Ottoman Turkish, as a historical variant of modern Turkish, suffers from a scarcity of available corpora and NLP models. This paper outlines our pioneering endeavors to address this gap by constructing a clean text corpus of Ottoman Turkish materials. We detail the challenges encountered in this process and offer potential solutions. Additionally, we present a case study wherein the created corpus is employed in continual pre-training of BERTurk, followed by evaluation of the model’s performance on the named entity recognition task for Ottoman Turkish. Preliminary experimental results suggest the effectiveness of our corpus in adapting existing models developed for modern Turkish to historical Turkish.