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AN OTTOMAN MENTALITY
THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE
AND ITS HERITAGE
Politics, Society and Economy
edited by

Suraiya Faroqhi and Halil Inalcik

Advisory Board

Fikret Adanir • Idris Bostan • Amnon Cohen • Cornell Fleischer

Barbara Flemming • Alexander de Groot • Klaus Kreiser
Hans Georg Majer • Irène Mélikoff • Ahmet Yaşar Ocak
Abdeljelil Temimi • Gilles Veinstein • Elizabeth Zachariadou

VOLUME 31
AN OTTOMAN MENTALITY
The World of Evliya Çelebi

BY

ROBERT DANKOFF

WITH AN AFTERWORD BY
GOTTFRIED HAGEN

BRILL
LEIDEN • BOSTON
2004
 This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dankoff, Robert
An Ottoman mentality : the world of Evliya Çelebi / by Robert Dankoff.
p. cm. — (Ottoman Empire and its heritage, ISSN 1380-6076 ; v. 31)
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 90-04-13715-7
1. Evliya Çelebi, 1611?-1682? 2. Turkey—History—Ottoman Empire, 1288-1918—I.
Title II. Series.

DR486.E95D36 2004
9104’1’09032—dc22
2004043507

ISSN 1380-6076
ISBN 90 04 13715 7

© Copyright 2004 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written
permission of the publisher.

Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal

use is granted by Brill provided that
the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright
Clearance Center, Rosewood Drive 222, Suite 910
Danvers MA 01923, USA
Fees are subject to change.

printed in the netherlands

 CONTENTS

Foreword .................................................................................... vii

Suraiya Faroqhi
Acknowledgment ........................................................................ xix
Abbreviations .............................................................................. xx

Introduction ................................................................................ 1
Chapter One Man of Istanbul ................................................ 9
Chapter Two Man of the World .......................................... 48
Chapter Three Servitor of the Sultan .................................... 83
Chapter Four Gentleman and Dervish .................................. 115
Chapter Five Raconteur .......................................................... 153
Chapter Six Reporter and Entertainer .................................. 185

Afterword Ottoman Understandings of the World in

the Seventeenth Century ........................................................ 215
Gottfried Hagen

Glossary ...................................................................................... 257

Bibliography ................................................................................ 261
Index ............................................................................................ 267
This page intentionally left blank
 FOREWORD

This is the first book-length biography of Evliya Çelebi, who has

some claim to be the Ottoman author most cited by present-day his-
torians. There have been numerous translations and commented edi-
tions of longer or shorter sections of his work, and the entire Seyahatname
(‘Book of travels’) in Latin characters is currently being published in
Istanbul, with volume 8 to appear in short order.1 Yet while the
details of his biography have long since been established, there has
been little attempt to link Evliya’s multifarious activities in Istanbul,
Cairo, the Ottoman provinces and even Vienna with what is now
known of him as an author. That he was a personage of many
different facets, and above all a creative writer, by now is well known
to specialists but has been rarely studied in extenso, the one major
exception being the thorough discussion of Evliya’s visit to Diyarbakır
as undertaken by Martin van Bruinessen, Hendrik Boeschoten and
their team of Dutch fellow scholars.2 A broadly-based overall dis-
cussion of Evliya’s education, accomplishments, world view and also
limitations has therefore been long overdue, and this is what Robert
Dankoff has set out to provide. His previous publications uniquely
qualify him for this task.

Making Evliya accessible

A critical edition of Evliya Çelebi’s work does not as yet exist. But
we do possess manuscripts that encompass the major part of this
gigantic ten-volume travelogue and that have a reasonable claim to be
regarded as the autograph. However even these manuscripts probably

1
Evliya Çelebi b Dervi{ Mehemmed Zilli, Evliya Çelebi Seyahatnâmesi, Topkapı Sarayı
Revan 1457 Numaralı Yazmasının Transkripsyonu—Dizini, vol. 6, ed. by Yücel Da<lı and
Seyit Ali Kahraman and Evliya Çelebi Seyahatnâmesi, Topkapı Sarayı Ba<dat 308 Numaralı
Yazmasının Transkripsyonu—Dizini, vol. 7 ed. by Yücel Da<lı, Seyit Ali Kahraman and
Robert Dankoff (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2002 and 2003). Robert Dankoff
has in fact been involved in the preparation of both these volumes.
2
Evliya Çelebi, Evliya Çelebi in Diyarbekir, ed. and tr. by Martin M. van Bruinessen
et alii (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1988).
viii foreword

do not represent the final form that Evliya intended to give to his
work. Thus the editors of the Albanian, Kosovo, Montenegrin and
Ohrid sections of the ‘Book of travels’ have concluded that what
survives of volume 6 is “(per hypothesis) the earliest stage of Evliya’s
draft of a fair copy of his work”.3 As a result, there is room for tex-
tual conjecture, although the editors who have made available numer-
ous selections from Evliya’s work have normally confined themselves
to the correction of obvious errors, especially in the sample texts and
word lists collected by the traveller and pertaining to languages with
an established literary tradition. But more importantly, the reader
often will feel the need for explanatory notes. After all the dissolu-
tion of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of numerous
national states on its former territories have resulted in many towns
and villages having two and even more variant names, and those
used by Evliya will often bear no resemblance to those found in
modern atlases. In the context of a major research project that has
produced a series of maps and studies on the history of the Middle
East, a special map cum explanatory volume has therefore been ded-
icated to the travels of Evliya Çelebi.4
Moreover when dealing with any region visited by this Ottoman
traveller, it may be of advantage to plot his itineraries on a map.
For as suggested many years ago by Pierre Mackay, Evliya’s ‘invented
travels’ can be weeded out quite effectively by means of mapping:
in regions that he did not visit in person, Evliya often provided defec-
tive itineraries, an error that he did not commit in those places
where he evidently had spent time.5 Some of this supplementary
information will be implicit in the translations that so often accom-
pany recent editions of certain sections of Evliya’s travelogue; other
material will find its place in the notes. In his commented edition
of Evliya Çelebi’s adventures in Bitlis, Robert Dankoff for example
has produced a very fine specimen of this genre.6

3
Robert Dankoff and Robert Elsie, Evliya Çelebi in Albania and Adjacent Regions
(Kosovo, Montenegro, Ohrid), The Relevant Sections of the Seyahatname Edited with Translation,
Commentary and Introduction (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2000), p. 7.
4
Jens Peter Laut, Materialien zu Evliya Çelebi I. Erläuterungen und Indices zur Karte B
IX 6 “Kleinasien im 17. Jahrhundert nach Evliya Çelebi” (Wiesbaden: Dr Ludwig Reichert,
1989).
5
Conference paper by Pierre Mackay given orally.
6
Evliya Çelebi, Evliya Çelebi in Bitlis, the Relevant Sections of the Seyahatname, edited
with translation, commentary and introduction by Robert Dankoff (Leiden: E. J.
Brill, 1990).
 foreword ix

But we also possess a good deal of background information that

is best presented in a separate volume. Inevitably Evliya visited certain
regions more than once, and while he did sometimes attempt ele-
mentary cross-referencing, it also happened that the same place was
described, with greater or lesser thoroughness, twice or even three
times. Moreover Evliya’s routes often were determined by his need
to ferret out the necessary financing, in other words an elite patron
who could use him as a secretary, messenger or travel companion.
Thus the Ottoman writer might be obliged to move from one end
of the empire to another within a fairly short space of time. This
situation accounts for part of the overlap between journeys; it also
explains why in books 2–9 the geographical areas covered in any
single volume are often extensive. A summary that recounts Evliya’s
moves and stories chapter by chapter—and both journeys and anec-
dotes are certainly very numerous—is thus a significant aid in finding
the localities needed for a given research project. Robert Dankoff
and Klaus Kreiser have provided us with such a resource, with a
trilingual title as a homage to European integration, supplementing
it with a commented bibliography.7

Exploring human lives

Early attention has focused on Evliya Çelebi as a travel writer, and

his nonchalant use of the sources on which he built his account has
intrigued and sometimes repelled many scholars.8 This study of Evliya’s
sources is by no means completed, and Robert Dankoff has contributed
an investigation of the use that Evliya supposedly made of a writer
that he calls ‘Mı<disi’. This Armenian historian is not documented

7
Robert Dankoff and Klaus Kreiser, Materialien zu Evliya Çelebi II. A Guide to the
Seyâhat-nâme of Evliya Çelebi, Bibliographie raisonnée (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992). Given
the numerous titles on Evliya appearing every year, the bibliography by now needs
to be updated.
8
The pioneering works in this field are Richard Kreutel, Im Reiche des Goldenen
Apfels, Des türkischen Weltenbummlers Evliya Çelebi denkwürdige Reise in das Giaurenland und
in die Stadt und Festung Wien anno 1665, tr. and commented by Richard Kreutel (Graz:
Verlag Styria, 1957), which after the commentator’s death appeared in a new edi-
tion augmented by his friends and colleagues: [Evliya Çelebi], Im Reiche des Goldenen
Apfels . . ., tr. and commented by Richard F. Kreutel, Erich Prokosch and Karl
Teply (Graz, Wien, Köln: Styria, 1987) and Me{kûre Eren, Evliya Çelebi Seyahatnâmesi
Birinci Cildinin Kaynakları Üzerinde bir Ara{tırma (Istanbul: n.p., 1960).
x foreword

in any other sources under this particular name; but he may have
been identical with an author of chronicles that had spent time in
Jerusalem and whose work possibly had been translated into Ottoman
Turkish.9
Yet subsequent work on his great travelogue has made it clear
that Evliya was able to do much more than write fanciful stories
about both familiar and little-known places. His major innovation in
Ottoman writing was doubtless the fact that he was willing to put
to paper details of his own life and that of his relatives, issues that
in the seventeenth century not many Ottomans cared to discuss
within the covers of a ‘proper’ book.10 Thus even though he did not
tell us if he was married, and if so, whether he had any children,
Evliya was probably the only author who before the later nineteenth
century recounted in some detail a conflict between husband and
wife. For obvious reasons the story was set among Evliya’s relatives,
namely the former grand vizier Melek Ahmed Pa{a and the princess
whom the latter had been obliged to marry at a fairly advanced age,
very much against his will.11 It is perhaps comforting to know that,
as Robert Dankoff has demonstrated, the basic reasons for such a
conflict were much the same as in our own age: demands for money,
the competitive assertion of socio-political rank, memories of a more
beloved partner, physical attraction or else the lack of it . . .
In a more positive vein Evliya is also one of the first persons in
the Ottoman realm, if not the very first, to discuss the meanings of
marital affection in Istanbul’s upper class. When it came to marry-
ing off a princess, the choices were made by the sultan, his mother
and perhaps other high-ranking officers in the harem, both eunuch
and female. Like the princess involved, the vizier who thus came to
be related to the sultan by marriage was rarely asked for his opin-
ion, and this was doubtless true of Melek Ahmed Pa{a as well. Yet

9
Robert Dankoff, “ ‘Mı<disi’: an Armenian Source for the Seyahatname” in Wiener
Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes, 76 (1986), Festschrift Andreas Tietze, pp. 73–79.
10
Apart from the exceptional case of Mustafa Ali: compare Cornell H. Fleischer,
Bureaucrat and Intellectual in the Ottoman Empire, The Historian Mustafâ Âli (1541–1600)
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986) and Jan Schmidt, Pure Water for Thirsty
Muslims, A Study of Mustafa 'Ali of Gallipoli’s Künhü l-ahbar (Leiden: no publisher,
n. d., probably 1992).
11
Robert Dankoff, The Intimate Life of an Ottoman Statesman, Melek Ahmed Pasha
(1588–1662) as Portrayed in Evliya Çelebi’s Book of Travels, introduction by Rhoads
Murphey (Albany NY: SUNY Press, 1991).
 foreword xi

Evliya makes it clear that Princess Ismihan Kaya Sultan, a daughter

of Sultan Murad IV, and her husband who was also the author’s
relative and patron, were happy together. Moreover for a lengthy
period the pasha also seems to have taken into account the princess’
fears of dying in childbirth. For while this did finally turn out to be
Kaya Sultan’s fate, in spite of her long years of marriage, she appar-
ently had only one child apart from the little daughter whose birth
caused her death.12 This circumstance makes the reader wonder
whether perhaps the couple hesitated for a considerable time before
embarking on this risky—and ultimately fatal—adventure. In any
case, Evliya describes Melek Ahmed Pa{a as prostrate with grief at
the death of his wife. And while it was not uncommon to criticize
men who showed a great deal of affection to their spouses—Süleyman
the Magnificent himself had been the butt of such criticism—it is
evident from Evliya’s account that his sympathies were definitely with
his kinsman.13
As another example of Evliya’s interest in personal perspectives
one might mention his detailed description of the behaviour of Sultan
Murad IV (r. 1623–1640) among his intimates. When this sultan
associated with a small circle of pages and other palace folk, a group
of which Evliya at one time formed a part, he put down the mask
of the terrifying ruler for which, according to the historians’ per-
spectives, he had become infamous or else famous. For remarkably
enough, Murad IV’s bloodthirstiness was approved of by, for instance,
a contemporary Orthodox author, just because he managed to strike
terror into the hearts of ‘the Turks’. Neither did Evliya voice any
particular criticism, although he long outlived his royal patron.14 In
any event, when no one except a few denizens of the inner palace
could see him, the sultan indulged in the jokes and horseplay to be
expected from a young man in high spirits, who enjoyed showing
off his powerful physique. From these intimates, Murad IV was also
was quite ready to tolerate even slightly off-colour jokes at his own

12
A. D. Alderson, The Structure of the Ottoman Dynasty (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1956), Table XXXVI.
13
Dankoff, The Intimate Life, p.
14
[Papa Synadinos of Serres], Conseils et mémoires de Synadinos prêtre de Serrès en
Macédoine (XVII e siècle), ed. tr. and commented by Paolo Odorico, with S. Asdrachas,
T. Karanastassis, K. Kostis and S. Petmézas (Paris: Association “Pierre Belon”,
1996), pp. 94–95.
xii foreword

expense. We can guess that Evliya, also a young man at that time,
must have contributed his share of stories and pranks.
While this particular episode in Evliya’s great work still remains
unstudied, it forms another example of the author’s concern with
the personal and the intimate. And while Evliya was certainly a
highly original writer, in this concern with the private world of edu-
cated people he was not totally alone; it is surely not by chance that
from the later seventeenth century there survive a few diaries, memoirs
and personal letters written by ‘ordinary’ Ottoman townsmen. Such
texts either were now penned somewhat more frequently than in
previous centuries, or at least—and this is also an important change—
they were more often regarded as worthy of preservation.15

Evliya the courtier

Evliya was able to associate with Murad IV because his family had
long-standing connections with the Ottoman palace. His grandfather
had been successful in war, was able to build a fine house from his
share of the booty, and perhaps it was also due to the contacts estab-
lished upon this occasion that his son, Evliya’s father Dervi{ Mehemmed
Zilli, was able to embark upon a career as a palace goldsmith. Evliya’s
mother was an Abaza tribeswoman, a relative of the later grand
vizier Melek Ahmed Pa{a, who was brought to the palace at a young
age before being ‘given’ to the goldsmith, who seems to have been
much older than she was. In all likelihood this woman, who remains
unnamed, was one of the many youthful servants in the harem who
had had no special success in attracting powerful patrons or patronesses,
and thus was made to leave after a short while. Given these links,
Evliya’s handsome voice presumably was not his only recommenda-
tion in the eyes of the young sultan, even though it had reputedly
gained him admittance to the palace school of pages over the objec-
tions of his teacher, who worried about the distraction this employ-
ment would cause to a religious scholar in the making.16

15
Cemal Kafadar, “Self and Others: The Diary of a Dervish in Seventeenth-
century Istanbul and First-person Narratives in Ottoman Literature”, Studia Islamica,
LXIX (1989) pp. 121–150 and idem, “Mütereddit bir Mutasavvıf: Üsküplü Asiye
Hatun’un Rüya Defteri 1641–43”, Topkapı Sarayı Yıllı{ı, 5 (1992) pp. 168–222.
16
Evliya Çelebi b Dervi{ Mehemmed Zılli, Evliya Çelebi Seyahatnâmesi, Topkapı Sarayı
 foreword xiii

We do not know what exactly prompted Evliya to leave the palace

milieu, which he must have known well, and embark upon the
uncharted career path of the ‘world traveller and boon companion
to mankind’. While he ‘graduated’ from the school of pages shortly
before Sultan Murad’s death, and claims to have started his wandering
life only in 1640, he seems to have left Istanbul occasionally even
before that date.17 Possibly it was the death of Sultan Murad after
all, that made Evliya come to a final decision about his role in life.
For we may imagine that the excentricities of Murad IV’s successor
Sultan Ibrahim (r. 1640–1648) made him uncomfortable, and who
knows, Evliya also may have been involved in one of the usual intrigues
between the favourites of the previous ruler and those of the new
one. But all this did not mean that the author’s courtly connections
were severed, far from it.
The skills Evliya had acquired at court doubtless stood him in
good stead when he accompanied Melek Ahmed Pa{a to his vari-
ous Anatolian postings, and especially when he found himself at the
court of the khan of Bitlis. Once again, the work of Robert Dankoff
has provided us with some access to this facet of Evliya’s personal-
ity. For he has produced a congenial translation of Evliya’s visit to
Abdal Khan, a ruler whose political power was certainly limited to
a small area and who moreover was much criticised at the Ottoman
court because of his financial exactions. But even so this personage,
who had managed to amass a great fortune, impressed even sophis-
ticated visitors from Istanbul by the refinement of his cuisine, the
lavishness of his court entertainments and the richness of his library.
Porcelain dishes, jewelled spoons and crystal ewers were used to serve
food and sherbets, and among the many exotic drinks Evliya enu-
merated tea, as yet a rarity in the Ottoman lands.18 Acrobats showed
their skills, and as a younger man Abdal Khan seems to have taken
part in such displays himself, because he was slightly lame due to a
fall from a tightrope.
As to the library, it was full of the works of the most famous cal-
ligraphers and also of Iranian miniatures, which filled Evliya with

Bagdat 304 Yazmasının Transkripsyonu—Dizini, vol. 1, ed. by Orhan }aik Gökyay and
Yücel Da<lı (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 1995), pp. 102–103.
17
Article “Evliya Çelebi” in (slâm Ansiklopedisi vol. 4 (Istanbul: Ministry of Education,
1945) by Cavit Baysun.
18
Evliya Çelebi in Bitlis, p. 119.
xiv foreword

admiration even though as a former courtier of Murad IV, victor

over Safavid armies, he professed to despise the Persians.19 Yet
although the Ottoman traveller was certainly a pious Sunni, he felt
even less sympathy when it came to the Kadızadelis, the ‘discordant
revivalists’ of the Ottoman seventeenth century, famous for their hos-
tility to everything not known to have existed in the Hijaz under
the first four caliphs.20 A Kadızadeli type was responsible for the
defacement of one particularly valuable illustrated Shahname manu-
script, and Evliya gleefully recounted this man’s disgrace at the hands
of Melek Ahmed Pa{a, an anecdote made even more picturesque by
Robert Dankoff ’s lively translation.21
However as Dankoff has shown in his introduction to Evliya’s stay
in Bitlis, this enjoyment of courtly elegance and savoir-vivre was
always fraught with danger. For as Evliya himself noted, Abdal Khan
could pass from genial pleasantries to dangerous suspicions within
the span of a moment, and his entourage also held some violent
and power-hungry men. The Ottoman traveller was himself an invol-
untary eye-witness to the murder of one of the khan’s sons by his
own brother, and in the resulting confusion, Evliya escaped across
the snowy mountains of eastern Anatolia. This feat he was able to
accomplish only because in previous days and weeks, he had taken
the precaution of training his horses every day.22 Although Evliya
when recounting his life as a palace companion to Sultan Murad
IV did not dwell on the dangers involved in this proximity to absolute
power, it is hard to imagine that he was not aware of them. Presumably
he had been trained to be on the alert at an early age.

Evliya as a linguist

In the more exotic places that he visited, both in the east and in
the west, Evliya tried to locate texts typical of the languages encoun-
tered, compile word-lists and also collect proper names deemed espe-

19
Evliya Çelebi in Bitlis, pp. 293–299.
20
Madeline Zilfi, “Discordant Revivalism in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul”, The
Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 45,4 (1986) pp. 251–269.
21
Evliya Çelebi in Bitlis, pp. 295–299.
22
Evliya Çelebi in Bitlis, pp. 10–11.
 foreword xv

cially characteristic of the region.23 These lists have intrigued philol-

ogists for a long time: thus several authors have tried their hands at
an identification of the fragments in the Viennese dialect of seven-
teenth-century German as collected by Evliya. After early attempts
at edition by Imre Karászon and others, Hans Joachim Kissling was
able to establish that these samples are fragments of liturgical prayers
to the Virgin Mary, probably linked to one of the sanctuaries out-
side the gates of the Habsburg capital, and not psalms as Evliya had
assumed. He probably had heard them from a passing procession
and therefore unavoidably distorted them. Moving from the far west
to an eastern province of the Ottoman Empire, namely to the dialect
of the city of Diyarbakır, Hendrik Boeschoten has studied both the
poem that Evliya used as a linguistic sample, and the comments
from a local informant that constituted the basis for the glossary
compiled by our traveller.24 From this study it has emerged that the
seventeenth-century dialect of Diyarbakır was of the Azeri group,
and that Evliya was rather successful in bringing out the latter’s char-
acteristics as opposed to Ottoman Turkish.
Once again, Robert Dankoff has made a major contribution to
the study of Evliya’s samples. Thus he has produced a study of the
languages of the world according to the views of our traveller, and
in addition a glossary of all the foreign and dialectal words occur-
ring in the Seyahatname.25 Moreover in his discussion of Evliya’s visit
to Bitlis, Dankoff has shown that the author has left us the earliest
extant sample of the Turkish dialect of this town, which contained
a fair sprinkling of Armenian loan-words—the words described by
Evliya as Rozhiki Kurdish being for the most part nothing of the
sort.26 Evliya’s rendering of the Bitlis dialect is so full that, as in the
Diyarbakır case, statements concerning morphology have become
possible. Thus Evliya’s work forms a major source for historical

23
Hans Joachim Kissling, “Einige Sprachproben bei Evlija Çelebi,” Leipziger
Vierteljahrsschrift für Südosteuropa, 2,3 (1938) pp. 212–220 See also [Evliya Çelebi], Im
Reiche des Goldenen Apfels, tr. and annotated by Richard F. Kreutel, Erich Prokosch
and Karl Teply, pp. 313–314.
24
Evliya Çelebi in Diyarbekir, pp. 100–106.
25
Robert Dankoff, “The Languages of the World according to Evliya Çelebi,”
Journal of Turkish Studies 13 (1989) pp. 23–32 and idem, An Evliya Çelebi Glossary:
Unusual Dialectal and Foreign Words in the Seyahat-name (Cambridge MA: Dept. of Near
Eastern Studies, Harvard University, 1991).
26
Evliya Çelebi in Bitlis, pp. 18–19.
xvi foreword

dialectology. On a more general level Dankoff has also devoted a

separate monograph to the linguistic imbrication of Turkish and
Armenian in certain dialects of eastern Anatolia.27

Recording contemporary artisans and historical monuments

It is never wise to discuss products of the hand and mind while dis-
regarding their makers, and Evliya Çelebi must have been quite
aware of this rule; after all his father had been a goldsmith who left
works to be admired by his son in different parts of the empire.28
While we do not know how much time Dervi{ Mehemmed Zilli’s
palace career allowed him for actually making things, or whether
his functions were mainly managerial, Evliya himself showed a lively
interest in crafts and craftsmen. Thus he procured himself certain
official documents on the basis of which he produced major cata-
logues of Istanbul and Cairo artisans.29 Typically these documents
had been compiled in order to record the participation of guilds-
men in festive parades marking the circumcisions of princes, the mar-
riages of princesses or the beginnings of sultanic campaigns, and to
establish precedents concerning the gifts and monetary contributions
expected on such occasions from the participating craftsmen. But for
reasons remaining unclear, none of the relevant official records have
surfaced to date; and we depend on Evliya Çelebi and other liter-
ary men for a notion of their contents.
Evliya’s discussions of Ottoman and more rarely pre-Ottoman
monuments are so valuable to the historian because some of the
buildings survive and thus the evidence on the ground can be checked
against the descriptions in the Seyahatname, thus giving us some idea
of Evliya’s reliability. Such comparisons have shown that more than
once, the author was rather careless, for instance when relaying with
not always faultless accuracy information derived from historical works

27
Robert Dankoff, Armenian Loanwords in Turkish (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz,
1995).
28
Robert Dankoff, “Evliya Çelebi’s Book of Travels as a Source for the Visual
Arts,” The Turkish Studies Association Bulletin 16,1 (1992) pp. 39–49.
29
On the artisans of Istanbul compare Evliya Çelebi, Evliya Çelebi Seyahatnâmesi,
vol. 1, pp. 220–317.
 foreword xvii

or poetry collections.30 Presumably Evliya’s tenacious and only partly

deserved reputation for unreliability has something to do with just
these inaccuracies; in addition the numerous dubious figures, often
meant to astonish rather than to inform, have impaired the writer’s
credibility yet further.
On the other hand, studies that confront Evliya’s accounts with
evidence from archival sources show that quite often he was in fact
correct. Thus to mention but a few examples his claims that a cer-
tain minor dervish lodge had been transformed into a school for law
and theology (medrese), or that another such establishment had passed
from one order to the next, confirm what is known from official
sources.31 For Machiel Kiel, who has authored a large number of
publications on Ottoman works of architecture in the Balkans, Evliya
Çelebi functions mainly as a guide to the building fabric of the sev-
enteenth century. After all the Ottoman writer has mentioned and
sometimes described a good many monuments that over three cen-
turies later, Kiel has studied either as ruins or else as structures still
serving a well-defined function.32 On the whole, this modern histo-
rian has gained rather a positive impression of the quality of Evliya’s
architectural information, describing him as more precise and sys-
tematic than other early travellers both eastern and western.33
Rather than with the reliability or otherwise of individual descrip-
tions, Robert Dankoff in a most valuable but all-too-brief article has
been interested in the overall perspective adopted by the Ottoman
writer.34 Thus Dankoff notes that Evliya was much better informed
and also more sober when discussing Ottoman monuments than
when he was confronted either with the ruins of antiquity or else
with Christian churches; in those latter cases, he was ready to recount
all matter of clichés and fables.35 Dankoff has also suggested that the

30
Eren, Evliya Çelebi Seyahatnâmesi, passim.
31
Suraiya Faroqhi, Der Bektaschi-Orden in Anatolien (vom späten fünfzehnten Jahrhundert
bis 1826), Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes, Sonderband II (Wien: Verlag
des Institutes für Orientalistik der Universität Wien, 1981), pp. 16–17.
32
Machiel Kiel, Studies on the Ottoman Architecture of the Balkans (Aldershot, Hampshire:
Variorum, 1990) compare index.
33
Machiel Kiel, “The Physical Aspects of the City,” in Evliya Çelebi in Diyarbekir,
ed. and tr. by Van Bruinessen et alii, p. 62.
34
Dankoff, “Evliya Çelebi as a Source for the Visual Arts”.
35
Ulrich Haarmann, “Evliya Çelebi’s Bericht über die Altertümer von Gize”,
Turcica, VIII, 1 (1976) pp. 157–230.
xviii foreword

terminology through which Evliya conveys the aesthetic quality of

some of the mosques that he visited would merit a closer investiga-
tion. But as yet nobody has dared to embark on this enterprise,
probably because so little is known about the aesthetic perceptions
current in the Ottoman world.36
After all these analytical explorations of Evliya’s activities in their
different facets, the time has evidently come for an effort at syn-
thesis, which I have the honour and the pleasure of presenting here.
In the fullness of time, Robert Dankoff ’s synthetic study surely will
generate yet further novel and sophisticated analyses; but I hope that
for the present, readers will simply give themselves up to the joys
of a fascinating story.

Munich, 18 December 2003

Suraiya Faroqhi

36
On the Arab world, with a strong emphasis on mediaeval norms, compare
Doris Behrens-Abouseif, Schönheit in der arabischen Kultur (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1998).
 ACKNOWLEDGMENT

In the mid-1980s when I first read through the entire text of the
Seyahatname—a task that took three years to accomplish—I made
notes that resulted in several books. One of these, Guide, which con-
sidered the Seyahatname mainly as an autobiographical memoir, pointed
to many items that illustrated the mentality of the author. It thus
contained the present book in nuce.
At the time I had no plans to develop it in this direction, considering
that to be a task for someone else. But in May of 2000, thanks to
the invitation of Gilles Veinstein, I had the opportunity to present
the germ of the first four chapters of the present book as lectures
at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. I had
already presented aspects of chapters 5 and 6 in lectures at Columbia
University (1989); University of California, Berkeley (1991); University
of Oslo and University of Bergen (1992); University of Wisconsin
(1993); and the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales
in Paris (1999). The stimulus to translate the long section in chap-
ter 1 of Evliya’s reminiscences of the Ottoman court came from
Palmira Brummett’s invitation to attend a mini-conference at the
University of Tennessee, Knoxville, in May 1997. And the stimulus
to translate the sections on the Celalis in chapters 2 and 3 came
from Klaus Kreiser’s invitation to visit the University of Bamberg in
February 1999.
I am grateful to Virginia Aksan, Faruk Bilici, Suraiya Faroqhi,
Cornell Fleischer, Gottfried Hagen, Halil Inalcik, Michael Khodar-
kovski, and Klaus Kreiser who have helped me at various stages
with comments, criticisms and suggestions.
Finally, a word of gratitude to my home institution, the University
of Chicago, for providing me the resources to sustain this endeavor
over many years.

Robert Dankoff
April 13, 2004
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