Evliya Çelebi was the great traveller of the seventeenth century, a man who spent more than forty years crossing the Ottoman lands and their neighbours and gathered what he saw into the ten volumes of his Seyahatnâme (Book of Travels). Almost everything known about his life comes from his own work; his name surfaces in official records in only a handful of documents. He came to Amasya in 1646 in the suite of Defterdarzâde Mehmed Pasha, who had been appointed governor-general (beylerbey) of Erzurum, and stayed in the city for three days. That short visit left behind a long description that is still consulted for seventeenth-century Amasya: the citadel, the palaces, the water-wheels of the Yeşilırmak, fifty-three quarters, one thousand and sixty shops, madrasas, dervish lodges, pears, quince preserve and the legend of Ferhad and Şirin.

Two years later, in the winter of 1648, he returned to Merzifon with the same pasha's rebel army and stayed in the town for weeks. From Merzifon he twice rode to Köprü (Vezirköprü) and back, and in the Pîr Dede lodge, among the dervishes, he placed the crown of Pîr Dede on his own head. The Amasya and Merzifon sections in the second book of the Seyahatnâme are the fruit of these two journeys, and, as throughout the work, eyewitness observation, hearsay, figures filled in later and popular legend are woven together in them.

Birth, Family and Upbringing

By his own account he was born in Istanbul, at Unkapanı, on 10 Muharram 1020 (25 March 1611). His full and real name is not known; the name Evliya Çelebi is thought to be a sobriquet taken from his teacher, İmam Evliya Mehmed Efendi. His father was Derviş Mehmed Zıllî Efendi, chief goldsmith of the imperial palace. Evliya relates that his father took part in the conquest of Cyprus and presented the keys of Famagusta, that in the reign of Ahmed I he made the waterspouts of the Kaaba and carried them to the Hijaz, and that he worked on the ornament of the doors and windows of the Sultan Ahmed Mosque. He traced his family to the Germiyanids and to the line of Ahmed Yesevî, and said that his ancestors had lived in the Zereğen quarter of Kütahya before settling in Istanbul after the conquest. His mother was of Abaza origin and had been brought to the palace in the time of Ahmed I. Through her he was related to Melek Ahmed Pasha, Defterdarzâde Mehmed Pasha and İpşir Mustafa Pasha, and these kinships largely shaped the course of his life.

He studied for some seven years at the madrasa of Şeyhülislâm Hâmid Efendi, memorised the Qur'an under his teacher Evliya Mehmed Efendi and learned calligraphy from his father. His fine voice earned him a musical training. Through Silahdar Melek Ahmed Agha and other notables he was presented to Murad IV, entered the Privy Larder by the sultan's order and studied calligraphy, music, grammar and Qur'anic recitation in the palace school. By his own account he was often in the sultan's presence, entertaining him with witticisms. After four years in the palace school he was passed out into the sipahi corps with a stipend of forty akçe. He never married; his work shows him as a good horseman and javelin player, a lively talker and wit who got on well with everyone.

The Dream and the First Journeys

Evliya traced his travels to a dream he had on the night of Ashura in Muharram 1040 (19 August 1630). In it he saw the Prophet at the Ahî Çelebi Mosque near the Yemiş landing; as he kissed his hand, meaning to say "Intercession, O Messenger of God," his tongue slipped and he said "Travel, O Messenger of God." The Prophet granted him intercession, travel and pilgrimage. Abdullah Dede, sheikh of the Kasımpaşa Mevlevi lodge, interpreted the dream and advised him to begin by describing the city of his birth. So Evliya began walking Istanbul quarter by quarter, gathering information in gatherings, coffeehouses and taverns. The first volume of the work is the product of these Istanbul wanderings.

His first journey outside Istanbul was to Bursa in 1640. He went without his father's leave, and on his return his father gave him leave to travel and urged him to write a travel book. In the same year, when Ketenci Ömer Pasha was appointed governor of Trabzon, he sailed there; the ship called at Black Sea ports such as Amasra, Sinop and Samsun. He then joined the campaign to recover the fortress of Azak (1641) and wintered at Bahçesaray in the Crimea. On the way back from the Crimea his ship nearly foundered in a storm; shaken by the experience, he stayed home for about four years and resolved to make his later journeys overland wherever he could. In 1645 he joined Yûsuf Pasha's army on the Cretan campaign and witnessed the conquest of Chania.

Forty Years in the Suites of Pashas

Although he knew many men of state, Evliya never chased an office; to ease his travels he took on errands such as carrying letters, registering villages or collecting taxes, and usually travelled in the suite of a pasha or with an embassy. In 1646, when Defterdarzâde Mehmed Pasha was appointed governor-general of Erzurum, he joined him as muezzin and companion; he had also been given a clerkship at the Erzurum customs house. On this assignment he crossed Anatolia from end to end and travelled as far as Tabriz, Baku, Tiflis and Erivan. When Defterdarzâde joined the revolt of Varvar Ali Pasha, Evliya came back across Anatolia with the rebel army in the winter of 1648; he recorded Varvar Ali Pasha's defeat by İpşir Mustafa Pasha and his death.

In August 1648 he went to Syria with Murtaza Pasha, governor-general of Damascus, and after the pasha's transfer to Sivas he toured central and eastern Anatolia, returning to Istanbul in 1650. That year his kinsman Melek Ahmed Pasha became grand vizier, a turning point in his life. As one of the grand vizier's closest men he saw the inner workings of affairs of state at first hand and wrote about them without reserve. He stayed at Melek Ahmed Pasha's side through his governorships of Özü, Rumelia, Van, Bosnia and Rumelia again, and so came to be called "Melek Ahmed Pasha's man." He took part in the campaign against Rákóczi in 1657, in the Crimean khan's raids against the Russians and Cossacks, in the Moldavian campaign of 1659 and in the Transylvanian campaign of 1661.

In 1663 he was on Fazıl Ahmed Pasha's Austrian campaign and saw the conquest of Uyvar (Nové Zámky) and the battle of the Raab. In 1665 he went to Vienna in the suite of the envoy Kara Mehmed Pasha; a document in the Austrian archives shows that he served in this embassy as muezzin. He writes that from Vienna, with the emperor's permission, he travelled to Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Holland and France, but the brief, formulaic information he gives about these places suggests a journey he planned and never made. He then returned by way of the Crimea and the Caucasus, crossed to Crete in 1668 to witness the last phase of the siege of Candia, toured the Morea and Albania, and was back in Istanbul in December 1670.

Pilgrimage, Egypt and the Last Years

In May 1671, again after a dream, he set out for the pilgrimage with his friend Sâilî Çelebi, three companions and eight slaves. For the first time he was starting a long journey with his own small party rather than attached to a caravan. He went by Bursa, Kütahya and Afyon to İzmir, crossed to Chios, Samos and Rhodes, toured southern Anatolia, Adana, Maraş and Ayıntab, came down into Syria and joined the pilgrim caravan at Damascus. After the pilgrimage he went on to Egypt and also saw the Sudan and Abyssinia. He stayed in Egypt for more than ten years and wrote his work there, drawing on the notes he had kept since his youth. The tenth volume of the Seyahatnâme is devoted to Egypt and breaks off abruptly, unfinished.

The date and place of his death are not known for certain. M. Cavid Baysun first proposed a date around 1682, then corrected himself, writing that Evliya lived to see the second siege of Vienna and was still alive in 1095 (1684). It has also been claimed that he returned from Egypt to Istanbul, died there and was buried in the family graveyard; this claim is not supported by documents.

The Seyahatnâme

The original title of the work is Târîh-i Seyyâh Evliyâ Efendi; some copies call it Târîh-i Seyyâh. The volumes follow the order of the journeys: the first is devoted to Istanbul and the tenth to Cairo, and these two cities frame the whole. The second volume describes Black Sea cities such as Bursa, İzmit, Amasra, Sinop, Samsun and Trabzon, together with Georgia, the Cretan campaign, Düzce, Bolu, Gerede, Amasya, Niksar, Erzurum, Merzifon and Çorum. The traveller describes every city according to a set scheme: administrative status, citadel and a short history, the Ottoman conquest, quarters, the origin of the name, mosques and masjids, madrasas, the learning of the people, khans, dervish lodges, bathhouses, market and crafts, dress, food and drink, climate, promenades and, last of all, places of pilgrimage. He sets particular store by figures; some are his own findings, some come from local people or records, and some were left blank to be filled in later.

The Seyahatnâme is also its author's memoir. Evliya tells of the battles he fought in, the people he met, his conversations with them, his fears and joys; here and there he mimics and mocks, and his taste for "wonders and marvels" leads him to tell a story he had heard as though he had lived it himself. He uses written sources, named and unnamed, sometimes repeating a source's sentences with only a few words changed. Errors of transmission and contradictions are frequent. At the same time his record of words and phrases from Anatolian dialects and from some thirty foreign languages, and his rendering of the spoken language of the seventeenth century, make the work indispensable for the history of the language as well.

The oldest manuscripts, whose status as the author's own copy is disputed, are in the Topkapı Palace Museum Library; volumes one and two are Bağdat Köşkü 304. The manuscripts were sent from Egypt in 1742 to the Chief Black Eunuch Hacı Beşir Agha, who had them copied. The first to introduce the work to the West was Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, who announced it in 1814 and translated the first volume and part of the second into English in abridged form (1834-1850). The first printed editions, begun by Ahmed Cevdet in 1314-1318 (1896-1900), are full of censorship cuts, omissions and typesetting errors. A reliable text edition of the whole work was completed by Yapı Kredi Yayınları between 1996 and 2007; the second volume was prepared by Zekeriya Kurşun, Seyit Ali Kahraman and Yücel Dağlı. The Seyahatnâme manuscripts in the Topkapı and Süleymaniye libraries were inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World Register in 2013.

1646: Arrival in Amasya

After receiving the patent of the Erzurum governorship from Sultan İbrahim's hand, Defterdarzâde Mehmed Pasha spent about a month preparing at Üsküdar and then set out east with his large suite along the middle branch of the courier road. This branch ran by Gebze and Bolu to Merzifon, and from there to Amasya and Tokat. In Evliya's account the party visited the tomb of Koyun Baba at Osmancık, crossed the Kızılırmak by the nineteen-arched bridge of Bayezid II, turned west and climbed the pass of Direklibel. The road was choked with stones; the pasha dismounted and threw them over the precipice with his own hands, and the four hundred men of his suite followed his example and cleared the way. Nine hours from Osmancık they reached the ruined village of Hacıköy on the border of the sanjak of Amasya, then the plain of Merzifon, and after eight more hours "the mountain town" of Amasya.

The description of Amasya in the Seyahatnâme belongs to this journey; in the manuscript the folio describing the city follows directly on the passage through Tosya and Osmancık. Some popular publications place the Amasya visit in 1640. The 1640 journey, however, was made by sea to the Black Sea ports, and the Amasya description in the Seyahatnâme plainly stands within the narrative of the 1646 Erzurum journey. The party stayed three days in the city; on the third day the trumpets of departure sounded, Evliya took leave of his friends, crossed the Çengellibel hills the same day, reached the Kanlıpınar station in six hours and went on towards Niksar.

Amasya in the Seyahatnâme

The Amasya section follows the order Evliya kept for every major city. For a long time Western readers knew it from Hammer's English translation of 1850. The second book of that translation is abridged in places, and some figures and names were filled in by the translator's conjecture; for this reason some numbers may appear differently in the Turkish edition.

History and Administration

Evliya writes that Amasya was founded by the Amalekites, or, according to another tradition, by Ferhad the mountain-cutter. He relates that the city was taken in 476 (1083) by the Danishmendid Melik Gazi, that the princes of Azerbaijan besieged it repeatedly without success, that it passed from the Danishmendids to the Seljuks, and that Bayezid I took it and made his son İsa Çelebi governor. He mentions coins struck in the name of Amasya in pure silver from three mines in the area. In the organisation of Mehmed II (the Conqueror) Amasya was the seat of a sanjak governor and was sometimes granted to three-tailed viziers as a benefice. According to the law code, the pasha's crown fief amounted to two hundred thousand akçe; the sanjak held nineteen zeamets and forty-two timars, with an alaybeyi and a çeribaşı, and the fief-holders with their armed retainers numbered three thousand men. The qadi held the rank of three hundred akçe. Among the districts of the sanjak Evliya names Köprü, Zeytun, Gümüş, Merzifon and Lâdik; the statement that the sanjak had nine districts in the mid-seventeenth century is also his.

The Citadel

Evliya's description of the Harşena citadel is one of the liveliest passages of the Amasya section. He writes that the towers on the mountain tops were usually veiled in cloud and that the finials of the mosques and the roofs of the houses showed only at noon. According to Hammer's translation the circuit of the citadel was nine thousand and sixty paces; it was a pentagon with forty-one towers and eight hundred battlements. Inside were magazines, cisterns and a stepped way cut in the rock leading down to the water; there was no market or bazaar. It had four iron gates facing east, a mosque built by Bayezid I, a dungeon as deep as the pit of hell and seventy cannon of no great calibre, for it was not a frontier fortress. Six caverns in the rock were where the rich of the city had hidden their valuables during the revolts of Karayazıcı and Kara Said. The traveller also tells how Timur besieged the citadel for seven months and withdrew; this account rests on local tradition.

He names the three gates of the lower citadel on the river: the Karanlık (Dark) Gate, the Maydanos Gate and the west-facing Meydan Gate. From the Meydan Gate a great bridge led across to the Gökmedrese side; another gate led over a wooden bridge to the Garipler Mosque. His statement that the citadel held a mosque in the name of Bayezid I, powder magazines, a granary and cisterns is repeated, on his authority, in studies of the urban history of Amasya.

The Yeşilırmak, Bridges and Water-Wheels

Evliya calls the river the Tozanlı. He writes that it rises in the mountains above Tokat, passes Turhal and the Ferhad gorge and reaches Amasya, where, opposite the great stone bridge, it is joined by the Çekerek, which comes from the lake of Lâdik and from Suluova. Because it flows from Tokat to Amasya, he says, people had a saying about it to the effect that "Tokat muddies it and Amasya drinks it." Below Amasya it takes the name Çarşamba water and, gathering seven more rivers, enters the sea beside Samsun. The city is built on both banks and on the hills along the river; a bridge worth seeing, built by Sultan Bayezid, joins the two sides. Flowing from south to north, the river turns many mills and water-wheels, and Evliya ranks the wheels of Amasya with those of Hama and Adana.

Quarters, Palaces and Mosques

According to Evliya the city was divided into fifty-three quarters, forty-eight Muslim and five Christian, with five thousand houses besides the palaces. The number of quarters agrees closely with the archival record: the first survey of 1520 registers forty-eight Muslim and four non-Muslim quarters. The number of houses, by contrast, is far above the population estimates drawn from the survey registers.

The sultan's palace stands on the river bank, surrounded by pleasant gardens, rare trees and sitting places; a master gardener and fifty gardeners in yellow caps tend the garden. Mehmed Pasha's palace is beside his mosque, and the palace of Sultan Bayezid lies inside the citadel. Evliya gives the total of mosques and masjids in the city as somewhat over two hundred (two hundred and forty in Hammer's translation) and names nine mosques and twenty masjids. First comes the Mosque of Bayezid II: Evliya tells how Bayezid in his youth was governor first of Trabzon and then of Amasya, how, on his father's death, he never forgot that he had come to the throne at Amasya, exempted its people from taxes and built this mosque. According to the chronogram over the gate opposite the qibla, the mosque was built in 892 (1486); it has two minarets and a fountain for ablutions in the middle of its courtyard, and its mihrab, minbar and muezzins' gallery are of fine workmanship.

Among the other mosques he lists are the Küçük Ağa Mosque facing the Çekerek, the lead-roofed, marble-paved Bayezid Pasha Mosque, the lead-roofed, single-minaret Mehmed Pasha Mosque, the large Hızır İlyas Mosque, the Mahkeme Mosque, built of wood together with its minaret, the Fethiye Mosque, formerly a church and monastery, the mosque of Yörgüç Pasha, vizier of Mehmed I, and the lead-roofed but minaretless Gökmedrese Mosque.

Madrasas, Dervish Lodges and Soup Kitchens

Evliya counts ten madrasas in the city, the most elegant being the Sultan Bayezid Madrasa. He writes that there were nineteen schools of Qur'anic recitation, ten schools of hadith and two hundred primary schools, and that more than three hundred hafızes studied at the Sultan Bayezid recitation school. The best of the forty dervish lodges was the Mevlevi lodge founded in the name of Mevlânâ Celâleddîn-i Rûmî. The most generous of the ten soup kitchens was that of Sultan Bayezid, where all the poor ate twice a day. Of the caravanserais, those of Sultan Bayezid and of Bayram Pasha, vizier of Murad IV, were roofed with lead. The khans had iron gates, and besides the merchants' khans there were khans for single men: these had their own gatekeepers, their gates were shut every night, and whoever came back late was not let in, while those inside could not leave until the gates were opened in the morning.

Market, People and Produce

The market held one thousand and sixty shops and a hundred and sixty kinds of craftsmen; the shops had stone vaults like those of the Bursa market, and the market street was paved with large stone slabs. A covered market (bedesten) with four iron gates was the centre of the city's trade. The figure of one thousand and sixty shops is among the most often cited proofs that Amasya was a lively centre of crafts and commerce in the seventeenth century.

Evliya describes the people of Amasya as merry, jovial, red-cheeked and fresh-faced. He divides them into three classes: the fief-holders and the people of the pasha's household; the learned men, judges, professors, imams, preachers and muezzins; and the merchants and craftsmen. He writes that there were many refined gentlemen in the city who spoke with great eloquence, but that the speech of the common people was harsh. The wealthy wore sable furs and broadcloth cloaks, people of middling means bogasin cotton. The craftsmen, he says, were skilled at every trade, the most famous being the tailors, cotton-fluffers, barbers and confectioners.

The most quoted part of the section is the list of fruit. From the district of Kağla came a kind of wheat that made excellent bread. Amasya grew forty kinds of pear, ruby-coloured cherries, seven kinds of grape and quinces; the famous preserve made from the quinces was sent as a gift to princes. He mentions a musk-scented sherbet of grape must and a quince sherbet, notes their use in medicine and says that some sherbets were sent to Persia. The Amasya apple does not appear on the list; the city's fame for its apples belongs to later centuries.

On the climate, he says that its position in a deep valley on the river bank gave the city mild air and fertile soil, that the windows of the houses faced west and north and that the winters were moderate. He writes that the water Ferhad brought to the city from the mountains opposite was distributed from house to house. He relates that in the time of the Amalekites the river did not run through the city, that Ferhad, the lover of Şirin, cut the mountains like cheese to open its way, and that the traces of this work could still be seen in the mountains west of the city.

Promenades and Places of Pilgrimage

Evliya counts seventy promenades in Amasya. The first is Kanlıpınar, the "Bloody Spring": tradition has it that a wicked old woman brought Ferhad false news here of Şirin's death, and Ferhad threw his axe into the air and hurled himself from the cliff. Ferhad's grave is on the mountain top, and the old woman is buried between him and his beloved; Evliya relates that the thorns and thistles growing on her grave keep apart the flowers that grow on the graves of Ferhad and Şirin.

The list of places of pilgrimage brings together the city's memory of learning and Sufism. He mentions the princes' tombs in the cypress grove but says plainly that he does not know the names of those buried there. He writes that Zekeriyyâ Halvetî, first successor of Pîr İlyas, was buried at Saraçlar. He visits the grave of Abdurrahman b. Hüsameddin (Gümüşlüzâde, pen name Hüsâmî), nephew of Pîr İlyas and a Halveti dervish, in the lodge of Yakub Pasha, and tells of the visit of the three sons of Murad II to the sheikh: two of the princes kissed his hand, but Mehmed kissed his foot, and the sheikh tied the cloth from his own neck around Mehmed's neck and entrusted the Muslims of Constantinople to him. Of the scholars he names Molla Kasım Hatib, Molla Alâeddin, Molla Abdülcebbar Acemî and Molla Abdurrahman b. Ali b. Müeyyed. He writes that Münîrî, whom he calls "the sultan of poets," was born and buried in Amasya, improvised verse in Arabic, Turkish and Persian, and was one of the viziers of Şehzade Ahmed (Prince Ahmed) when the prince governed Amasya. He remembers Mihrî Hatun, of the family of Pîr İlyas, as a lady who knew seventy books by heart, defeated the most learned men in disputation and left a divan of poems and religious treatises.

At the head of the list stands Pîr İlyas. Evliya counts him among the sheikhs of Bayezid I, writes that he went with Timur to Shirvan and returned to Amasya, his birthplace, that he was buried on a height near the city called Suvadiye, and that his tomb and endowments were built by Bayezid II. He relates that strangers and the poor were generously fed there and says that he visited the tomb and completed a full reading of the Qur'an there. The grave of the Mevlevi sheikh Kılıç Arslan in the Mevlevi lodge is also among the places of pilgrimage. Evliya notes that he recited the Yâsîn at each of them, that many other great men lay in the city, but that he had written only of those he had visited.

Winter 1648: A Rebel Army in Merzifon

In 1646 Evliya had only crossed the plain of Merzifon. His detailed description of the town belongs to the winter of 1648. In November 1647 Defterdarzâde Mehmed Pasha decided to join Varvar Ali Pasha's revolt and marched west from Erzurum, recruiting troops as he went and taking Evliya with him. Following the Kelkit valley from Erzincan and Şebinkarahisar, the army came down into the plain of Lâdik in January 1648. The pasha was feasted at Lâdik for three days and then moved on village by village to Merzifon. This march bypassed Amasya, passing through the Havza gap straight to Merzifon.

According to Evliya, Dilaver Agha, armsbearer of Tabanıyassı Mehmed Pasha, entertained the pasha and the fourteen hundred men of his suite at Merzifon for ten days, so lavishly that the pasha's people did not have to provide so much as a nosebag or a cup of coffee. The officers were billeted in the town and lived with their hosts like fathers and sons; four thousand soldiers were quartered in the surrounding villages. Evliya describes the villagers as gentle people who gave freely of what they had.

He writes that the town was founded by the Danishmendids and taken by Bayezid I, that Merzifon was an endowment of Pîr Dede and under the supervision of the Chief Black Eunuch. He counts four thousand tile-roofed houses, forty-four quarters and seventy mihrabs in Merzifon; the oldest is the single-minaret Mosque of Murad II in the market. Hadith is also taught at the Madrasa of Murad II, and there are seventy primary schools and two soup kitchens, one of them in the lodge of Pîr Dede. Around the old bathhouse built by Mehmed I, with more than seventy basins, lived the felt-makers and morocco-leather tanners. Set beside the twenty-eight quarters recorded for Merzifon in an avarız survey made towards the middle of the seventeenth century, Evliya's forty-four quarters suggest round figures based on local information.

At the centre of the Merzifon section stands Pîr Dede. In the legend Evliya relates, Murad II, hearing the slander that Pîr Dede went among the women in the bathhouse and foretold hidden things to them, came to the bath meaning to kill him. Pîr Dede said that he served only women pregnant with great scholars, passed through the stone wall, and kneading two pieces of marble lying before the bath like dough, gave one to Murad and one to his son Mehmed, foretelling the conquest of İzmir to the one and of Constantinople to the other. Evliya writes that the two loaves of white marble were shown set into the wall. In Pîr Dede's lodge two hundred Bektashi dervishes hosted two or three hundred travellers every night. Evliya, "a great friend of dervishes," tells how with their permission he put Pîr Dede's felt crown on his head. The grave of Abdürrahîm Merzifonî, who used the pen name Rûmî in his mystical poems, is also among the places of pilgrimage.

The traveller writes that Merzifon was watered by hundreds of streams and springs coming down from the Tavşan Dağı, that without them the fields gave no crop, and that a special agha was appointed to share out the water, since otherwise the townspeople would kill one another over it. In summer the people went up to the pastures on the Tavşan Dağı. Among the town's products he lists grape must, raisins and the white bread of Pîr Dede; he says that almost all of its six hundred shops belonged to dyers, that the Merzifon dyers produced a blue finer than the Persians', and that its cotton cloth was sent to the Crimea and exchanged for captives. He also notes that Merzifon was fifteen hours from Amasya.

The days at Merzifon were not quiet. Defterdarzâde had sent a messenger to warn Murtaza Pasha, governor of Baghdad; but the messenger was struck by apoplexy on the way, and the palace couriers who set out after him killed Murtaza Pasha at Diyarbekir and brought his head in a box to the Merzifon court. The pasha now began to fear for his own head, raised irregular levies and sent Evliya to Köprülü Mehmed Pasha, who was then at Köprü. By the dates Evliya gives in the Seyahatnâme he left Merzifon on 10 Muharram 1059 (5 February 1648), spent a day at Köprü, came back, and a few days later went again. On his second visit Köprülü Mehmed Pasha had received orders from Istanbul to march against the rebels. Evliya left at once with the men he had recruited and brought the pasha two hundred irregulars.

Tønnes Bekker-Nielsen's study, which compares the manuscript with Hammer's translation, shows that part of Evliya's description of Köprü rests on his own observation, but that his information on places west of Köprü was not seen on the spot and was taken from records he consulted later. According to this study, Hammer's reading, which stretches Evliya's route through Göl, Kargı and Tosya, is mistaken; Evliya made both round trips directly across the Tavşan Dağı. The same study shows that the final stay at Merzifon, which Hammer translates as "ten days," is "twelve days" in the manuscript. Evliya left Merzifon on 27 Muharram (22 February 1648). Passing Murtaza Pasha's farm on the Merzifon plain, the army was caught in a snowstorm, failed to cross the Direklibel pass and had to take refuge at Gümüş (Gümüşhacıköy). There too Evliya recorded the silver mines, the town's thousand houses and its eleven mosques.

The Value of the Amasya Description

Considering that Evliya stayed only three days in Amasya, the density of detail in the section shows his method clearly. The structure of the citadel, the course of the river, the look of the market, the gate rules of the khans and the tombs he visited rest on observation. The law-code figures, the list of districts and the numbers of zeamets and timars, on the other hand, come from a written record; in figures of this kind the Seyahatnâme has been shown to draw on the treatise of Ayn Ali Efendi describing the organisation of the age of Süleyman the Magnificent. The agreement between his number of quarters and the survey registers suggests that the traveller learned some figures from local officials. The numbers of houses and mosques are round and high; the five thousand households Evliya gives can only be used with care when set beside population estimates drawn from the survey registers.

The legends have a value of their own. Ferhad cutting through the mountain to open a way for the river and the water, his death at Kanlıpınar, the thorns on the old woman's grave, the marble loaves of Pîr Dede, Gümüşlüzâde tying his cloth around the neck of the future Conqueror: these are among the oldest written forms of the popular beliefs current in Amasya and Merzifon in the mid-seventeenth century. For this reason the Amasya section of the Seyahatnâme is read as a source that complements the archival documents, both for the physical appearance of the city and for its memory at the time; it gains its full value when its figures are checked against the registers and its legends against local tradition.

Chronology

25 March 1611: Born at Unkapanı in Istanbul (10 Muharram 1020).

19 August 1630: Had the dream he regarded as the cause of his travels.

1640: First journey, to Bursa; then sailed to Trabzon.

1641: Took part in the Azak campaign and wintered in the Crimea.

1645: Witnessed the conquest of Chania on the Cretan campaign.

1646: Stayed three days in Amasya on the way to Erzurum in the suite of Defterdarzâde Mehmed Pasha.

5 February 1648: Rode from Merzifon to Köprü to join Köprülü Mehmed Pasha.

22 February 1648: Left Merzifon with the rebel army.

1650: Returned to Istanbul; Melek Ahmed Pasha became grand vizier.

1665: In Vienna as muezzin of Kara Mehmed Pasha's embassy.

December 1670: Returned to Istanbul from Crete, the Morea and Albania.

May 1671: Set out on the pilgrimage, then settled in Egypt.

1684: Still alive in this year according to Baysun; the date and place of his death are uncertain.

1742: The Seyahatnâme manuscripts were sent from Egypt to Hacı Beşir Agha.

2013: The Seyahatnâme manuscripts were inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World Register.

Bibliography

The following sources were used for this article:

Online sources