Evliya Çelebi is the greatest travel writer of the Ottoman Empire. Born in Istanbul in 1611, he started travelling in 1640 and continued for over forty years, stopping eventually in Cairo where he died in about 1685. He collected his lively and eclectic observations into a ten-volume manuscript the Seyahatname, or Book of Travels. For the first time in English, this selection gives a taste of the breadth of Evliya’s interests: from architecture to natural history, through religion, politics, linguistics, music, science and the supernatural. While he made over a thousand complete recitations of the Koran in his lifetime, he also wrote with curiosity about Christianity, about his own impotence, about the antics at a world convention of trapeze artists and the feats of a Kurdish sorcerer who conjured a horse from a log pile.

Robert Dankoff is Professor Emeritus of Turkish and Islamic Studies at the University of Chicago. His research has concentrated on Central Asian and Ottoman Turkish texts. He has published several books, his most recent being An Ottoman Mentality: The World of Evliya Celebi. Sooyong Kim is Visiting Assistant Professor at Bryn Mawr College. He is currently working on the formation of the Ottoman literary canon in the sixteenth century. Evliya Çelebi is variously described as a Turkish Pepys, a Muslim Montaigne or an Ottoman Herodotus. Born in Istanbul in 1611, he started travelling in 1640 and continued for over forty years, stopping eventually in Cairo where he is thought to have died around 1685. Starting with a volume on his native city, he collected his lively and eclectic observations into a ten-volume manuscript the Seyahatname, or Book of Travels. Virtually unknown to western readers, Çelebi is celebrated in the Islamic world as one of the great travel writers of the world. He has long been a favoured source on the culture and lifestyle of the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire and historians of this period are indebted to his vivid eyewitness descriptions.