The botanical expeditions and collections of
Hofrat Prof. Carl Haussknecht (1838-1903) in Anatolia

Asuman Baytop

Hofrat Prof. C.Haussknecht (1838-1903) was a well known German botanist. He founded a rich herbarium and a library, which he housed in Weimar in a separate building as the Herbarium Haussknecht, and opened it to the visit of researchers in 1896. He was a pharmacist and had a drugstore, but his passion for the plants made him a collector and a botanist. In his youth, he came twice to Anatolia, in 1865 and 1867. He travelled in the provinces of Hatay, Gaziantep, Maraş, Adıyaman, Malatya, Elazığ, Diyarbakır, Urfa, and Mardin. The Flora of Turkey cites nearly 550 of his specimens. We see there that he has collected the types of 135 Anatolian new taxa. The number of Haussknecht's Anatolian specimens in Flora Orientalis is ca.1300. We can conclude then that his Turkish collection comprises not less than 2000 specimens. 34 Turkish taxa bears his name with the epithet hausknechtii. Boissier named in 1872 a new genus after him: Haussknechtia Boiss. His Anatolian specimens are distributed to 12 herbaria across 6 European countries.

Key words: Turkish flora, botanical collections, collectors, Carl Haussknecht, history of botany; Anahtar kelimeler: Türkiye florası, bitki toplamaları, toplayıcılar, Carl Haussknecht, botanik tarihi.