Derviş Mehmed Zillî (25 March 1611 – 1682), known as Evliya
Çelebi (Ottoman Turkish: اوليا چلبى), was an Ottoman explorer who travelled
through the territory of the Ottoman Empire and neighboring lands over a period
of forty years, recording his commentary in a travelogue called the Seyâhatnâme
("Book of Travel"). The name
Çelebi is an honorific title meaning gentleman (see pre-1934 Turkish naming
conventions).
Life
Evliya Çelebi was born in Constantinople (now Istanbul) in
1611 to a wealthy family from Kütahya. Both his parents were attached to the
Ottoman court, his father, Derviş Mehmed Zilli, as a jeweller, and his mother
as an Abkhazian relation of the grand vizier Melek Ahmed Pasha. In his book,
Evliya Çelebi traces his paternal genealogy back to Khoja Akhmet Yassawi, an
early Sufi mystic. 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 and joked freely about Islam. Though employed as clergy
and entertainer to the Ottoman grandees, Evliya refused employment that would
keep him from travelling. His journal
writing began in Istanbul, taking notes on buildings, markets, customs and
culture, and in 1640 it was extended with accounts of his travels beyond the
confines of the city. The collected notes of his travels form a ten-volume work
called the Seyahatname ("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.
He fought the House of Habsburg in Principality of
Transylvania.
Evliya Çelebi died in 1684, it is unclear whether he was in
Istanbul or Cairo at the time.
Travels
Mostar
Evliya Çelebi visited the town of Mostar, then in Ottoman
Bosnia and Herzegovina. 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."
Kosovo
In 1660 Çelebi went to Kosovo and referred to the central
part of the region as Arnavud (آرناوود) and noted that in Vučitrn its
inhabitants were speakers of Albanian or Turkish and few spoke
"Boşnakca". The highlands
around the Tetovo, Peć and Prizren areas Çelebi considered as being the
"mountains of Arnavudluk". Çelebi referred to the "mountains of
Peć" 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 Lab 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 travelled three times in Albania in 1670. He visited
the cities Gjirokastra, Berat, Vlorë, Durrës, Ohër, Përmet, Skrapar, and
Tepelenë, and wrote about them.
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 1665–66, 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.
Azerbaijan
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 he reported as
safe was the Ottoman fortress at Arabat.
Çelebi wrote of the slave trade in the Crimea:
A man, who had not seen this market, had not
seen anything in this world. A mother is severed from her son and daughter
there, a son—from his father and brother, and they are sold amongst
lamentations, cries of help, weeping and sorrow.
Çelebi estimated that there were about 400,000 slaves in the
Crimea but only 187,000 free Muslims.
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."
Syria and Palestine
In contrast to many European and some Jewish travelogues of
Syria and Palestine 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 1670–1. 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.
The Seyâhatnâme
Although many of the descriptions the Seyâhatnâme 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
Istanbul, the final volume with Egypt.
Currently there is no English translation of the entire
Seyahatname, 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 (Istanbul 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 University of Chicago professor 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 specimens of the
languages in each region he traveled in. There are some 30 Turkic dialects and
languages cataloged in the Seyâhatnâme. Çelebi notes the similarities between
several words from the German and Persian, though he denies any common
Indo-European heritage. The Seyâhatnâme 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.
In the 10 volumes of his Seyahatname, he describes the
following journeys:
Istanbul and
surrounding areas (1630)
Anatolia, the Caucasus, Crete and Azerbaijan (1640)
Syria, Palestine, Armenia and Rumelia (1648)
Eastern Anatolia,
Iraq, and Iran (1655)
Russia and the Balkans (1656)
Military Campaigns in
Hungary during the fourth Austro-Turkish War (1663/64)
Austria, the Crimea,
and the Caucasus for the second time (1664)
Greece and then the Crimea and Rumelia for the second time
(1667–1670)
The Hajj to Mecca (1671)
Egypt and the Sudan (1672)
In popular culture
İstanbul Kanatlarımın Altında (Istanbul Under My Wings,
1996) is a film about the lives of legendary aviator brothers Hezârfen Ahmed
Çelebi and Lagâri Hasan Çelebi, and the Ottoman society in the early 17th
century, during the reign of Murad IV, as witnessed and narrated by Evliya
Çelebi.
Çelebi appears in Orhan Pamuk's novel The White Castle, and
is featured in The Adventures of Captain Bathory (Dobrodružstvá kapitána
Báthoryho) novels by Slovak writer Juraj Červenák.
Evliya Çelebi ve Ölümsüzlük Suyu (Evliya Çelebi and the
Water of Life, 2014, dir. Serkan Zelzele), a children's adaptation of Çelebi's
adventures, is the first full-length Turkish animated film.
UNESCO included the 400th anniversary of Çelebi's birth in
its timetable for the celebration of anniversaries.
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