Abstract:

Evliya Çelebi’s Seyahatnâme is a highly important work reflecting not only the culture of 17th century Ottoman Empire, but also the cultures of Asian, European and African communities which represent the identities of three big continents. The work is a valuable resource as it guides studies in different branches of human sciences such as history, ethnology/anthropology, sociology and geography. Almost all of the books of travels, which basically reflect a specific era, are significant and valuable. Evliya Çelebi’s Seyahatnâme is especially important as it is more comprehensive and it has a more vivid and interesting narrative. Books of travels have always attracted the attention of scientists as they are reference works that shed light to the history, culture, belief, customs, behavior patterns in an era; they additionally reveal the relationships between different cultures. All of the travelers such as Herodotus, Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus, Captain Cook, İbn-i Battûta and Evliya Çelebi present the readers the opportunity to learn different cultures of the places they visited. All of the books of travels are important references, but there are some important points that should be taken into consideration while analyzing these sources. Reliability is one of these points. Most of the writers in their travel books are naturally members of their cultural tradition, thus reflect their personal viewpoints while “observing” other communities. Some of the travelers preferred to see different cultures and communities on the basis of a complete subjectivity, by representing the state or belief that they were born into. On the other hand, it would be unfair to claim that all of the travelers had negative views about the cultures or communities that they observed. Similarly, it would be naïve to believe that all of the chronicles written by travelers are correct and objectively presented. Evliya Çelebi, who had the opportunity to travel for more than fifty years around different parts of the world, is different from the other travelers as he had objective evaluations about the communities he saw. This common assumption is partially true but when looked into Seyahatnâme carefully, it is seen that Evliya Çelebi is not always “neutral” in his approach about different societies and cultures. For example he used some of words as “The infidels” (kefere), “the kizilbash” (“the red head”, a derogatory term for Alevis and/or Shi’is), “the yezidis”, “ugly-faced” black men, etc. for expressing some “foreign” societies. The goal of this analysis is to demonstrate the discriminative language used by Evliya Çelebi through samples in his works –apart from the importance and value of Seyahatnâme.

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