Among the Turkic manuscripts in the collection of the St. Petersburg Branch of the Institute of Oriental Studies, there is a nineteenth-century copy of the poem Gharīb-nāma by 'Āshiq-pāshā. The history of the manuscript is of some interest; it was presented by the copyist to an extraordinary political figure, the Kazakh khān Jahāngīr. The circumstances surrounding the gift itself, the nature of the text, as well as the intricate way by which the copy in question entered the collection may throw additional light both on one of the most curious episodes in Kazakh history and the circulation of literary texts, written in Old Anatolian Turkic, among the Turkic peoples of Russia and Central Asia…
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