To Evliya’s mind, the divine and the earthly were bound tightly together sensual pleasure was not inimical to piety.ĭespite his wanderlust, Evliya was actually a pretty lousy traveler: a fussy eater, prone to discomfort, with a fear of boats. That this tribute came from a man who repeatedly described himself as a “dervish”-a man who during the course of his life recited from memory the whole of the Koran more than a thousand times-reveals something vital about his world and his mindset. In his telling, it was a place of learning, culture, and endless sensory stimulation, where acrobats from Arabia, Persia, Yemen, and India performed in the streets, and where “thousands of old and young lovers” exposed their “rosy pink bodies, like peeled almonds” to the summer sun, swimming and canoodling in the open. Evliya’s Istanbul was cosmopolitan and outward-looking: its population teemed with disparate ethnicities from Asia, eastern Europe, and the Middle East, merchants, scholars, and diplomats from even farther afield, and even a surprising number of Protestant refugees-Huguenots, Anabaptists, Quakers-fleeing war, schism and persecution in Europe.Įvliya so adored the bustling energy of Istanbul that he dedicated the first volume of the Seyahatname to it. By the age of twelve, his prodigious intelligence, quick wit, and facility for language had him apprenticed to the imam of Sultan Murad IV by his early teens he was reciting from memory lengthy passages of the Koran in front of thousands at the Hagia Sofia. The son of a successful goldsmith, he was born in Istanbul in 1611, the beginning of the end of the Ottoman Empire’s golden age. Along the way he wrote the Seyahatname (“Book of Travels”), a magnificent ten-volume sprawl of fantasy, biography, and reportage that is utterly unique in the canon of travel literature, and which confirms Evliya as one of the great storytellers of the seventeenth century. His path crossed Buddhists and crusading warriors, the Bedouin and Venetian sailors, ambassadors, monks, sorcerers, and snake charmers. Evliya took in Anatolia, Mecca, Medina, Jerusalem, Cairo, Athens, Corinth, Sudan, and swathes of Europe from Crimea to-supposedly-the Low Countries. Muhammad’s intervention, whether an act of providence or not, spurred three decades of globetrotting indulgence. His feet itched to travel and his fingers to write, but he could never find a way of telling his parents that the life they had proudly mapped out for him-a stellar career, a virtuous wife, and a brood of smiling children-played no part in his vision of a meaningful existence. Muhammad announced that Allah had a special plan, one that required Evliya to abandon his prospects at the imperial court, become “a world traveler,” and “compose a marvelous work” based on his adventures.Īs religious missions go, it was a pretty sweet deal-and for Evliya it came at the perfect moment. He was visited in a dream by the Prophet Muhammad, dressed nattily in a yellow woollen shawl and yellow boots, a toothpick stuck into his twelve-band turban. Edward White’s The Lives of Others is a monthly series about unusual, largely forgotten figures from history.Īccording to his own recollection, Evliya Çelebi, the seventeenth-century Turkish writer and traveler, experienced a life-changing epiphany on the night of his twentieth birthday.
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