Independent scholarship from the heart of Central Asia.

BYR Publishing House was founded in Bishkek in 2008 with a single editorial purpose: to issue carefully prepared scholarly works in the Social Sciences and Humanities, and to make them available to research libraries that need them.

Our work

Since our founding we have issued thirty-five titles. They fall into three editorial streams that, together, reflect the intellectual landscape we live in.

The first stream is original scholarship: monographs and edited volumes in history, religious studies, literature, linguistics, sociology, economics, and tourism studies. Many of these works concern Kyrgyzstan, the Turkic world, and Central Asia more broadly. The two regional handbooks — Kırgızistan: Tarih-Toplum-Ekonomi-Siyaset (2017, edited by Cengiz Buyar) and Kazakistan: Tarih-Toplum-Ekonomi-Siyaset (2021, also edited by Buyar) — are reference works of approximately 600+ pages each, prepared with contributions from scholars based in Kyrgyzstan, Türkiye, and elsewhere.

The second stream is our critical reprint series. Beginning with V. V. Bartold's Kirgizii (originally 1927; reissued by us in 2008), we have brought back into circulation works of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russian and Central Asian Orientalism — titles by L. F. Kostenko, A. P. Fedchenko, A. N. Kuropatkin, L. G. Kornilov, V. Nalivkin, N. N. Pantusov, L. P. Potapov, and Father Iakinf (Bichurin), among others. These works are foundational sources for any serious researcher working on the region, but most have long been out of print or held only by a handful of specialist libraries. Our reprints are typeset cleanly and bound for archive use.

The third stream is contemporary academic Turkish-language scholarship in Islamic studies and classical literature — including works on hadith methodology, classical Ottoman divan poetry, prosody (aruz), and Sufi thought.

Languages and reach

We publish in Kyrgyz, Russian, Turkish, and English. Our titles are deposited with research libraries in Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Kazakhstan, Türkiye, the United Kingdom, Germany, and the United States. Each title is registered with an ISBN under our Kyrgyz Republic prefix (978-9967), making the work discoverable through national bibliographic systems and international library catalogues.

Our scope

We are a small press by design. We do not aim to issue a high volume of titles each year; instead we work closely with each author through editing and production, and we accept manuscripts that we believe will hold up as scholarship over the long term. This means our pace is measured. It also means that the titles we issue stand on their own terms.

The disciplines we are most active in are Turkic and Central Asian history, religious studies (Islamic studies and the sociology of religion), classical Turkish literature, and area studies of Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. Manuscript proposals in adjacent fields are welcome; please see our Submissions page.

A word from the Director

"Our role is a modest but, I believe, an important one. There are many subjects in our field that need careful editing, careful printing, and a publisher willing to put the work in front of librarians and scholars who will actually use it. We try to be that publisher. We do not promise authors fame; we promise them a clean edition, an ISBN that registers properly, and a place on the shelves of libraries that matter."