Evliya Çelebi
Evliya Çelebi (اوليا چلبي), the son of the imperial goldsmith Derviş Mehmed Zılli (March 25(?), 1611 – 1682) was the most famous Ottoman traveler, having journeyed throughout the territories of the Ottoman Empire and the neighbouring lands over a period of forty years.
Born in 1611 in Istanbul as the son of a Turkish jeweller for the Ottoman court, he received an excellent education. It is quite possible that he also joined the Gülşenî sufi order based on his intimate knowledge of its lodge in Cairo and a graffito referring to himself as "Evliya-yı Gülşenî" (Evliya of the Gülşenî). After initially traveling in Istanbul and taking notes on buildings, markets, customs and culture, he started his first journey outside the city in 1640. His collection of notes of all of his travels formed a ten-volume work called the Seyahatname (Book of Travels). Although many of the descriptions in this book were written in a quite exaggerated manner, his notes are widely accepted as a useful guide to the cultural aspects and life style of Ottoman Empire in the 17th century.
The first volume deals exclusively with Istanbul and the final volume with Cairo. The work is immensely valuable as both a source of the Turkish culture that Evliya embodies and also as a source for the lands he reports on. He has often been seen as unreliable, but more scholars are beginning to understand his sense of humor and are learning how to read him properly.
Currently, there is no English translation of the entire work. The longest single English translation was published in 1834 by Ritter Joseph von Hammer, an Austrian Orientalist. Von Hammer's work covers the first two volumes: Istanbul and Anatolia. The translation is somewhat inaccurate and uses a bizarre transliteration system. It is out of print but can be found in some university libraries under the author name, "Evliya Efendi." A valuable introduction to the whole travelogue, The World of Evliya Celebi: An Ottoman Mentality, was published in 2003 and features dazzling, if brief, excerpts. The book, written by University of Chicago professor Robert Dankoff, can also be found at some university libraries. Translations of his stays in Albania, Bitlis and Diyarbakır also exist.
Evliya Çelebi is noted for having collected language specimens from each region he travelled in. There are some thirty Turkic dialects and thirty other languages catalogued in the Seyahatname. Evliya Çelebi noted the similarities between several words from German and Persian, though the reason he suggests for these was not based on any common Indo-European heritage. His notes on Kurdish in Eastern Anatolia are highly valued by linguists. The Seyahatname also contains the first transcriptions of many Caucasian languages and Tsakonian, and the only extant specimens of written Ubykh outside the linguistic literature.
Evliya Çelebi died sometime after 1682 though it is unclear whether he was in Istanbul or Cairo at the time.
Popular culture
İstanbul Kanatlarımın Altında (Istanbul Under My Wings, 1996) is a film about the lives of Hezarfen Ahmet Çelebi, his brother Lagari Hasan Çelebi, and the Ottoman society in the early 17th century, during the reign of Murad IV, as witnessed and narrated by Evliya Çelebi, the greatest traveler of the Ottoman period whose books provide us most of the knowledge that we have today on the Ottoman cities, provinces and daily life as a whole.
