An Ottoman Traveller

Evliya Çelebi is the greatest travel writer of the Ottoman Empire. Born in Istanbul in 1611, he started travelling in 1640 and continued for over forty years, stopping eventually in Cairo where he died in about 1685. He collected his lively and eclectic observations into a ten-volume manuscript the Seyahatname, or Book of Travels. For the first time in English, this selection gives a taste of the breadth of Evliya’ s interests: from architecture to natural history, through religion, politics, linguistics, music, science and the supernatural. While he made over a thousand complete recitations of the Koran in his lifetime, he also wrote with curiosity about Christianity, about his own impotence, about the antics at a world convention of trapeze artists and the feats of a Kurdish sorcerer who conjured a horse from a log pile.