Musician and writer Ali Ufki, born Wojciech Bobowski, bridged Eastern and Western musical traditions with his compositions and arrangements. He wrote a set of psalms in Turkish, basing it on the Geneva psalter, and transcribed large amounts of Ottoman Turkish musical material, both secular and sacred.

Ali Ufki, also known as Albertus Bobovius, Ali Bey, Santuri Ali Ufki, and by several other names, was born in 1610 in Bobowa, near the present-day city of Gorlice, or in Lwow (now Lviv, Ukraine) -- sources differ. He was raised Protestant, had musical training when he was young, and planned a career as a church musician, but he was captured by forces loyal to the warlord raider Khan Temir and sent to the Ottoman court in Turkey, which had directed the warlord's movements. The Turkish prince to whom he had been delivered realized the value of his talents and sold him to the court of Ottoman Sultan Murad IV. At this time, he took the name Ali Ufki. He converted to Islam and became a valued member of the Sultan's retinue, serving as a musician, treasurer, and interpreter. Ufki was a gifted linguist: in addition to Polish and Turkish, he spoke Arabic, French, German, Hebrew, Greek, Italian, Latin, and seven other languages.

Ufki's musical abilities led him to create several important works that left an invaluable record of Turkish music of the time (which was not notated), and also introduced Western religious music to the Ottomans. His stated goal, musically and otherwise, was to promote mutual understanding. Ufki compiled two volumes of Turkish sacred and secular music under the title Mecmûa-i Sâz ü Söz ("Collection of Instrumental and Vocal Works"), becoming one of just a few Westerners to master and record the complex music of Turkey. He also issued Mezmurlar, a collection of psalms based on the psalter of Geneva, Switzerland, translating the texts into Turkish and classifying their melodies according to the system of Turkish musical modes. Ufki translated the Bible into Turkish, a feat not duplicated until 2002, and his translation is still used in Turkey today. In 1657, Ufki was officially freed from the Sultan's service. He traveled to Egypt and may have gone on the Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca. When he returned to the Sultan's court, he served as a dragoman, a figure whose talents combined translation, inter-language interpretation, diplomacy, and general cultural expertise. In 1666, he wrote a grammar of the Turkish language, and he translated the works of several European religious figures into Turkish. He died in Constantinople (now Istanbul) in 1675.

Ufki's musical activities have hardly been fully documented, but several recordings of his work have been issued. The King's Singers recorded several of his psalms on their 2005 album Sacred Bridges, and in 2020, the ensemble Constantinople recorded some of his transcriptions of Turkish music. ~ James Manheim, Rovi