As religious missions go, it was a pretty sweet deal

August 9, 2016 7:57 AM

Evliya Çelebi’s Seyahatname is one of history’s greatest travelogues - Edward White, The Paris Review. [via]
posted by Think_Long (4 comments total)

Thanks for sharing. I'm surprised the piece didn't talk about how you can read this work in English. There's never been a translation of the whole thing, but there was a translation of excerpts published a few years ago: An Ottoman Traveller: Selections from the Book of Travels of Evliya Celebi, translated by Robert Dankoff and Sooyong Kim. I've only read the portion on Athens and I don't know Turkish, let alone Ottoman Turkish, but it was readable and a pleasure. Highly recommended.
posted by crazy with stars at 11:35 AM on August 9, 2016 [4 favorites]

Thanks for posting this--it's a lively and endearing introduction to Evliya, who deserves to be much better known. I've read parts of the Seyahatname in English and (modern) Turkish translation and it's both fascinating and entertaining. There's now a heritage walking-or-riding route called the Evliya Çelebi Way that traces the path of one of his journeys through Western Turkey--I'd love to travel it someday.

Also, if you're looking for public-domain English translations, there's a 19thC one available at the Internet Archive: vol 1, vol 2.
posted by karayel at 12:37 PM on August 9, 2016 [3 favorites]

That's a wonderful piece; I'd heard of Evliya, but had no idea about most of that stuff. Nor how worldly Istanbul was:

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.

Thanks for the post!
posted by languagehat at 2:11 PM on August 9, 2016

What a delightful read! And thanks crazy with stars for the pointer to some actual excerpts from the travelogue in English.
posted by congen at 9:39 PM on August 9, 2016