The Book of Travels

Forty years in the saddle, all over the Ottoman Empire and beyond, from Vienna to Mecca, from the Caucasus to the Nile: Evliya Çelebi was a true globetrotter. Klaus Kreiser, in this first ever translation into German, offers us a colourful selection from ‘The Book of Travels’, whose sometimes realistic, sometimes fantastical and exaggerated descriptions of cities, fortresses, people, customs and curiosities are still capable of captivating readers to this day.

‘Remarkable discovery of a Turkish travel account,’ wrote the Orientalist scholar Josef von Hammer in 1814. He was talking about the ‘Seyahatname’ – ‘The Book of Travels’ – by Evliya Çelebi, which has been of great interest to researchers ever since. The enlightened traveller from Istanbul, with his insatiable curiosity, visited most of the provinces and hundreds of the cities of the Ottoman Empire and its neighbours, and described them in an entertaining and meticulously detailed way. He returned from Mecca and Medina as a haji. He stood on the walls of Crete as a muezzin during the war against the Venetians. In the same role he accompanied the Ottoman legation to Vienna in 1664, and his account of the trip paints a gorgeous, in places satirical, panorama of the city and its Kaiser. His description of Egypt is on a par with Napoleon’s ‘Description de l’Égypte’. Klaus Kreiser’s careful selection from the vast treasure trove of ‘The Book of Travels’ is drawn from all ten volumes, and gives an expert overview of the greatest travel account of the 17^th century if not the whole of world literature.

*‘Praise be to Allah that we can eat. The abstemious infidels do, however, have incredible scholarship.’ Evliya Çelebi after his visit to Vienna

*The 17^th-century world from the point of view of a Muslim

*One of the greatest travel accounts in world literature

*Fully accessible in German for the first time

*Sensitively translated and knowledgeably annotated by a leading expert