March 9, 2019 • 25 mins
Today we revisit a 2012 episode from previous hosts Sarah and Deblina. Evliya Çelebi grew up in 17th century Istanbul as the "boon companion" of Sultan Murad IV. In his 20s, Evliya had a prophetic dream and spent decades traveling. During his travels he wrote the Seyahatname, one of history's important travel narratives.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday, everybody. As long time listeners to the show, No,
Holly and I joined this podcast, but the show has
been around all the way since two thousand and eight.
We had a whole series of other hosts before our time,
and even though Holly and I have been digging around
through our own archive for six years at this point,
(00:22):
we still stumble across episodes that have just not ever
caught our attention before. And that happened to me with
today's classic, which is on Evil at Chellaby. Elia Chelloby
was a seventeenth century traveler from the Ottoman Empire who
spent more than forty years chronicling all his journeys. This
episode dates back to from previous hosts Sarah and Bablina.
(00:44):
So enjoy. Welcome to Stuff you missed in history class
from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello in law, come
to the podcast. I'm Fair Dowdy and I'm DeLine to
Chuck Rebording and Devilina. I have a question for you.
(01:05):
What's that? Have you ever kept a travel journal? I mean,
I know you like to travel a lot. I have
kept well, I have attempted to, but I usually end
up getting them. I have a collection of beautiful journals
that I bought throughout the years, and I end up
taking them and I fill out a page. And then
I realized there's this big competition between actually wanting to
do things and having time to write about the things
(01:27):
while I'm on vacation, and then when you get back,
you get so busy that you just don't have time
to rerecord everything happens to me too, if I'm lucky,
I'll start writing on the plane ride home and maybe
fill in the briefest details. So try to imagine trying
to keep a travel journal for forty years now, and
imagine that our expeditions included not just classic traveler high
(01:51):
points you know, meals you eight monuments, he saw people
you met, that kind of thing, but events like wars
and rebellions and pirate attacks. I mean, I'm engine having
time for that. I mean, I think I would make
time to write about a pirate attack that would that
would warrant an entry for sure. So our subject today,
evlah Chellaby is a seventeenth century Ottoman gentleman, and he's
(02:14):
considered by many people to be one of the world's
greatest travelers and by extension, one of the world's greatest
travel writers. He kept a two thousand, four hundred folio
record of his journeys. He called it the Saya Hotnomy,
or a Book of Travels, and it's the longest travel
account in Islamic literature, maybe even the longest travel account
(02:34):
in the world. And from about age thirty until his
death in his seventies, Evlah was on the move, and
for as long as he traveled, he kept on writing,
covering his journeys across rivers of ice in the far
northern reaches of the Ottoman Empire, to the Sahara Desert
and the Nile River in the south. And because Evlah
went to places that many others didn't even bother to
(02:54):
visit or at least document, his record has become a
key source for archaeologists, joag graffers, and cultural historians. And
that's why, in addition to discussing high points from Evliah's
remarkable travels, we're also going to talk about the strange
history of the Seahotana May, which, at nearly four hundred
years old, is only now becoming an item of world interest.
(03:16):
But before we get to that, there's the matter of
Evliah's home bound years. Of course, he didn't start traveling
until he was about thirty. So we mentioned Evliah was
a gentleman, and in fact, his name Chellaby means gentleman,
so appropriately enough. He grew up in the cultured atmosphere
of the Ottoman court, where his father was the Sultan's
chief goldsmith, and his mother was an Abcasian, possibly a
(03:39):
slave girl given to the goldsmith in marriage by the Sultan,
who told him, grand Aga, you're an old man, but
God willing from this maiden you will have an angel
like world adorning son. And sure enough, Evliah was born
nine months ten days after that in sixteen eleven in
istanbul And, and he started his education as other children
(04:03):
of his class would have, at the Madressa, which was
Arabic school, where he would have learned to recite the
Koran become a prayer caller, and he would have also
studied languages to Turkish, Persian, Arabic plus Greek and Latin,
and stories of Roman emperors and Alexander the Great that
he picked up from the non Muslims who worked in
(04:24):
his father's gold shop. And when he wasn't studying, Eliah
still learned in a different way. He roamed a standbull,
watching artisans, exploring mosques, and occasionally even attending court with
his father. By his teens, Eliot could recite the entire
Koran from memory. This took him about eight hours to do,
and he'd do it every single Thursday, and he said
(04:46):
he was proud to have maintained this tradition through his life.
It was during one of those restations, in fact, that
he got kind of his big break in a sense.
During a recital, Elia was summoned by the reigning Sultan
Murad the Fourth, who to him how long his recitations took.
And eight hours must have seemed like a really good
answer to him, because the Sultan essentially then told him
(05:08):
that they were going to be friends. Okay, so what
does being friends with the sultan really entail to me?
It sounds a bit like pursuing a higher education. Because ever,
Leo was soon set up with a tutor, a calligraphy master,
a spiritual advisor, a music teacher for music and singing,
a grammar instructor, plus his old master for continued Koran studies.
(05:32):
And so his job essentially became to read and write,
you know, study during the day and night, refine his
manners dressed nicely and recite entertaining things for the Sultan,
really showing off his learning, and he he gives a
sampling of what this usually involved in his book of Travels,
he recounts an early meeting where he asked the Sultan, look,
(05:54):
I will what exactly do you want to hear me recite?
You know, literature? I can do Persian, Arabic, Turkish, Hebrew, Syriac, Greek,
maybe a medley of musical forms, maybe a selection of
different kinds of verse poetry. The Sultan actually even calls
him out on showing off so much, because in between
cataloging all this knowledge, this huge platter of things he
(06:17):
can recite for the Sultan, he throwing puns and make
witty remarks, some of them kind of risque, and polished
the whole performance off by somersaulting out of the room.
I mean, this kid, this kid knew how to put
on a show for sure. So his next two years
at court involved lots of study, beautiful books, calligraphy practice,
and those audiences with the Sultan and fancy presence as well.
(06:41):
A silver ink pot studded with jewels wasn't one notable
one and also a writing board inlaid with mother of pearl.
Good accessories for the scholar. Yeah, a gem encrusted back scratcher,
that's a bonus, So handy. But he became especially valued
when we're of the fourth was feeling down, since he
could crack him up with as near constant jokes. Courtiers
(07:02):
would hurry evliah In and Muraud would say, quote, look,
the dispeller of woe has arrived. Sometimes his duties would
be a little more solemn, Koran recitations, leading calls to prayer,
singing sad songs, things like that. Others were more outrageous,
such as supervising the Sultan's wrestling matches and avoiding vomiting
(07:23):
on the Sultan when he'd pick him up and spin
him around, which sounds pretty nerve racking, not something you'd
want to do to the Sultan, so it seems like
with such a prestigious position, though minus the spinning of course. Ever,
Leo would really enjoy every moment spent in his hometown
of Istanbul and at the palace, But from about age
(07:44):
twenty onward he was itching to get away. He wanted
to get outside of the city. He had only visited
towns just outside of the city walls. So to make
up for that, since he didn't have travel magazine studied,
he'd quiz dervishes about their travels and learn about the
seven climbs, the four quarters of the Earth. Really just
um make the travel bug he already had really even
(08:07):
more intense ready to go. In addition to his court connection,
Evliah had family pressures keeping him at home though as well.
In an early book he wonders quote how to get
free of pressure from mother and father and teacher and brother.
(08:29):
I think that's probably a sentiment a lot of people
can relate to. It must have been on his mind
a lot, because when Elia was in his early twenties,
he had a dream, but not just a dream. It
was a dream of vision, which appears sometimes in podcasts
they do they've popped up recently, I feel like now
and again. But in this particular dream, he found himself
with early Islamic saints and the prophet Mohammed, who asked
(08:53):
Evlia to call the morning prayer. After he was done,
Eliah went back before the prophet to ask for shaffat,
or intercession, but messed up and asked instead for a
similar sounding word in Ottoman Turkish say a hot or travel,
so Mohammed promises him both, plus visits to the tombs
(09:13):
of saints and prophets, which do end up coming along
with his later travel. So according to the Ottoman historian
Caroline Finkel, this type of dream vision is a common
occurrence of literature from this time and when that Evilia
himself used in later accounts of his travels. But she
also notes that in this case he sounds especially genuine,
(09:34):
like it really was a life changing moment for him,
not that he woke up from his dream and started packing,
though it still took about ten years before Elia could
get away uh the first time, accompanied by a friend
visiting nearby Borsa, and on the trip back home, he
decided not to tell his folks, but to set out
(09:56):
again and head off to the north Anatolian coast um
to to tour that rage in a little bit. Since
he was traveling with a newly appointed governor, this also
started a trend of journeying and the entourage of various
public officials, so he'd serve various functions along the way,
including things like prayer caller, tax collector, courier, envoy, customs clerk,
(10:17):
even a mom Basically anything that allowed him to tour
with a retinue or run specific errands to places that
he was interested in. Imagine a more practical version of
his work for the Sultan, and that's kind of what
it was. Yeah, and it afforded him not only free
travel of course, a job that it goes along with traveling,
but a certain amount of protection to You've got to
(10:38):
imagine bandits in the woods and rebels and pirates. Of course,
as we've already mentioned, they were traveling with a group
like this would have been a safer way to go.
So Everiot eventually began calling himself despite all those other
professions to lean and just rattled off world traveler and
boon companion to mankind, which I think sums him up
(11:00):
pretty well. It does. Many of his journeys were in
the company of his mother's kinsman, the one time Grand
Vizier Melik Ahmed Pasha, and they traveled to modern Ukraine, Sophia, Iran, Iraq, Transylvania,
while Akia and mal Davia, Poland Bosnia, just a lot
of places all over the place. And Evila's range also
(11:23):
starts to sound more impressive when you consider he was
usually taking the hard away on these travels on horseback.
After a six forty one shipwreck in the Black Sea,
um he was kind of put off sea travel and
completely all of his expeditions were overland. When he finally
hopped on a boat about thirty years later attempting to
(11:43):
visit Cyprus, he was quickly rewarded with that pirate attack
that we mentioned before, so it turned out that sea
travel was just not for him. Out of commission for
all sea travel, and after Melik Ahmed died in sixteen
sixty two, evilah no longer had this May Jr. Patron
this man who he was mostly traveling with. But according
(12:03):
to Caroline Finkel's article on him in History Today, he
also didn't have anything stopping him anymore from going exactly
where he pleased. So he ended up going to work
as a cavalryman and serving in several major engagements before
taking part in a really notable peace mission to Vienna
which established a twenty year truce between the Habsburgs and
the Ottomans. And everley Is account of his trip to
(12:27):
Vienna is really one of the best love parts of
the Book of Travels because it's so full of both
day to day beauties and the horrors of the seventeenth century. Yeah.
For example, he's impressed by the organ at St. Stephen's
and notes that it quote fills the lungs with blood
and the eyes with tears. But he's also really taken
(12:47):
by an operation to remove a bullet from a man's
head and the doctrine that he himself receives to stabilize
three teeth that had been hit by a javelin. And
he's kind of scandalized by social customs he sees when
he's in Vienna, for instance, men and women socializing together
in public, women socializing without their husband's present. But at
(13:08):
the same time, even though this clearly disturbs him, he
finds no problems talking with and even befriending individual European.
So after this epic trip to Vienna, Evliah moved up
to Krimea, up the Volga to Kazan, and then briefly
back to Istanbul. These trips back to Istanbul are really
(13:28):
really short and um come with large spans of travel
in between. By sixteen sixty eight he visited Greece. This
is another really famous part of the book of Travels
because he described the Parthenon, which was then functioning as
a mosque. And the reason why this account is so
particularly important and why the detail is so valued, is
(13:49):
because just about twenty years after Evlas saw the Parthenon,
the building was of course blown up when a cannon
ignited and Ottoman munition stump. I mean, some it's easy
to forget that be ruined Parthenon didn't used to be
quite as ruined as it is today. In sixteen sixty
nine he saw the Ottomans take a Cretan fortress after
(14:10):
a twenty one year siege, and he had the honor
of calling the first prayer there. And then in sixteen
seventy one, at about age sixty, he embarked on his
pilgrimage to Mecca, again, dreaming of blessings, and this time
from his father and his former teacher. And it's interesting
too he did, I mean, of course, for a man
who traveled so much and who was so devout, it
(14:30):
seems like he would have tried to get to Mecca
earlier in his life. He did try to go, he
had events waylay him. So this was a real lifetime
goal to finally be making it to Mecca. And when
he did it he went with three companions, eight servants,
and fifteen Arabian horses. So Ellie ended up spending twice
the time that a normal trip from Istanbul to Mecca
(14:51):
would take to get After his pilgrimage, evil Is settled
in Cairo, surveyed the city, and made a short attempt
to find the source of the Nine. But he died
around sixty four, likely in Cairo, though the exact date
and location are still unknown. Okay, so now that we've
covered in brief, of course every is forty years of travel.
(15:12):
What did he have to say about all these places?
What mide? What he had to say so unique in
the first place, and to a certain extent his work
is fairly formulaic. In towns or cities. He'll write about topography, fortifications, monuments,
you know, what you might expect from a newcomer to
a town. But he'll also talk about dress and cuisine, occupations,
(15:33):
class structure, medicine, naming, customs, speech, literature, hygiene, which, by
the way, he was really pretty into. He had his
slaves at one point clean out a public bath house
for the benefit of the people. He just thought it
was too gross. And then in the countryside he sort
of stuck to a formula to kind of the in
between parts of his travel. After all, and you'd talk
(15:55):
about the landscape, how long it took to get somewhere,
the direction he was, had it in any high points
like saints tombs along the way. But and this is
the important part with all the cataloging, usually comes an anecdote,
(16:17):
a conversation he has with a local authority or a legend.
In many cases, his is the only record of notable
people or strange customs in a given area because other
people just didn't write it down. And like any good
travel writers, some of the neatest examples of anecdotes have
to do with one of our favorite things, food writing.
(16:38):
So for instance, he broods over whether it's religiously acceptable
to eat horse meat with Tatars and um questions that
a bit. And another funny example, he assumes that it's
probably okay to eat giraffe meat with the people in Sudan.
He actually writes, God willing it is permitted, I have
not found a discussion of it in the sore this.
(17:00):
He also claims to have found practicing cannibals among the Colmics,
who are Western Mongols who he says would eat their
dead to honor them, and perhaps most memorably, he talks
about a Cirkashian village custom of entering a dead body
in a wooden box in a hollow tree. So if
the bees made honey, that meant that the soul would
go to heaven. But unfortunately for Evlah, he experiences this
(17:23):
tradition firsthand after he accepts some rather hairy honey from
a local and ends up learning that it's honey from
a hive that was built on a dead man's crotch.
He has an appropriately freaking out kind of reaction to
learning this, But Eveleah Chelloby biographer Robert Dankoff also notes
that the further out on the frontier Evela gets, the
(17:46):
more remarkable his stories. And I mean, I don't know
if we should consider the cannibals and the honey ones
kind of in that end of the spectrum. But some
of the things that sound really shocking are of course true.
He talks about female circumcision, for instance, but others are
clearly made up. He includes fake trips to Western Europe
ones with ridiculously short timelines, especially considering Evlia and what
(18:10):
we can already assume about how he preferred to travel,
which was leisurely. Um, and then also folk tales that
are obviously not true and they're presented as fact. And
I think this is interesting though, according to Dankov, wasn't
like Evly was trying to pull one over on his readers.
He suggests that the readers would have immediately recognized these
(18:30):
as fiction, just like modern readers would, and they were
really just included to entertain something that doesn't exactly fit.
I guess with our notions of travel writing today, you
don't want to just make things up. But I like
it too. Something about that appeals to me. Yeah, well,
I feel like nowadays people want to know, They really
want to know whether this is journalistic, is it true,
(18:53):
or is it something that it has to fall in
either camp? But the combination of the two does sound
sort interesting. So, considering the importance of the Book of
Travels as a geographic document, a cultural archive, and just
a bounty of really well told stories, you'd figure it
would be widely available. But that is not the case.
(19:15):
Though every is certainly considered an audience in his writing,
likely people who were well off, educated ottomans like himself.
That's really not how it went down. After his death,
the manuscript stayed in private collections in Cairo until seventy two,
when it was given to the Chief Black Unuch, who
was one of the highest officials at Ottoman court, and
he realized that it was pure gold and ordered up
(19:38):
more copies of it right away. Excerts of these copies
were eventually printed in Ottoman Turkish now, which is kind
of like Middle English for modern Turkish sepparently pretty impossible
to read for anybody but scholars exactly, and it was
translated into English as well, so the Book of Travels
became known for Book one, which surveys is stand But
(20:00):
the document as a whole was considered pretty much unimportant,
not worth translating the whole thing, So by the late
eighteen hundreds it was printed in its entirety, but at
that point the Sultan considered some parts too too risky
and had large sections censored, and that was really the
only thing that people had to work with for about
(20:21):
a century. Finally, in the mid nineteen nineties it was
transcribed in its entirety into modern Turkish. Still they're only
extracts available in English. I mean, when I first learned
about this guy. I immediately checked my library expecting to
be able to find a copy, and then I learned,
like good luck. But another hold up with people, I
(20:41):
guess studying the whole manuscript, studying the whole piece of
literature is it's really huge. And his biography of Evliah,
Robert Dankoff writes that quote the gigantic scope of the
work has deterred investigators from analyzing its structure beyond a
mere enumeration of its basic contents. Character is Stickally, scholars
have approached the say a hootanomy, as though it were
(21:03):
a huge mind with numerous unconnected passageways. So what I
take away from this is that because it does have
so many relevant details to very specific areas of study,
like botany or food in um, I don't know, the
Ukraine or something like that, people will go in and
(21:23):
look for what concerns their own work and not really
consider the whole work and the life behind it. But
times are changing and Evla is kind of on his
way up. He was named a UNESCO Man of the
Year in two thousand eleven, and a trail through western
Turkey now follows the first stage of his six seventy
one pilgrimage, and it's meant to encourage historic and natural preservation,
(21:47):
promote sustainable tourism, and also to advanced indigenous horse breeds.
Since it's the horse trail, it's called the Evla Chellaby Way.
And I think you listen to recording of a talk
given by Caroline think about this, right. Yeah. It was
a talk given at the Royal Asiatic Society, and she
said that when she was scouting out this trail, you know,
(22:08):
trying to establish it with a group of other interested people,
they found that a lot of the local folks along
the way not only still knew who EVERLEA. Chellaby was,
but still knew what he had written about their villages,
you know, four hundred years earlier. It reminded me, I
don't know, maybe the best comparison we could make would
be Lewis and Clark or something, knowing about the region
(22:29):
they passed through, if you still live in that region.
But this is four hundred years ago, which definitely puts
a puts a spin on the whole thing. It's pretty amazing.
I have one final point to I want to make
about travel writing in general. I was trying to think
about what makes good travel writing. We've already established that
we can't even keep you know, a week of journals
when we go on vacations. But I do like reading
(22:52):
travel writing, and I think that really strong travel writing
usually does have all of those details, but has a
strong enough presence behind it that somehow it all feels
unified without feeling like, oh, I'm just reading about what
this person is thinking and going through. What appeals to
you about good travel writing, Well, it makes me kind
(23:12):
of think about what we were saying about Evliah. I mean,
what really appeals to me is when a person becomes
a part of a place. They're not just observing and
you know, telling you what they're seeing and what they're
tasting and whatever they're doing. They're talking to people and
not just talking to people, but maybe becoming friends with
the people, um, you know, forming relationships with them, and
(23:32):
really becoming immersed in the culture. Because I think, um,
you know, that's what makes a really good trip. That's
what really makes me want to go on a trip,
as knowing like, hey, it could become part of this
place and this is what it's really like. Well, and
that kind of writing is what sets a good travel
narrative apart from just a guide book or something where
it's just telling you what you need to go see,
(23:53):
there's no personality behind it. And I think one of
the reasons why Evliah is such a strong travel writer
and while why he is so appealing after all these years,
is that even though he was very, you know, an
elite man. He was well off, well educated, he was
uh devoted to his empire, but he stayed pretty open
minded during his travels. I mean, he would include stereotypes,
(24:17):
but like I said earlier, he was willing to go
meet people and talk to people and um talk to
the average people too, and find out what they were doing.
He didn't let it stop him from from really experiencing
a place, and he knew how to describe things. He's
known for comparing things to vegetables, for instance, when everyone
can run, but something everyone can relate to exactly, even
(24:40):
four dred years later. Thank you so much for joining
us on this Saturday. If you have heard an email
address or a Facebook you are l or something similar
over the course of today's episode, since it is from
the archive that might be out of date now, you
can email us at History Podcast at how Stuff works
(25:02):
dot com and you can find us all over social
media at missed in History. And you can subscribe to
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Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. For
more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how
stuff Works dot com
Happy Saturday, everybody. As long time listeners to the show, No,
Holly and I joined this podcast, but the show has
been around all the way since two thousand and eight.
We had a whole series of other hosts before our time,
and even though Holly and I have been digging around
through our own archive for six years at this point,
(00:22):
we still stumble across episodes that have just not ever
caught our attention before. And that happened to me with
today's classic, which is on Evil at Chellaby. Elia Chelloby
was a seventeenth century traveler from the Ottoman Empire who
spent more than forty years chronicling all his journeys. This
episode dates back to from previous hosts Sarah and Bablina.
(00:44):
So enjoy. Welcome to Stuff you missed in history class
from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello in law, come
to the podcast. I'm Fair Dowdy and I'm DeLine to
Chuck Rebording and Devilina. I have a question for you.
(01:05):
What's that? Have you ever kept a travel journal? I mean,
I know you like to travel a lot. I have
kept well, I have attempted to, but I usually end
up getting them. I have a collection of beautiful journals
that I bought throughout the years, and I end up
taking them and I fill out a page. And then
I realized there's this big competition between actually wanting to
do things and having time to write about the things
(01:27):
while I'm on vacation, and then when you get back,
you get so busy that you just don't have time
to rerecord everything happens to me too, if I'm lucky,
I'll start writing on the plane ride home and maybe
fill in the briefest details. So try to imagine trying
to keep a travel journal for forty years now, and
imagine that our expeditions included not just classic traveler high
(01:51):
points you know, meals you eight monuments, he saw people
you met, that kind of thing, but events like wars
and rebellions and pirate attacks. I mean, I'm engine having
time for that. I mean, I think I would make
time to write about a pirate attack that would that
would warrant an entry for sure. So our subject today,
evlah Chellaby is a seventeenth century Ottoman gentleman, and he's
(02:14):
considered by many people to be one of the world's
greatest travelers and by extension, one of the world's greatest
travel writers. He kept a two thousand, four hundred folio
record of his journeys. He called it the Saya Hotnomy,
or a Book of Travels, and it's the longest travel
account in Islamic literature, maybe even the longest travel account
(02:34):
in the world. And from about age thirty until his
death in his seventies, Evlah was on the move, and
for as long as he traveled, he kept on writing,
covering his journeys across rivers of ice in the far
northern reaches of the Ottoman Empire, to the Sahara Desert
and the Nile River in the south. And because Evlah
went to places that many others didn't even bother to
(02:54):
visit or at least document, his record has become a
key source for archaeologists, joag graffers, and cultural historians. And
that's why, in addition to discussing high points from Evliah's
remarkable travels, we're also going to talk about the strange
history of the Seahotana May, which, at nearly four hundred
years old, is only now becoming an item of world interest.
(03:16):
But before we get to that, there's the matter of
Evliah's home bound years. Of course, he didn't start traveling
until he was about thirty. So we mentioned Evliah was
a gentleman, and in fact, his name Chellaby means gentleman,
so appropriately enough. He grew up in the cultured atmosphere
of the Ottoman court, where his father was the Sultan's
chief goldsmith, and his mother was an Abcasian, possibly a
(03:39):
slave girl given to the goldsmith in marriage by the Sultan,
who told him, grand Aga, you're an old man, but
God willing from this maiden you will have an angel
like world adorning son. And sure enough, Evliah was born
nine months ten days after that in sixteen eleven in
istanbul And, and he started his education as other children
(04:03):
of his class would have, at the Madressa, which was
Arabic school, where he would have learned to recite the
Koran become a prayer caller, and he would have also
studied languages to Turkish, Persian, Arabic plus Greek and Latin,
and stories of Roman emperors and Alexander the Great that
he picked up from the non Muslims who worked in
(04:24):
his father's gold shop. And when he wasn't studying, Eliah
still learned in a different way. He roamed a standbull,
watching artisans, exploring mosques, and occasionally even attending court with
his father. By his teens, Eliot could recite the entire
Koran from memory. This took him about eight hours to do,
and he'd do it every single Thursday, and he said
(04:46):
he was proud to have maintained this tradition through his life.
It was during one of those restations, in fact, that
he got kind of his big break in a sense.
During a recital, Elia was summoned by the reigning Sultan
Murad the Fourth, who to him how long his recitations took.
And eight hours must have seemed like a really good
answer to him, because the Sultan essentially then told him
(05:08):
that they were going to be friends. Okay, so what
does being friends with the sultan really entail to me?
It sounds a bit like pursuing a higher education. Because ever,
Leo was soon set up with a tutor, a calligraphy master,
a spiritual advisor, a music teacher for music and singing,
a grammar instructor, plus his old master for continued Koran studies.
(05:32):
And so his job essentially became to read and write,
you know, study during the day and night, refine his
manners dressed nicely and recite entertaining things for the Sultan,
really showing off his learning, and he he gives a
sampling of what this usually involved in his book of Travels,
he recounts an early meeting where he asked the Sultan, look,
(05:54):
I will what exactly do you want to hear me recite?
You know, literature? I can do Persian, Arabic, Turkish, Hebrew, Syriac, Greek,
maybe a medley of musical forms, maybe a selection of
different kinds of verse poetry. The Sultan actually even calls
him out on showing off so much, because in between
cataloging all this knowledge, this huge platter of things he
(06:17):
can recite for the Sultan, he throwing puns and make
witty remarks, some of them kind of risque, and polished
the whole performance off by somersaulting out of the room.
I mean, this kid, this kid knew how to put
on a show for sure. So his next two years
at court involved lots of study, beautiful books, calligraphy practice,
and those audiences with the Sultan and fancy presence as well.
(06:41):
A silver ink pot studded with jewels wasn't one notable
one and also a writing board inlaid with mother of pearl.
Good accessories for the scholar. Yeah, a gem encrusted back scratcher,
that's a bonus, So handy. But he became especially valued
when we're of the fourth was feeling down, since he
could crack him up with as near constant jokes. Courtiers
(07:02):
would hurry evliah In and Muraud would say, quote, look,
the dispeller of woe has arrived. Sometimes his duties would
be a little more solemn, Koran recitations, leading calls to prayer,
singing sad songs, things like that. Others were more outrageous,
such as supervising the Sultan's wrestling matches and avoiding vomiting
(07:23):
on the Sultan when he'd pick him up and spin
him around, which sounds pretty nerve racking, not something you'd
want to do to the Sultan, so it seems like
with such a prestigious position, though minus the spinning of course. Ever,
Leo would really enjoy every moment spent in his hometown
of Istanbul and at the palace, But from about age
(07:44):
twenty onward he was itching to get away. He wanted
to get outside of the city. He had only visited
towns just outside of the city walls. So to make
up for that, since he didn't have travel magazine studied,
he'd quiz dervishes about their travels and learn about the
seven climbs, the four quarters of the Earth. Really just
um make the travel bug he already had really even
(08:07):
more intense ready to go. In addition to his court connection,
Evliah had family pressures keeping him at home though as well.
In an early book he wonders quote how to get
free of pressure from mother and father and teacher and brother.
(08:29):
I think that's probably a sentiment a lot of people
can relate to. It must have been on his mind
a lot, because when Elia was in his early twenties,
he had a dream, but not just a dream. It
was a dream of vision, which appears sometimes in podcasts
they do they've popped up recently, I feel like now
and again. But in this particular dream, he found himself
with early Islamic saints and the prophet Mohammed, who asked
(08:53):
Evlia to call the morning prayer. After he was done,
Eliah went back before the prophet to ask for shaffat,
or intercession, but messed up and asked instead for a
similar sounding word in Ottoman Turkish say a hot or travel,
so Mohammed promises him both, plus visits to the tombs
(09:13):
of saints and prophets, which do end up coming along
with his later travel. So according to the Ottoman historian
Caroline Finkel, this type of dream vision is a common
occurrence of literature from this time and when that Evilia
himself used in later accounts of his travels. But she
also notes that in this case he sounds especially genuine,
(09:34):
like it really was a life changing moment for him,
not that he woke up from his dream and started packing,
though it still took about ten years before Elia could
get away uh the first time, accompanied by a friend
visiting nearby Borsa, and on the trip back home, he
decided not to tell his folks, but to set out
(09:56):
again and head off to the north Anatolian coast um
to to tour that rage in a little bit. Since
he was traveling with a newly appointed governor, this also
started a trend of journeying and the entourage of various
public officials, so he'd serve various functions along the way,
including things like prayer caller, tax collector, courier, envoy, customs clerk,
(10:17):
even a mom Basically anything that allowed him to tour
with a retinue or run specific errands to places that
he was interested in. Imagine a more practical version of
his work for the Sultan, and that's kind of what
it was. Yeah, and it afforded him not only free
travel of course, a job that it goes along with traveling,
but a certain amount of protection to You've got to
(10:38):
imagine bandits in the woods and rebels and pirates. Of course,
as we've already mentioned, they were traveling with a group
like this would have been a safer way to go.
So Everiot eventually began calling himself despite all those other
professions to lean and just rattled off world traveler and
boon companion to mankind, which I think sums him up
(11:00):
pretty well. It does. Many of his journeys were in
the company of his mother's kinsman, the one time Grand
Vizier Melik Ahmed Pasha, and they traveled to modern Ukraine, Sophia, Iran, Iraq, Transylvania,
while Akia and mal Davia, Poland Bosnia, just a lot
of places all over the place. And Evila's range also
(11:23):
starts to sound more impressive when you consider he was
usually taking the hard away on these travels on horseback.
After a six forty one shipwreck in the Black Sea,
um he was kind of put off sea travel and
completely all of his expeditions were overland. When he finally
hopped on a boat about thirty years later attempting to
(11:43):
visit Cyprus, he was quickly rewarded with that pirate attack
that we mentioned before, so it turned out that sea
travel was just not for him. Out of commission for
all sea travel, and after Melik Ahmed died in sixteen
sixty two, evilah no longer had this May Jr. Patron
this man who he was mostly traveling with. But according
(12:03):
to Caroline Finkel's article on him in History Today, he
also didn't have anything stopping him anymore from going exactly
where he pleased. So he ended up going to work
as a cavalryman and serving in several major engagements before
taking part in a really notable peace mission to Vienna
which established a twenty year truce between the Habsburgs and
the Ottomans. And everley Is account of his trip to
(12:27):
Vienna is really one of the best love parts of
the Book of Travels because it's so full of both
day to day beauties and the horrors of the seventeenth century. Yeah.
For example, he's impressed by the organ at St. Stephen's
and notes that it quote fills the lungs with blood
and the eyes with tears. But he's also really taken
(12:47):
by an operation to remove a bullet from a man's
head and the doctrine that he himself receives to stabilize
three teeth that had been hit by a javelin. And
he's kind of scandalized by social customs he sees when
he's in Vienna, for instance, men and women socializing together
in public, women socializing without their husband's present. But at
(13:08):
the same time, even though this clearly disturbs him, he
finds no problems talking with and even befriending individual European.
So after this epic trip to Vienna, Evliah moved up
to Krimea, up the Volga to Kazan, and then briefly
back to Istanbul. These trips back to Istanbul are really
(13:28):
really short and um come with large spans of travel
in between. By sixteen sixty eight he visited Greece. This
is another really famous part of the book of Travels
because he described the Parthenon, which was then functioning as
a mosque. And the reason why this account is so
particularly important and why the detail is so valued, is
(13:49):
because just about twenty years after Evlas saw the Parthenon,
the building was of course blown up when a cannon
ignited and Ottoman munition stump. I mean, some it's easy
to forget that be ruined Parthenon didn't used to be
quite as ruined as it is today. In sixteen sixty
nine he saw the Ottomans take a Cretan fortress after
(14:10):
a twenty one year siege, and he had the honor
of calling the first prayer there. And then in sixteen
seventy one, at about age sixty, he embarked on his
pilgrimage to Mecca, again, dreaming of blessings, and this time
from his father and his former teacher. And it's interesting
too he did, I mean, of course, for a man
who traveled so much and who was so devout, it
(14:30):
seems like he would have tried to get to Mecca
earlier in his life. He did try to go, he
had events waylay him. So this was a real lifetime
goal to finally be making it to Mecca. And when
he did it he went with three companions, eight servants,
and fifteen Arabian horses. So Ellie ended up spending twice
the time that a normal trip from Istanbul to Mecca
(14:51):
would take to get After his pilgrimage, evil Is settled
in Cairo, surveyed the city, and made a short attempt
to find the source of the Nine. But he died
around sixty four, likely in Cairo, though the exact date
and location are still unknown. Okay, so now that we've
covered in brief, of course every is forty years of travel.
(15:12):
What did he have to say about all these places?
What mide? What he had to say so unique in
the first place, and to a certain extent his work
is fairly formulaic. In towns or cities. He'll write about topography, fortifications, monuments,
you know, what you might expect from a newcomer to
a town. But he'll also talk about dress and cuisine, occupations,
(15:33):
class structure, medicine, naming, customs, speech, literature, hygiene, which, by
the way, he was really pretty into. He had his
slaves at one point clean out a public bath house
for the benefit of the people. He just thought it
was too gross. And then in the countryside he sort
of stuck to a formula to kind of the in
between parts of his travel. After all, and you'd talk
(15:55):
about the landscape, how long it took to get somewhere,
the direction he was, had it in any high points
like saints tombs along the way. But and this is
the important part with all the cataloging, usually comes an anecdote,
(16:17):
a conversation he has with a local authority or a legend.
In many cases, his is the only record of notable
people or strange customs in a given area because other
people just didn't write it down. And like any good
travel writers, some of the neatest examples of anecdotes have
to do with one of our favorite things, food writing.
(16:38):
So for instance, he broods over whether it's religiously acceptable
to eat horse meat with Tatars and um questions that
a bit. And another funny example, he assumes that it's
probably okay to eat giraffe meat with the people in Sudan.
He actually writes, God willing it is permitted, I have
not found a discussion of it in the sore this.
(17:00):
He also claims to have found practicing cannibals among the Colmics,
who are Western Mongols who he says would eat their
dead to honor them, and perhaps most memorably, he talks
about a Cirkashian village custom of entering a dead body
in a wooden box in a hollow tree. So if
the bees made honey, that meant that the soul would
go to heaven. But unfortunately for Evlah, he experiences this
(17:23):
tradition firsthand after he accepts some rather hairy honey from
a local and ends up learning that it's honey from
a hive that was built on a dead man's crotch.
He has an appropriately freaking out kind of reaction to
learning this, But Eveleah Chelloby biographer Robert Dankoff also notes
that the further out on the frontier Evela gets, the
(17:46):
more remarkable his stories. And I mean, I don't know
if we should consider the cannibals and the honey ones
kind of in that end of the spectrum. But some
of the things that sound really shocking are of course true.
He talks about female circumcision, for instance, but others are
clearly made up. He includes fake trips to Western Europe
ones with ridiculously short timelines, especially considering Evlia and what
(18:10):
we can already assume about how he preferred to travel,
which was leisurely. Um, and then also folk tales that
are obviously not true and they're presented as fact. And
I think this is interesting though, according to Dankov, wasn't
like Evly was trying to pull one over on his readers.
He suggests that the readers would have immediately recognized these
(18:30):
as fiction, just like modern readers would, and they were
really just included to entertain something that doesn't exactly fit.
I guess with our notions of travel writing today, you
don't want to just make things up. But I like
it too. Something about that appeals to me. Yeah, well,
I feel like nowadays people want to know, They really
want to know whether this is journalistic, is it true,
(18:53):
or is it something that it has to fall in
either camp? But the combination of the two does sound
sort interesting. So, considering the importance of the Book of
Travels as a geographic document, a cultural archive, and just
a bounty of really well told stories, you'd figure it
would be widely available. But that is not the case.
(19:15):
Though every is certainly considered an audience in his writing,
likely people who were well off, educated ottomans like himself.
That's really not how it went down. After his death,
the manuscript stayed in private collections in Cairo until seventy two,
when it was given to the Chief Black Unuch, who
was one of the highest officials at Ottoman court, and
he realized that it was pure gold and ordered up
(19:38):
more copies of it right away. Excerts of these copies
were eventually printed in Ottoman Turkish now, which is kind
of like Middle English for modern Turkish sepparently pretty impossible
to read for anybody but scholars exactly, and it was
translated into English as well, so the Book of Travels
became known for Book one, which surveys is stand But
(20:00):
the document as a whole was considered pretty much unimportant,
not worth translating the whole thing, So by the late
eighteen hundreds it was printed in its entirety, but at
that point the Sultan considered some parts too too risky
and had large sections censored, and that was really the
only thing that people had to work with for about
(20:21):
a century. Finally, in the mid nineteen nineties it was
transcribed in its entirety into modern Turkish. Still they're only
extracts available in English. I mean, when I first learned
about this guy. I immediately checked my library expecting to
be able to find a copy, and then I learned,
like good luck. But another hold up with people, I
(20:41):
guess studying the whole manuscript, studying the whole piece of
literature is it's really huge. And his biography of Evliah,
Robert Dankoff writes that quote the gigantic scope of the
work has deterred investigators from analyzing its structure beyond a
mere enumeration of its basic contents. Character is Stickally, scholars
have approached the say a hootanomy, as though it were
(21:03):
a huge mind with numerous unconnected passageways. So what I
take away from this is that because it does have
so many relevant details to very specific areas of study,
like botany or food in um, I don't know, the
Ukraine or something like that, people will go in and
(21:23):
look for what concerns their own work and not really
consider the whole work and the life behind it. But
times are changing and Evla is kind of on his
way up. He was named a UNESCO Man of the
Year in two thousand eleven, and a trail through western
Turkey now follows the first stage of his six seventy
one pilgrimage, and it's meant to encourage historic and natural preservation,
(21:47):
promote sustainable tourism, and also to advanced indigenous horse breeds.
Since it's the horse trail, it's called the Evla Chellaby Way.
And I think you listen to recording of a talk
given by Caroline think about this, right. Yeah. It was
a talk given at the Royal Asiatic Society, and she
said that when she was scouting out this trail, you know,
(22:08):
trying to establish it with a group of other interested people,
they found that a lot of the local folks along
the way not only still knew who EVERLEA. Chellaby was,
but still knew what he had written about their villages,
you know, four hundred years earlier. It reminded me, I
don't know, maybe the best comparison we could make would
be Lewis and Clark or something, knowing about the region
(22:29):
they passed through, if you still live in that region.
But this is four hundred years ago, which definitely puts
a puts a spin on the whole thing. It's pretty amazing.
I have one final point to I want to make
about travel writing in general. I was trying to think
about what makes good travel writing. We've already established that
we can't even keep you know, a week of journals
when we go on vacations. But I do like reading
(22:52):
travel writing, and I think that really strong travel writing
usually does have all of those details, but has a
strong enough presence behind it that somehow it all feels
unified without feeling like, oh, I'm just reading about what
this person is thinking and going through. What appeals to
you about good travel writing, Well, it makes me kind
(23:12):
of think about what we were saying about Evliah. I mean,
what really appeals to me is when a person becomes
a part of a place. They're not just observing and
you know, telling you what they're seeing and what they're
tasting and whatever they're doing. They're talking to people and
not just talking to people, but maybe becoming friends with
the people, um, you know, forming relationships with them, and
(23:32):
really becoming immersed in the culture. Because I think, um,
you know, that's what makes a really good trip. That's
what really makes me want to go on a trip,
as knowing like, hey, it could become part of this
place and this is what it's really like. Well, and
that kind of writing is what sets a good travel
narrative apart from just a guide book or something where
it's just telling you what you need to go see,
(23:53):
there's no personality behind it. And I think one of
the reasons why Evliah is such a strong travel writer
and while why he is so appealing after all these years,
is that even though he was very, you know, an
elite man. He was well off, well educated, he was
uh devoted to his empire, but he stayed pretty open
minded during his travels. I mean, he would include stereotypes,
(24:17):
but like I said earlier, he was willing to go
meet people and talk to people and um talk to
the average people too, and find out what they were doing.
He didn't let it stop him from from really experiencing
a place, and he knew how to describe things. He's
known for comparing things to vegetables, for instance, when everyone
can run, but something everyone can relate to exactly, even
(24:40):
four dred years later. Thank you so much for joining
us on this Saturday. If you have heard an email
address or a Facebook you are l or something similar
over the course of today's episode, since it is from
the archive that might be out of date now, you
can email us at History Podcast at how Stuff works
(25:02):
dot com and you can find us all over social
media at missed in History. And you can subscribe to
our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the I Heart
Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. For
more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how
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