Evliya Çelebi’s Book of Travels is too long to translate, and too big to write about.
An Ottoman Traveller: Selections from the Book of Travels of Evliya Celebi
Eland Publishing
520 pages
$22.79
Travelogue, ethnography, architectural and musical guide, dream diary and action drama, intimate portrait of the Ottoman Porte, foreign phrasebook and economic catalogue, diplomatic history, it features battles and shipwrecks, deceit, escapes, wonder tales of dervishes and magicians, sexual customs and sample menus, landscape and weather, surgical practices, science, superstition and beliefs, employing an enormous 17th-century Turkish vocabulary. The Seyahatname‘s ten volumes run to over 4,300 pages in the authoritative Turkish edition.
The Travels made its own long journey into print. Evliya Çelebi settled in Cairo the mid-1670s for the last decade or so of his life, and finished his memoirs by 1683. The manuscript was first read in 1742, when it was transported to Istanbul and copied. It took over a century and a half for a complete, printed Seyahatname to appear, and that edition was as long in the press (1896-1938) as Çelebi was on the road. Most Turkish readers know the Travels in that version, or in condensed translation in modern Turkish. The authoritative, unbowdlerized, and corrected Book of Travels in the language of its composition was published between 1999 and 2007.
Çelebi’s path into English also has that hint of romance. Around 1804, a German-English aristocrat, Joseph von Hammer, ran across a manuscript of volumes 1 through 4. Thinking he had the whole work in hand, Hammer issued excerpts in German translation starting in 1814. Between 1834 and 1850, he released his abbreviated English version of volumes 1 and 2: Narrative of Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa, in The Seventeenth Century, by Evliya Efendi, translated from the Turkish by the Ritter Joseph Von Hammer. That, plus a mid-20th-century version of Hammer’s translation titled In the Days of the Janissaries: Old Turkish Life as Depicted in the “Travel Book” of Evliyá Chelebí, and a scholarly monograph, Turkish Instruments of Music in the Seventeenth Century, as described in the Siyāhat nāma of Ewliya Chelebi (extracted from the catalogue of Istanbul guilds in Volume 1) was all the English common reader had of The Book of Travels.
No more.
About twenty years ago, Robert Dankoff collaged a biography, The Intimate Life of an Ottoman Statesman: Melek Ahmed Pasha (1588-1662), as Portrayed in Evliya Çelebi’s “Book of Travels” using von Hammer’s English and the 1896-1938 Turkish. Last year, Dankoff (an editor of the 21st-century Turkish edition) and his co-translator Sooyong Kim issued the anthology An Ottoman Traveller: Selections from the Book of Travels by Evliya Çelebi. Unlike the topical Evliya Chelebi: Travels in Iran and the Caucasus, 1647 & 1654, published that same year but aimed at Persian specialists, An Ottoman Traveller draws from all ten volumes, and gives some metonymous measure of the whole work’s greatness.
The Book of Travels resembles Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy in its exhaustive accumulation of detail; it’s also akin to Herodotus’ Histories, but picaresque. As a collection of pointed tales and reported wonders, the Travels owes a lot to The 1001 Nights, as well as to the Mathnawí of Jalálu’ddín Rúmí. As for posterity, Orhan Pamuk set his world-art-historical murder mystery, My Name Is Red, in the Istanbul of Çelebi’s first volume.
Born in 1611, Evliya Çelebi was the son of the chief goldsmith to all the Ottoman sultans from Süleyman to Ibrahim; his maternal uncle, Melek Ahmed Pasha, served as grand wazir and as governor of Rumelia (now Bulgaria), Baghdad, Damascus, Van (in the Crimea), and Bosnia. Çelebi studied theology and jurisprudence until the age of twelve. He then apprenticed to the personal imam of Sultan Murad IV. By his early twenties, Çelebi was a recognized hafiz, reciting the entire Koran from memory in public performances at Aya Sofia, just up the hill from the Topkapi Palace. In 1636, Murad himself took note of Evliya’s gifts as muezzin, singer, and ready wit, and named him a royal entertainer and boon companion.
But Çelebi avoided a career at court. Instead, he pursued his lifelong dream of travel, often as an attaché in this or that pasha’s entourage. “Dream” is more than figurative here: the Seyahatname opens with an account of “a dream of comfort” that came to the young hafiz in a “sleep of wish fulfillment” in 1631, on his twentieth birthday. That night, Çelebi kissed the hand of the Prophet himself, who called him to travel the world, and commanded the youth to record what he would see.
Çelebi’s practical curiosity is as universal as ibn Khaldun’s; his forty-year travels are sprightlier than ibn Batuta’s. Beginning at the Bosporus, the Seyahatname touches upon every corner of the Ottoman Empire at the height of its power (excepting the Maghrib), and ends in Cairo, on the River Nile.
As an observer, he makes no pretense of neutrality. Çelebi was an orthodox Sunni Muslim, and his contempt for almost everyone else—Christians, Jews, Shi’ites, Zoroastrians’, Hindus, Kurds, Franks, Arabs—accounts for much of his narrative’s charm, even guarantees its integrity.
Passing through Safed in Canaan, he describes the language of the Jews, “an ancient and accursed people.” Çelebi explains that the two books revealed to this religious community are the Book of Psalms, which God revealed to the prophet David, and the Torah, revealed to Moses. Psalms is entirely prayers, while the Torah, the traveler writes, “is entirely promise and threat, command and prohibition, narrative, permitted and forbidden, paradise and hell and purgatory, resurrection and judgement …. Aside from the Jews, among the Christians as well—the infidels of Sweden, Holland, Dunkerque, Denmark, Germany, etc.—they all read the Torah and the Psalms and they speak Jewish.” (By “Jewish,” Çelebi meant Ladino.)
His description of the Armenians includes a brief cultural survey: Amalek created the Armenian language; the Armenians are all Christians who follow the Gospel, and are divided into seven sects. “Only their false doctrines,” says Çelebi, “are not like those of the Greeks. The Armenians eat oily foods on the eve of the Christian Festival of the Egg (Easter), while the Greeks eat oily foods on the following morning, according to their false fast.”
Evliya allows that every world traveler should have a smattering of Armenian to satisfy his needs and to keep on good terms with the natives. His handy vocabulary transliterates numbers from one to twelve, and lists the words for bread, water, raisins, apple, come, and go. The traveler’s phrasebook deals with such question-and-answer situations as demanding and failing to be served barley. And there are scripts for other interactions as well: “Come let’s go to the garden and drink wine”; “My hero, I love you very much”; “Give me a kiss O my dear boy”; “My hero, what ever happens will happen tonight, come let’s go to bed.”
When Çelebi accompanied Melek Ahmed Pasha to Split, in Croatia, he encountered the Frankish tongue. According to him, all the Franks speak their own dialect of Italian, and require translators to communicate with each other. He concedes that the Venetian language is most eloquent, then invokes the old saying, “Arabic is eloquence, Persian is elegance, Turkish is an offence, and all other languages are filth.”
Vienna posed the Muslim traveler real difficulty. A bronze white elephant clock that struck the hours, a gilded copper peacock that flapped and shrieked, and a pair of cast rams used to execute criminals left him torn between graven imagery and admiration. The elephant’s behavior was like that of the black elephant, Çelebi explained, “but it is white magic, a masterpiece of art, that astonishes the viewer.”
To qualify the wonder, this orthodox Sunni placed his extended description of Vienna’s Stephansdom under the heading, “Dispraise of the cathedral of priests and monks,” which he further characterized as a “house of mis-worship the un-good work of a non-upright king.”
Yet Çelebi couldn’t contain himself. “The paintings and gildings are strange and wondrous works of magic in the Frankish style …. This great cathedral glitters like the gold mine of Mt Akra in Kurdistan and dazzles the eyes like a mountain of light.” And several pages later, “When one sees the depiction of Paradise in this Stephan Church … , one wishes to die and go to heaven …. When it comes to painting, the Franks prevail over the Indians and Persians.” And then there were paintings of Hell and Purgatory. “Seeing these figures,” he wrote, “one’s body trembles like an autumn leaf.”
There is seeing, and there is hearing.
The Stephansdom’s “organ of David” requires twenty priests just to operate the bellows. “When the infidels wish to play this organ,” Çelebi writes, it takes seventy magicians, “each one a master at the level of Pythagoras,” to turn and work its parts. Castrati climb ladders to descend upon the bellows. As they rise and fall, the boys sing along with the organ in voices that will never crack, intoning verses from the Psalter. “According to the Germans’ false doctrine,” the traveler explains, “while David recited psalms … , he also played the organ …. So when the German priests and monks play the organ …—and the castrati mounted on the two bellows in groups of ten recite the Psalter …—one’s lungs fill with blood and one’s eyes with tears …. Truly, this organ has an awesome, liver-piercing sound, like the voice of the Antichrist, that makes a man’s hair stand on end …. It is only white magic,” the Muslim musician concludes, “a concatenation of musical instruments that scatters the wits of the listener.”
While the first volume of the Seyahatname begins with a dream, the last starts with what Çelebi calls “Adam’s prayer for Egypt in ‘Hebrew.’ ” He prefaces his transcription with this account of Adam’s wanderings: After the expulsion from Eden, Adam made his first home in Sri Lanka; he next dwelt at Mt. Ararat, then in unfarmed Mecca. Finally, Adam and his descendants (40,000 sons, by the Coptic chronicles’ count) went down to Egypt and settled by the Nile.
“And this,” Evliya Çelebi reports, “is the prayer he recited. It is written in the Hebrew language, because when Adam fell from paradise, in his rebellion he forgot the language of paradise, which is Arabic, and instructed by Gabriel he began to speak Hebrew instead”:
Hidam
tit jedilem
huji Çiji riba
felaj riba felaj riba
sujüm jaken
tarj dilem serij tena
sija riyeji zehriba
jedilem jiraj jiraj
Hidam kidam
hirj bijiti jar binti
jari mjni jari mjni
My God
My faith
Preserve from the devil
Save me, save me
All your angels
May they serve me
Give wheat I’ll make bread
In the end death occurs, death
My God
For my sons this my city
Make prosper, make prosper
Bibliography
I first learned of Evliya Çelebi in John Freely’s Istanbul: The Imperial City (Penguin, 1996).
Evliya Chelebi: Travels in Iran and the Caucasus, 1647 & 1654, translated by Hasan Javadi and Willem Floor (Mage, Washington, D.C., 2010).
The Intimate Life of an Ottoman Statesman: Melek Ahmed Pasha (1588-1662), as Portrayed in Evliya Çelebi’s “Book of Travels,” translation and commentary by Robert Dankoff (SUNY Press, 1991).
In the Days of the Janissaries: Old Turkish Life as Depicted in the “Travel Book” of Evliyá Chelebí, by Alexander Pallis (London: Hutchinson, 1951).
Turkish Instruments of Music in the Seventeenth Century, as described in the Siyahat nama of Ewliya Chelebi, translation edited with notes by Henry George Farmer (Long-wood Press, 1937).
Narrative Of Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa, in The Seventeenth Century, by Evliya Efendi, translated from the Turkish by the Ritter Joseph Von Hammer (London: 1834).
Laurance Wieder is a poet living in Charlottesville, Virginia. His books include The Last Century: Selected Poems (Picador Australia) and Words to God’s Music: A New Book of Psalms (Eerdmans). He can be found regularly at PoemSite (free subscription available from poemsite@gmail.com).
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