Seyahatname (Book of Travels of Evliya Çelebi)

The Seyahatname is the book of travels of Evliya Çelebi. Its translator Joseph von Hammer notes that Evliya styled himself Evliya, Hafiz and Siyyah ("the traveller"), and that his work is called the Siyyah Nameh, "the History of the Traveller". ¹ The English edition introduces it as the narrative of an Asiatic traveller "enthusiastically fond of seeing foreign countries, and unwearied in his investigation of their history, condition, and institutions". ²

Hammer says Evliya began his travels with excursions through Constantinople and its environs, whose description fills the whole first volume, the most valuable part in his view being the account of the tradesmen's corporations and their rank in the public processions. ^{1 3} The second volume opens with the journey to Brussa in 1640, then Nicomedia and the Princes' Islands, then Trebizond, the Black Sea coast, the land of the Abaza and the siege of Azov; ^{3 4} the third opens with his seventh journey, to Damascus; ⁵ and the fourth ends with Baghdad, Basra, Hormuz, Mosul and their surroundings, closing with the year 1066 AH (1655). ^{6 7} Hammer says that despite searching the markets nothing beyond the fourth volume had been found, so he took it that Evliya never wrote a continuation, and that these four volumes cover only twenty-six of the forty-one years Evliya spent travelling; this is Hammer's view in his time. ⁷

The translation begins with sayings Evliya cites about Constantinople, then the city's foundation, walls and gates, talismans, sieges and its conquest by Mehmed II, then the New and Old Serai, the offices established at the conquest, the imperial mosques beginning with Aya Sofya, the mosques of Mehmed the Conqueror, Bayezid II, Selim I and Süleyman, and then Süleyman's Kanun-name and the provinces and sanjaks of the empire. ^{8 9} The sayings Evliya cites about Constantinople are reported here only as the section title gives them, without any judgement on them. ⁸

Volume two opens with the journey to Brussa: its fortress and gates, imperial mosques, colleges, hot springs, markets, the language, dress and crafts of its people, and the tombs of the first Ottoman sultans there; then the journey to Nicomedia, and on to Batum, Trebizond, Sinope and Samsun. ^{10 11}

Two volumes of Hammer's abridged English translation, published in London by the Oriental Translation Fund of Great Britain and Ireland, were read: the first of 1834 and the second of 1850, both copies from the library of Franz Babinger. ^{12 13} The Turkish text was not read.