Dervish Mehmed Zillî (25 March 1611 – 1684), known as Evliya Çelebi (), was an Ottoman Turkish explorer who traveled through his home country during its cultural zenith as well as neighboring lands. He travelled for over 40 years, recording his commentary in a travelogue called the Seyahatnâme ("Book of Travel"). The name Çelebi is an honorific meaning "gentleman" or "man of God".
Life
Evliya Çelebi was born in Constantinople in 1611 to a wealthy family from Kütahya. Both his parents were attached to the Ottoman court, his father, Dervish Mehmed Zilli, as a jeweller, and his mother as an Abkhazian relation of the Grand Vizier of Mehmed IV Melek Ahmed Pasha.Robert Dankoff, An Ottoman Mentality: The World of Evliya Çelebi, BRILL, 2004, , p. xii. In his book, Evliya Çelebi traces his paternal genealogy back to Ahmad Yasawi, the earliest known Turkic poet and an early Sufi mystic., page 21 Evliya Çelebi received a court education from the Imperial ulama (scholars). He may have joined the Gulshani Sufi order, as he shows an intimate knowledge of their khanqah in Cairo, and a graffito exists in which he referred to himself as Evliya-yı Gülşenî ("Evliya of the Gülşenî").
A devout Muslim opposed to fanaticism, Evliya could recite the Quran from memory. Though employed as a clergyman and entertainer at the Imperial Court of Sultan Murad IV, Evliya refused employment that would keep him from travelling.Jerusalem: The Biography, page 303-304, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2011. Çelebi had studied vocal and instrumental music as a pupil of a renowned Khalwati dervish by the name of 'Umar Gulshani, and his musical gifts earned him much favor at the Imperial Palace, impressing even the chief musician Amir Guna. He was also trained in the theory of music called .
His journal-writing began in Constantinople, with the taking of notes on buildings, markets, customs, and culture, and in 1640 it was augmented with accounts of his travels beyond the confines of the city. The collected notes of his travels form a ten-volume work called the Seyahâtname ("Travelogue"). Departing from the Ottoman literary convention of the time, he wrote in a mixture of vernacular and high Turkish, with the effect that the Seyahatname has remained a popular and accessible reference work about life in the Ottoman Empire in the 17th century, including two chapters on musical instruments.
Evliya Çelebi died in 1684. It is unclear whether he was in Constantinople or Cairo at the time.
Travels
Europe Çelebi claimed to have encountered Native Americans as a guest in Rotterdam during his visit of 1663. He wrote: "[they] cursed those priests, saying, 'Our world used to be peaceful, but it has been filled by greedy people, who make war every year and shorten our lives.'"
While visiting Vienna in 1665–1666, Çelebi noted some similarities between words in German and Persian, an early observation of the relationship between what would later be known as two Indo-European languages.
Çelebi visited Crete and in book II describes the fall of Chania to the Sultan; in book VIII he recounts the Candia campaign.
Croatia During his travels in the Balkan regions of the Ottoman Empire Çelebi visited northern Dalmatia, parts of Slavonia, Međimurje, and Banija. He recorded a variety of historiographic and ethnographic sources. They included descriptions of first-hand encounters, third-party narrator witnesses, and invented elements.
Circassia Çelebi traveled to Circassia as well, in 1640. He commented on the women's beauty and talked about the absence of mosques and bazaars despite being a Muslim country.Evliya Çelebi. Evliya Çelebi Seyahatnâmesi. Beyoğlu, İstanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları Ltd. Şti., 1996 He talks about the hospitality of Circassians and mentions that he could not write the Circassian language using letters, and compared the language to a "magpie shout".
Bosnia
Evliya Çelebi visited the town of Mostar, then in Ottoman Bosnia. He wrote that the name Mostar means "bridge-keeper", in reference to the town's celebrated bridge, 28 meters long and 20 meters high. Çelebi wrote that it "is like a rainbow arch soaring up to the skies, extending from one cliff to the other. ...I, a poor and miserable slave of Allah, have passed through 16 countries, but I have never seen such a high bridge. It is thrown from rock to rock as high as the sky."
Bulgaria (Dobruja) Evliya Çelebi, who traveled around Anatolia and the Balkans in the 17th century, mentioned the northeast of Bulgaria as the Uz (Oğuz) region, and that a Turkish speaking Muslim society named Çıtak consisting of medium-sized, cheerful and strong people lived in Silistra, and also known as the "Dobruca Çitakları" in Dobruja. He also emphasizes that "Çıtaklar" is made up of a mixture of Tatars, Vlachs, and Bulgarians.
Kosovo In 1660, Çelebi went to Kosovo and referred to the central part of the region as Arnavud (آرناوود) and noted that in Vushtrri its inhabitants were speakers of Albanian or Turkish and few spoke Bosnian. The highlands around the Tetovo, Peja, and Prizren areas Çelebi considered as being the "mountains of Arnavudluk". Çelebi referred to the "mountains of Peja" as being in Arnavudluk (آرناوودلق) and considered the Ibar river that converged in Mitrovica as forming Kosovo's border with Bosnia. He viewed the "Kılab" or Llapi river as having its source in Arnavudluk (Albania) and by extension the Sitnica as being part of that river. Çelebi also included the central mountains of Kosovo within Arnavudluk.
Albania Çelebi traveled extensively throughout Albania, visiting it on 3 occasions. He visited Tirana, Lezha, Shkodra and Bushat in 1662, Delvina, Gjirokastra, Tepelena, Skrapar, Përmet, Berat, Kanina, Vlora, Bashtova, Durrës, Kavaja, Peqin, Elbasan, and Pogradec in 1670.
North Macedonia Çelebi visited the area of modern North Macedonia. He wrote that the mosque in Ohrid, now named the Ali Pasha Mosque, had two minarets. If true, the second did not survive to be photographed in the 19th century.
Parthenon In 1667, Çelebi expressed his marvel at the Parthenon's sculptures and described the building as "like some impregnable fortress not made by human agency." He composed a poetic supplication that the Parthenon, as "a work less of human hands than of Heaven itself, should remain standing for all time."
Shirvan Of oil merchants in Baku Çelebi wrote: "By Allah's decree oil bubbles up out of the ground, but in the manner of hot springs, pools of water are formed with oil congealed on the surface like cream. Merchants wade into these pools and collect the oil in ladles and fill goatskins with it, these oil merchants then sell them in different regions. Revenues from this oil trade are delivered annually directly to the Safavid Shah."
Crimean Khanate Evliya Çelebi remarked on the impact of Cossack raids from Azak upon the territories of the Crimean Khanate, destroying trade routes and severely depopulating the regions. By the time of Çelebi's arrival, many of the towns visited were affected by the Cossacks, and the only place in Crimea he reported as safe was the Ottoman fortress at Arabat.
Çelebi wrote of the slave trade in the Crimea:
Çelebi estimated that there were about 400,000 slaves in the Crimea but only 187,000 free Muslims.Brian L. Davies (2014). Warfare, State and Society on the Black Sea Steppe. pp. 15–26. Routledge.
Asia
Syria and Palestine In contrast to many European and some Jewish travelogues of Palestine and Syria in the 17th century, Çelebi wrote one of the few detailed travelogues from an Islamic point of view. Çelebi visited Palestine twice, once in 1649 and once in 1670–1671. An English translation of the first part, with some passages from the second, was published in 1935–1940 by the self-taught Palestinian scholar Stephan Hanna Stephan who worked for the Palestine Department of Antiquities.. Part 1: Vol 4 (1935) 103–108; Part 2: Vol 4 (1935) 154–164; Part 3: Vol 5 (1936) 69–73; Part 4: Vol 6 (1937) 84–97; Part 5: Vol 8 (1939) 137–156. Part 6: Vol 9 (1942) 81–104. Significant are the many references to Palestine, or "Land of Palestine", and Evliya notes, "All chronicles call this country Palestine." However, Sarah Irving cautions, "the borders of Stephan’s Palestine were largely meaningless to Evliya at a time when cities such as Acre, Jaffa and Nablus had closer and more significant relations with (respectively) Beirut, Sidon or Salt than with one another. In selecting the specific sections included in his translations, Stephan effectively creates a new text which accords with the Palestine of his own day."* Çelebi says of the Sanjak of Safed that "All chronicles mention these places as Kan'an.". Part 1: Vol 4 (1935) 103–108
The work features some exaggerations: on Safed, he claims 70,000 Jews once lived there before migrating to Salonica, with only 2,000 remaining in his day. He explains the large numbers of Jews by saying the city was the original homeland of the Children of Israel, and compared it to their own ka'aba, apologizing: "saving the comparison!" He described Jerusalem as containing the shrines of 124,000 prophets, 240 prayer niches and 700 waqfs. Visiting the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, he found it beautiful but like a "tourist attraction", lacking spirituality, and praying in a corner that it would one day become a mosque. He also recorded shared worship of Jews, Muslims, Druze and Christians, including multi-religious celebrations at Meiron, Hebron's Cave of the Patriarchs, and the Tomb of Samuel.
Mecca Evliya reported that the sheriffs of Mecca promoted trade in the region by encouraging fairs from the wealthy merchants. Evliya went on to explain that a large amount of buying and selling occurred in Mecca during the pilgrimage season.
Seyahatnâme
He wrote one of history's longest and most ambitious accounts of travel writing in any language, the Seyahatnâme. Although many of the descriptions in the Seyahatnâme were written in an exaggerated manner or were plainly inventive fiction or third-source misinterpretation, his notes remain a useful guide to the culture and lifestyles of the 17th-century Ottoman Empire. The first volume deals exclusively with Constantinople, the final volume with Egypt.
Currently there is no English translation of the entire Seyahatnâme, although there are translations of various parts. The longest single English translation was published in 1834 by Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, an Austrian orientalist: it may be found under the name "Evliya Efendi." Von Hammer-Purgstall's work covers the first two volumes (Constantinople and Anatolia) but its language is antiquated. Other translations include Erich Prokosch's nearly complete translation into German of the tenth volume, the 2004 introductory work entitled The World of Evliya Çelebi: An Ottoman Mentality written by Robert Dankoff, and Dankoff and Sooyong Kim's 2010 translation of select excerpts of the ten volumes, An Ottoman Traveller: Selections from the Book of Travels of Evliya Çelebi.
Evliya is noted for having collected samples of the languages in each region he traveled in. There are some 30 Turkic dialects and languages cataloged in the Seyahatnâme. Çelebi notes the similarities between several words from the German and Persian, though he denies any common Indo-European heritage. The Seyahatnâme also contains the first transcriptions of many languages of the Caucasus and Tsakonian, and the only extant specimens of written Ubykh outside the linguistic literature. He also wrote in detail about Arabian horses and their different strains.
In the 10 volumes of his Seyahatnâme, he describes the following journeys:
Constantinople and surrounding areas (1630) Anatolia, the Caucasus, Crete, and Azerbaijan (1640) Syria, Palestine, Armenia, and Rumelia (1648) Kurdistan, Iraq, and Iran (1655) Russia and the Balkans (1656) Military Campaigns in Hungary during the fourth Austro-Turkish War (1663/64)