The trcman project was launched in Almaty back in 2023 — at that time, its co-founders announced their intention to open a library and began hosting public events in the southern capital of Kazakhstan. Two years later, trcman is now operating at full capacity.
The name of the library project alludes to Ismail Gasprinsky (Gaspraly) and "Tercüman" — the first private Turkic-language newspaper of the Russian Empire, which the founder of Jadidism published in Bakhchysarai in the late 19th–early 20th centuries.
The word trcman in the project's logo is written without vowels—just as in the Arabic language, where they are often indicated by diacritics or omitted entirely. The co-founders of trcman told the editorial team that this homage to Arabic script emphasizes the project's interest not merely in collecting literature, but also in languages, translation, and meanings. The peoples of Central Asia used the Arabic script at a certain historical stage, and it is still used today by the Uyghurs and Kazakhs of China.
For now, trcman is located in the building of the Almaty art space Egin, which houses an exhibition hall, a lecture hall, and a discussion platform. Egin partially covered the expenses for renovating the space for the library and transporting the books and does not charge trcman rent.
Library hall trcman in Almaty. Photo: trcman.
The book collection is quite substantial — at the time of opening, it contained 2,200 volumes from the personal collection of co-founder Artem Slet.
"By making the library public and institutionalizing this project, my colleagues and I hope to significantly expand the collection through book donations from publishers, foundations, and other partners," he says. The trcman team plans to attract additional funding for book purchases, as acquiring the necessary academic literature in English can amount to a significant sum.
"Our dream is to have a serious research collection of tens of thousands of volumes."
Initially, the project team set a goal to compile a collection of books that would reflect the full diversity of regional languages. The catalog will be expanded according to this principle, with the selection of literature aided by local experts. In addition to strictly academic literature, trcman monitors local publishing, self-publishing, media, cultural initiatives, and any other forms of non-academic knowledge production.
The trcman catalog currently features Kazakh literature and publications in dozens of local languages, but for now, its core consists of books in Russian and English. According to the project's co-founder, Aslanbek Kazbekov, the dominance of these two languages "reflects the contemporary inequality in the production and distribution of knowledge."
Trcman focuses on artistic, scientific, and journalistic literature about Central and North Asia, the Caucasus, the Volga region, the Urals, and Crimea. The project's founders are convinced: these territories, squeezed between the more comprehensible-to-Western-academia regions of Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia, are largely absent from the field of research attention.
For example, Central Asia in recent decades has been studied either within the framework of Russian/Eastern European studies or as part of the Muslim world. Currently, the region is generating greater interest among researchers, but they most often limit themselves to only Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Eastern Turkestan, the indigenous populations of Siberia and the Volga region, and the Azerbaijani population of Iran remain almost without attention.
"The uniqueness of our research project lies primarily in how we imagine our region. From the outset, we agreed that perceiving Central Asia solely as five independent nation-states is very limiting. Therefore, we began gradually incorporating additional cultural and linguistic spaces that have connections to the region," — Artem Slyota.
The trcman team intends to focus on working with this geocultural space through books, texts, local knowledge, and multilingualism.
"It is important for us to concentrate knowledge about the region and strive for collaboration, joint knowledge production, and discussion. The library features rather niche specialized literature, but we try to make the library space open to local initiatives and are always happy to welcome guests," says co-founder Zhanar Berekétova.
"To make knowledge more accessible, we are launching a publishing program, we will release affordable books, overcome language barriers," she emphasizes.
The creators of trcman do not plan to limit themselves to just the library. Based on it, the team intends to create an online platform for translocal collaboration both within the region and beyond it.
The project has an ambitious goal — to ensure that knowledge about our region is concentrated within the region itself, making it accessible to those living in their homeland who lack access to the libraries of foreign, including Western, universities.
The Jadids, who inspired the founders of trcman, actively traveled throughout the Turkic-speaking regions of the Russian Empire and actively exchanged ideas. Following their example, the library was conceived as a mobile one, so Almaty is not its only location.
Every few years, the library will relocate to other cities and countries, immersing itself in a completely different cultural and linguistic context, attracting local knowledge and discussions that transcend national borders. Uzbekistan is one of the countries where the nomadic library can make a stop. According to the founders of trcman, logistics do not intimidate them — the team already has experience with relocations and collecting literature from across Eurasia.
"The main criterion for selecting the next city will be the presence of an institution ready to host us. So this choice depends not so much on us, but on the inviting party," says Slyota.