Evliya Çelebi in Dalmatia: an Ottoman Traveler’S Encounters with the Arts of the Franks

Chapter 2 Evliya Çelebi in Dalmatia: An Ottoman Traveler’s Encounters with the Arts of the Franks

Cemal Kafadar

Evliya Çelebi (1611–d. after 1683), the Ottoman traveler whose 10 hefty volumes are perhaps the most monumental testament to the genre of travel writing in any language,1 seems to have worried deeply about how one might understand the interconnectedness of the world that imposed itself on the consciousness of thinking people around the globe in the early modern era. It may seem odd to readers today, accustomed to regarding the Balkans as a backwater to world history, that he had a moment of epiphany when he was in Bosnia, of all places. In Sarajevo, specifically, he got carried away, in a “stream of consciousness,” imagining the fluvial links that connect the city to the rest of the world: “the stream that runs through the city of Sarajevo … flows into the river of Saray,” which meets waters arriving from Herzegovina and Croatia before it flows over mountainous terrain into the Sava, which in turn “meets the Danube right beside Belgrade.” The Danube itself, in all its majesty, eventually runs into the Black Sea, and “it is clearer than sunlight” (he obviously had in mind readers in Istanbul, his beloved city of birth) that the Black Sea meets the Mediterranean Sea in Istanbul. The Mediterranean, in turn, flows through the straits of Gibraltar into the “Surrounding Sea,” which meets the larger Ocean “by the order of the Creator of both worlds.” This passage also gives us a good example of his narrative style, which proceeds like an animated movie at times.

1 All 10 volumes of Evliya Çelebi’s travel writings were finally properly edited and published under the title Evliya Çelebi Seyahatnamesi, 10 vols. Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yaynlar, 1996–2007. In this essay, I refer frequently to vol. 5, ed. Yücel Dağlı, Seyit Ali Kahraman, and İbrahim Sezgin; and vol. 6, ed. Seyit Ali Kahraman and Yücel Dağlı. The relevant sections in volume 5 have been published, in German translation with excellent commentary by Helena Turkova, as Die Reisen und Streifzüge Evliya Çelebis in Dalmatien und Bosnien in den Jahren 1659–61. Prague: Orientalische Institut, 1965. A generous selection of parts of the travelogue, including the section on Dubrovnik, can now be found in Robert Dankoff and Sooyong Kim, trans. and eds., An Ottoman Traveller: Selections from the Book of Travels of Evliya Çelebi. London: Eland, 2010.

In a certain sense, this was indeed the center of the world from an Ottoman point of view. Namely, it was the struggle for world dominion (or world har- mony, if you consider the settled and peacefully negotiated circumstances that prevailed for much of the time during the 15th through 17th centuries between the Ottomans and their European counterparts. Kâtip Çelebi (1609–1657), also known as Khadji Khalifa, the prolific and influential savant who managed to fit several works of world history and world geography into his short life noted in his work on the naval wars of the Ottomans that

the people of Islam passed to the European part of the four parts of the world and developed a relation to it only recently. Former rulers, with battles and measures approaching extraordinariness, were able to seize only Bosnia in Rumelia and a portion of Hungary. These mentioned places are at one edge of Europe. Since security on the seas is essential to maintaining and protecting even this much, they paid great attention [to naval affairs] in former times. And now, too, it is important to abandon neglect and to exert serious effort [in that matter].2

It was well understood by at least some intellectuals that Ottoman claims to universal rulership and competition with European rulers in that regard— which would determine the future of the world order—hinged on control over this region. Even in the 20th century, Bosnian self-perception would maintain, with some pride, this notion of the region’s centrality to the Ottoman enterprise. When a team of Homeric and folklore scholars from Harvard went to Yugoslavia between the two world wars in the 20th century to study the oral renditions of long epic poems, having heard of the existence of a living tradition there, they were mesmerized by one raconteur in particular, a certain Avdo, who started one of his tales with this invocation:

Now to you, sirs, who are gathered here I wish to sing the measure of a song, that we may be merry. It is a song of the olden times, of the deeds of

2 Kâtip Çelebi, Tuhfetü’l-kibār fī esfāri’l-bihār, Süleymaniye Library, Esad Efendi ms. 2170, p. 121a. When Hungary and Bosnia are mentioned as part of the same puzzle, it is not because they happened to have been two distinct corners of Europe that the Ottomans came to rule (in part). The link between Hungary and the northwestern corner of the Balkans was a matter of physical as well as political geography: the former is encapsulated in Evliya elebi’s descrip- tion of the waterways and the significance of the Danube; the latter was known to the Ottomans through historical memories, since parts of the region of Serbia/Bosnia/Croatia had been taken from the Hungarians.