Evliya Çelebi

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. In his book, Evliya Çelebi traces his paternal genealogy back to Ahmad Yasawi, the earliest known Turkic poet and an early Sufi mystic. Evliya Çelebi received a court education from the Imperial ulama (scholars). 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 . including two chapters on musical instruments. 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.'"

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. He commented on the women's beauty and talked about the absence of mosques and bazaars despite being a Muslim country. 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".

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.

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.

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. Significant are the many references to Palestine, or "Land of Palestine", and Evliya notes, "All chronicles call this country Palestine."

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. 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) 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, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, and the Sudan (1672-1675)

Perceptions of ethnic and religious minorities Çelebi encountered a wide range of ethnic and religious communities during his travels and has commonly been credited with being more objective toward them, but a 2019 study by Mustafa Çapar argues this reputation is only partially deserved; he identifies examples of what he describes as marginalizing, "otherizing" language, which he links to Çelebi's social position. Drawing on Suavi Aydın, Çapar presents Çelebi as combining an orientalist-style attitude toward the peoples of his own "Orient," particularly communities that had rejected Islam, with an occidentalist attitude toward Europe. Aydın has called Çelebi "the first occidentalist Turk." Arzu Erekli, also cited by Çapar, argues that Çelebi feminized and thereby marginalized the West, casting it as weak and female against a strong, male Orient. At the same time, Çapar notes, Çelebi admired and praised Western agricultural, medical, and technical developments, so that the West functioned for him as both a negative and a positive other. Çelebi also repeated claims that Jews had murdered prophets. In the 2015 TV series Muhteşem Yüzyıl: Kösem, is portrayed by Turkish actor Necip Memili.

Taxa named in his honor The Lycian spring minnow, Pseudophoxinus evliyai Freyhof & Özuluğ, 2010 is a species of ray-finned fish in the family Leuciscidae. It is found in drainages in western Anatolia in Turkey.