Today is the birthday of travel writer Evliya Çelebi (1611-1682)
Forty Years on the Road...
Born on March 25, 1611, in Istanbul, Evliya Çelebi was an OG travel blogger who spent four decades documenting his journeys across three continents. Today, when "travel writing" often means posting sunsets on Instagram with captions limited to "Live, Laugh, Blessed," Evliya Çelebi went big—his "Chronicle of a Traveler," or Seyahatname, stretches over ten volumes and is exactly as ambitious as it sounds.
Evliya noticed everything and seemed determined to write it all down. Bustling markets, bloody battles, quiet mosques, smoky taverns—he chronicled them with honesty, genuine affection, and not a little humor, whether describing aristocrats in Cairo or Balkan shepherds. He opined about architecture and art, food, religion, and languages, even theorizing on linguistic connections, including some surprising similarities between Persian and German (centuries before linguists would formally classify them as Indo-European languages).
Mixing the good, the bad, the ugly, and the sublime, his commentary seems surprisingly modern: Empires are greedy, people suffer, and the powerful rarely notice, but also people are amazing, the world is vast, and around the next corner could very well be the coolest, most amazing thing you have ever seen.
His travelogue wasn't afraid to be brutally honest. He visited Crimea and flat-out called its slave markets horrifying—which, to be clear, they were. He claimed to have met Native Americans in Rotterdam, which sounds unlikely until we remember that Western Europeans were at this time also doing a brisk trade in the intercontinental shipment of human cargo. In fact, Evliya Çelebi's newfound North American friends had some choice words about their "hosts."
Evliya Çelebi was wonderfully complex—religious yet irreverent, scholarly yet earthy, deeply respectful yet quick with a joke. He could recite the Quran from memory yet laughed openly at life's absurdities. Not every observation was profound, not every description was firsthand, and more than a few tales were wildly exaggerated—so I guess, Evliya Çelebi shares a few things in common with modern travel writing. But to read him today is to encounter someone unafraid to wander off-script, embracing the messy humanity behind the façades in the places he visited, and who took the time to write it down for posterity.