Evliya's sea battle

The Ottoman Fleet of Tarik-y Bayezid (ink and gold leaf on vellum) 
16th century, which is early for Evliya.

This week, a section from Evliya Çelebi's Setyahatname, about a famous pirate and a battle at sea off Clarentza in 1668. The translation is by Pierre MacKay.  The bolded headings in the   text represent Evliya's red-ink marginal comments on the original manuscript
                                                                        * * * * * *

Departing from [Vostitza], I went for 3 hours southwards to the Kamenítza river, which comes down from the Kalâvryta mountains and flows into the gulf at this spot. It is a small river, and crossing it on horseback, I came to the village of Mustafa Paşa. This is a great bequest trust for the mosque of Mustafa Paşa in Gebze, which is a day's journey away from Üsküdar. The tributary populace is all Albanians. Another 3 hours from there is the

village of Mertéza, which is a zeamet-class fief of the Commander of the Levy for Morea. It tributary populace is all Greeks. This village is at the skirts of the "Black Mountain" of Morea, where all the infidel frigates have little landing places in the forest. They hide here and capture travellers and passers-by, and then sail away. From this village we went into the limitless plain of Gastúni and passed by prosperous villages with mosques,

inns and great houses, and through gardens and orchards like the gardens of Irem, and so came to Glarénza).

Description of the entire castle of Glarénza

It was founded by the Bundukani Venetians. In Greek, Glarénza (Larence) means . . ., and that is the reason for the name.

In the year . . ., it was a conquest of Sultan Beyazid the Saintly, but the conquest was made with great toil and suffering, and since the castle was largely useless he demolished it in several places. Since Patras and Chlemútsi are both close by, he left this castle in ruins although, when it was still standing, the saying goes that on the whole island of Morea there was no stronger nor more thickly populated | fortress. There are huge great pieces of the wall fabric lying about in many places, and it could easily be repaired if there were any occasion for it. It was a stout, five-sided fortress on the seashore with freshwater sources and two harbors where one may lie safe from all eight winds without fear or apprehension. The Algerian privateers, when they are cruising at sea looking for a prey, come in to cast anchor and lie at this harbor of Glarénza whenever they perceive the hill of Chlemútsi.

Witness of a seafight, in a tale worthy of future remembrance

Your poor and humble servant hid my horses away in the hills and came back on foot with two of my servants to Glarénza, where the three of us concealed ourselves in a corner of the great field of ruins, and inspected the island of Cephalonia, out in the gulf, with a telescope.This island is under the domination of the Venetian Franks, and while we were making a survey of all the details that were clearly visible through the telescope--the towers and wallsof the castle, the landing places, and the infidels themselves, both great and small--eight Muslim frigates appeared, flying green standards, with pennants waving in the wind.  
It happened that certain of our warrior heroes from Naupactus, namely Dorak Bey and Mısırlı Oğlu, were bringing their ships back from an expedition when ten frigates emerged from the harbor of the afore-mentioned infidel castle of Cephalonia and fell unexpectedly on Dorak Bey's squadron. The ships of Islam came into close engagement with the infidel frigates all across the face of the sea, and there was a huge battle. Your humble servant could not endure the rain of spent cannon and rifle shot falling in the ruins of Glarénsa castle, and retired to hide in a corner, but certain it is that our brave heroes made a fine, vigorous fight of of it.

Now our ships were returning from an expedition, and all eight of them were crammed full of infidel captives and loaded down with immeasurable amounts of tightly packed booty acquired as the spoils of war. The crews themselves were battle-ready, but the ships were not properly loaded for an engagement. The ten galleys of the enemy, on the other hand, were first-rate ships, fully armed and not loaded down. Moreover they had caiques and rowing boats coming up behind to help. Our ships of the Muslim fleet, therefore, | became apprehensive about the close-packed cargo of infidel prisoners, fearing that they might have a chance to raise their heads against us in the course of the fight. As a result, all eight Muslim frigates broke off from the engagement and as soon as they were free cried, "Full speed ahead!" and pulled on the oars with all their strength, heading in to shut themselves up in the harbor of Glarénza castle, from which we had been watching them.

When they saw my poor self there, the heroes were delighted, and in the twinkling of an eye they had unloaded all the booty, the heavy cargo and the infidel prisoners with their hands bound behind their necks. They turned this all over to me, and I brought down my slaves and my horses, and mounted my own horse to stand guard over the infidel captives while | I sent one of my slaves up to a village in the hills to tell the tributary populace to come down here fully armed. As soon as they arrived, we massed the infidel captives into the middle of our party, loaded them up with all the heavy cargo and marched them up away from the castle ruins and into the hills where we left them safe. 

Meanwhile, Dorak Bey, with his eight frigates now free and unencumbered, selected five hundred of the youngstalwarts who were gathering round from all four sides to look at the battle and tumult, and filled his ships with them. Then he sailed back out of Glarénza harbor again and pulledahead at full speed against the infidels. The noise and tumult of the close-fought melée and the exchange of fire was heard all the way to Patras and Chlemútsi, and young warriors rushed along the roads to get into ships in time to bring aid to the hero, Dorak Bey. He then took up a position in the middle of the ten enemy frigates, and filled the gun-crews tending the infidel cannon with so much lead and cannon-shot that he made prizes of eight of the enemy ships all at once. The other two turned about and ran back into the harbor of Cephalonia.

Glory to God--Dorak Bey had now conquered eight more ships with his eight and had madeprisoners of all their infidel crews, as well as capturing a proportional amount of cargo, weapons and ordnance materiel. He turned back into Glarénza harbor, therefore, and whenhe dropped anchor, I brought back the prisoners and booty that were up in the hills and turned them over once again to Dorak Bey. At this, the hero Dorak Bey, Mısırlı Oğlu, and the other officers and sea-captains gave me three prisoners in payment for my services, along with two European boy-slaves and a purse of silver thalers. Then the whole expedition reboarded the sixteen ships and after turning the crucifix idols upside down on all he eight infidel ships, they fired a joyous salute of cannon and rifle fire, let out their sails and set out straightaway with the day's prizes for the castle of Naupactus.  

So your humble servant was accidentally the witness of such a sea-fight, and God, in His Greatness, presented me with five captives and a purse of silver. For it was God who rewarded me thus, in that I, a traveller by land, was granted a present of booty taken at sea. Actually, I sent the five captives I had been given to accompany the remaining prisoners of Dorak Bey and the other heroes who were going to Naupactus, and directed one of my slaves to send them on from there to Zekeriya Efendi in Corinth, along with a letter telling him to sell them. So they went off to Naupactus and I went on southwards, and in three hours climbed up to Chlemútsi.

Evliya writes of the channels of Egriboz/Negroponte

The channels of the Euripos at Egriboz/Negroponte. 

Detail from Camoccio etching, ca. 1571.

Kiliç Ali Pasa became admiral of the Ottoman fleet shortly after this story took place. His personal story began when young Giovan Dionigi Caleni was taken captive from a coastal town in Italy, Capo Rizzuto at the SW corner of the gulf of Taranto,  and enslaved.   After some resistance, he converted to Islam, and his natural abilities allowed him to rise rapidly in the Ottoman fleet. He became famous as the pirate Occhiali, alternating periods as a corsair with naval service, and Capo Rissuto now has a memorial to him. .  He was the only Ottoman commander to escape from Lepanto, bringing out with him the remnants of the Ottoman fleet. He was a patron of the aged architect Mimar Sinan who built the  important Istanbul mosque named for him.

Evliya appears to be the only discoverable source for this story. Pierre MacKay is my source and the translator. 

* * * * * *

(SN VIII250a23) A wonderful story  

In the year … in the time of Sultan Khan the second, Kiliç Ali Pasa, the supreme commander on the island of Cyprus, came to the aid of Kara Mustafa Paşa and, with four galleys of his own Uluç Ali Pasa chanced on 10 infidel galleons. He fought a fierce battle with the infidel, lasting all day and all night, until finally, making it appear that he would easily be worsted, “he took flight from the pursuit of infidels,” and with a dash forward at full stroke came into the harbor of Kızıl Hisar. But right behind the place where he intended to drop anchor, up came the wretched infidels in pursuit, so Ali Paşa could not stay there. He went on into the gulf of Negropont and dropped anchor beneath the castle and lay there without fear or apprehension. But the infidel with his ten galleons came into the mouth of the strait and lay at anchor there, saying, “Whenever the Turk leaves, he is mine!" 

 Note "Molini" to the right of the little castle, and the mill wheels behind.

With the genius of an Aristotle, Ali Paşa took the marines and galley slaves out of his four galleys in the middle of one night and, at either side of the water in the channel that flows beside the mills of the castle bridge, the ones we have already mentioned, he massed a group of prisoners at the rock, with the picks of Ferhad in their hands. Then he had them cut away at the rock on either side until the channel was wide enough for a galley to pass through and, in the middle of the night, he took out the awnings from the four galleys they belonged to and set them up on land. Then he went out with the four ships through the afore-mentioned mill channels he had cut, on past the point of Oreos, at the far end of the island, and back down around the point of Kızıl Hisar. In the early morning, the infidels, seeing from their ships that the Turkish awnings still remained in the harbor, were off their guard but, at that very time of morning, while all the infidels lay drunk and besotted in sleep, Ali Paşa, with his four galleys, entered the infidel ships crying, "Allah! Allah!" and rounded up the infidels from both bow and stern.

Thus, Ali Paşa herded the infidels up into their own ships at sword’s point, in the twinkling of an eye and, by the will of God, he captured ten enemy ships with four galleys. When he returned victorious and successful to the royal palace, having overturned the idols of the infidels, with their crosses, he was received with a great celebration of cannon and musketry fire by Selim Khan himself. Afterwards he held the fully independent post of Grand Admiral, with three horsetails and, near the Arsenal, he built a luminous mosque out of the great booty he won. Even now, in the place where Ali Paşa cut away the rock, at the channel for the Egriboz mill, if it were desired, one could remove the mill wheels from the channel, and it would be possible for a (/5/) galley to pass through. So much for that.





Kiliç Ali Pasa's channel, much widened, is the channel now seen at Halkis.  The previous, main channel was closed up over several centuries, and the island castle and city walls destroyed in the late 19th century. Pierre MacKay is currently preparing a study of the history of the dual channels at Negroponte for which previous authors have made assumptions, mis-citations, and unsubstantiated claims.

On Vacation: A Mistra song from Evliya

 Gentile Bellini, Turkish Woman, ca. 1480.

 

A song collected by Evliya Çelebi in the late summer of 1668, included in the Mistra section of the Seyatahatname.   Evliya wrote a transliteration of the Greek in Arabic script.  The transliteration into the Latin and Greek alphabets, and the translation are by Pierre MacKay.

Evliya's transcription is remarkable, in part, because Arabic script does not permit the consonant clusters so common in Greek.
 

Kla pste ma tia mou, kla pse te, na ka me te mia vri si,

na rthi sto dil be ra ki mou, na tou ge mi si pi kri

ti e his mav ri ko ra ka, kin ta fte ra sou mav ra,

ki ne tav ga sou me la na, kin ta pou lia sou mav ra?

an e his po no stin kar dia, e la na klem' an ta ma.  

Weep my eyes, oh weep, and make a fountain

that may flow to my lover and fill him with sorrow.

What ails you, black crow, that your feathers are so black?
that your eggs too are black and your chicks black?
If you have trouble in your heart, come let us weep together .

κλάψτε ματιά μου, κλάψετε, νὰ κάμετε μιὰ βρύση.

ν’ἄρθη στὸ ντιλμπεράκι μου, νά του γεμίση πίκρα,

τί ἔχεις μαύpη κόρακα, κ’εἶν’ τὰ φτερά σου μαῦρα,

κ’εἶναι τ’αὐγά σου μελανά, κ’εἶν’ τὰ πουλιά σου μαῦρα;

ἂν ἔχεις πόνο στὴν καρδιὰ, ἔλα νὰ κλαίμ' αντάμα.

The dog of Venice

In a graduate class on Venetian history, a young man was discussing the role of the "Dog of Venice." He was a Navy SEAL, and we admired him too much to smile, or to embarrass him with a correction.  But I have cherished that Dog of Venice, and was utterly delighted when Pierre MacKay said, But that is what the Ottomans called the lion!

Correspondents have sent me references, which Pierre MacKay translated.  Claudia Römer sent a passage from Evliya Çelebi SN VIII 309b about Candia in 1668:

First of all, Kanye means dog-house in the Italian Frankish language, because the Venetian Franks who worship a two winged dog named San Marco, dedicated it to San Marco the dog under the name Kanye.

Then from Gülçin Tunalı, from Mahmud Efendi in Tarih-i Medinet'ül- Hukema, 48b, ca. 1700:

They treated this dog with great respect and reverence. When the dog died they buried it and built a shrine and temple over it.  Over the door of the shrine they depicted the dog and revered it.  And not satisfied with this level of honor, everyone to the best of his ability made an image of the dog out of silver and gold and placed it on the house as a blessing.  Rich and poor, small and great, each to the extent of his means, expended them for the making of a gold, silver, copper or brass image of the dog.  And still, today, Venetian infidels love no animal as much as they do the dog.

Robert Dankoff comments that Evliya (SN.IX257b15) called the Venetian ducat the kelbi ḳuruş = the dog ducat.

So here are some dogs of Venice:

An unexpected lion of S. Marco on a 17th C crucifix at the Pantokrator on Mt. Athos.  

End of ceiling beam, Ag. Paraskevi, Halkis, ca. 1270.

 Halkis

 Halkis

 

 Methoni

Heraklion

 

Rethymno

 Nauplion

 Methoni  

  Methoni 

 Methoni 

 
 

Nauplion

Nauplion ca. 1470

 Nauplion, ca. 1700 & 2009

 

The finest lion of all, Halkis.


 

Evliya's Mistra

Turkish Fountain, lower city.

Evliya Çelebi visited Mistra in September 1668. Here are parts of his description from Pierre MacKay's translation of the Morea portion of the Seyahatname. Evliya's numbers should not be taken for court evidence.  The section headings are Evliya's from his manuscript.  The text is taken from folios SN VIII.274a29 through SN VIII.275a31.

* * * * * * * * * *

[Coming from Longaniko.]

Passing through this town, I continued southeast along the foothills of the Falcon Mountain of Ma'ni, and came through frightful and dangerous places to the villages of Ag. Vasi'l, Koki'tsa, Ago'riani and Alevru'. These are all in the foothills of the mountains of Ma'ni, and together they comprise three or four hundred houses. They are Greek villages with gardens and orchards, and belong to the juridical district of Mistra' command. From there it was 4 hours to Mistra'. 

 

Conquests of the province of Mesokhori, which is the description of the castle of Mistra

Some write the name Misistra, but in the Imperial registers, they write "The Province of Mesokho'ri," and in official titulatures it is known as the Mezistra command. According to the statements of ancient Greek historians, it was built first by King Solomon, and the next builder was Rehoboam, son of the prophet Solomon. Then King Philip, having built the city of Athens, was so pleased with the air and water of this city of Mistra' that he edified it still further, and because the actual work on the building was done by his vizier, Meso Khor, the lower city is called Mesokho'ri in the Greek histories. In the Frankish tongue they call it . . . , and in the Latin tongue it is Mistir. This ancient city and mighty fortress was taken by the Conqueror Sultan Mehmed Khan in person, in the year. . . . 

It was formerly the capital city of the King of the Venetian Franks, and is now the capital city of the Bey of the Mistra' command. According to the cadastral register, the special reserve for the Pasha is 219000 aspers. There are 11 zeamet-class and l9 timar-class fiefs. There is a Levy Commander (Alay Beyi) and a Captain of Troops (Çeri başi), and according to the code the total levy of men-at-arms is a force of three thousand men. The Bey (Sancak Beyi) is assigned to naval duties under the Grand Admiral, who is Commander-in- chief for the Governorate, and he takes three galleys on campaign. He derives nine purses of revenue annually from the administration of justice in this command.

Religious law is the province of a sacred jurisdiction valued at three hundred aspers, and there are . . . district villages. The Judge's annual income from the administration of justice is eight purses. The Chief Mufti is the Excellent Hamdi Efendi, a creature perfect in knowledge, outstanding in temperament, rich in elevated nobility and majestic in scholarship. There is a Marshal of the descendants of the Prophet and a Judge-substitute for the lower city. There is a Local Commander of Troops (Sipa^h Ka^hya Yeri), a Captain of Janissaries and many magnates and notables. There is a Castle Commandant and twenty-four garrison personnel. There is an Inspector of Commerce with the rank of Ag"a, a Commissioner of Customs Duties, a Commissioner of Tribute Taxes, a Collector of Transit Dues, a Chief Architect with the rank of Ag"a, a City Intendant and a . . .. There is a Proto'geros for the Greek infidels, a Chief of the Congregation for the Jews and Consuls for the Franks, because this is a well-ordered city.

A chapter on the entire appearance of the city of Mistra'

According to the personal observations of your poor and humble servant, this high castle is at the foot of the mountains of Ma'ni on a steep smooth white rock, attached to the Falcon Mountain. There is a strong fortress and a mighty rampart reaching to the very sky, an almond-shaped masonry citadel of archaic workmanship. Together with its lower circuit it forms three subdivisions, making up a stalwart and well-built defense. There are three gates. One opens to the east, and this is the gate to the inner keep, located in that line of defense. The gate of the middle castle opens to the southeast and the gate of the outer division opens west and is in a very dark and shady place. In front of this gate is the Station of the Conqueror Mehmed Khan. This is a smooth slab of hard stone where the Conqueror performed a prostration of heartfelt thanksgiving, just as the castle was taken. In the place where his forehead touched the stone during the prostration of worship, there is now a little polished depression, and when the blessed rain collects here, epileptics and people with fevers come here and drink the rainwater, in which, by the will of God, they find recovery.

In the central keep of this three-part citadel is the residence of the Castle Commandant, and there is also an armory, a provisions store and a water cistern, but nothing else. In this entire three-part citadel there is a total of eighty lofty tile-roofed houses with splendid views, and the mosque of Sultan Mehmed Khan is here in this citadel too, an old-fashioned place of worship with no minaret. The entire circumference of this citadel complex, measured around the battlements, is eight hundred paces. If a man looks down from this castle -- God's truth -- his gall-bladder will burst from terror, for it is such a lofty castle, reaching up to the very sky, that even to look up at it sets a man's mind to whirling as if he were staring into the center of a narcissus flower.

The station of the Excellent Ak Sems u"d-Din

Outside the castle, on the rock where he worshipped, there are the holes worn away by his tears falling drop by drop, and traces of the place where his holy knees touched the hard rock. For this reason they say that the castle of Mistra' was taken by the tears of Ak S,ems u"d-Din. Down the hill from this holy place is the lower castle. Commendation of the construction of the mighty lower castle This is a huge fortress, surrounding the citadel on the east, north and west sides, while on the south side, as God is my refuge, the steep rock cliff, which is a hundred fathoms deep and precipitous as the pits of Hell, results in there being neither walls nor towers, for they are not needed.

The entire circumference of this five sided castle is nine thousand long paces all round. There is no moat on any side, for the castle is built on a hard, steep, solid rock. There are eight gates altogether. One is the little gate to the prayer ground, and this opens westward. Another is the market gate, which also opens west. Then there is the. . . gate which opens to the east, the gate of the Kurd Ag"a mosque, which opens north, and the lower market gate which opens south . In addition to these, there is a number of small arched posterns in the city, whereas the ones mentioned above are the big gates on the main thoroughfares. Inside the city there are altogether one thousand one hundred inhabited and prosperous masonry houses built by the infidels, storey upon storey, one up against the other, with no yards but with a fine view. Only this year, however, a raging fire burned down six hundred of them and many of the houses are still undergoing repairs or rebuilding. The houses are built one above another, and are lofty dwellings with a view out to the east and north, over the plain of St. Nikon.

A count of the mosques in this castle

There are seven places of worship. First the Fethiye mosque, which is a mosque of Sultan Mehmed Khan, then the market mosque and the Zal mosque. The rest are neighborhood mosques for the faithful. There is one college for burning scholars, two primary schools for 5 well-born and properly raised heart's darlings, one convent for elders in the way of asceticism, one bath to refresh and soothe, two hundred shops for artisans and craftsmen, one inn for merchants, one caravanserai for travelers, and seven churches and monasteries for the meaningless mumblings of infidels. Of these, the monastery of St. Nikon is the best built.

A noteworthy marvel

Inside this castle, in the Greek and Jewish quarters, and in other places too, there are twenty-nine places called "cool- rooms," great cellars and natural caves worked into a finished shape. Each of these will hold a thousand people, and in July, the whole city, from the best of Muslim society to the worst of dissolute drunkards make themselves comfortable in these cellars and carry on their enjoyments, pleasures and festivities there. Even during the dog-days a man cannot sit near the entrance of these cellars without wearing furs. The people of the city chill their water, their wine and their sweet fruit drinks here. These are remarkable cellars to visit, where one cannot endure the cold even in July. Outside the castle, the mosque of Kurd Çelebi has just been built, and it is a very fine mosque. Then you go two thousand paces down a steep slope to the suburb of Mesokho'ri.

Praise of the suburb of Mesokhori

There are five hundred spacious tile-roofed masonry houses with gardens and orchards on a level plain here. There are ten Muslim neighborhoods, five congregations of Jews, and eleven Greek neighborhoods. There are six Muslim places of worship and one is a very well-appointed mosque . . .. There are also four neighborhood mosques. There is one upper school for burning scholars, two primary schools for children's youthful ABCs, two dervish chapels, and two open prayer grounds. One of these is north of the castle and one south of it. There is one damp and rather dirty little bath, four inns for merchants, and one caravanserai for travellers which the judge of Mistra', {{Zekeriya}} Efendi, has just built. Among the great houses are the Palace of the Pasha, the palace of Ako Bey, the . . . Ag"a palace, the . . . palace and the law-court palace, which are all fine residences. There are eighty shops, of which the tanners' hall and the silk- workers' market are the richest.

You cross the river . . . that runs in front of this suburb by way of a single arched bridge. This river goes on to join the great Eurotas  river that flows through the plain of St. Nikon and then runs on close by the E'los plain and empties into the Mediterranean close to Bardhu'nia and Pa'ssava castles. Inside the city there are seventy water-mills. There are altogether three thousand gardens, orchards and flower-plots, and there are abundant lemons, oranges, figs and grapes. The vineyards are spread all over the hills west of the castle, and the plain is all set out in gardens irrigated with running water. Roses, hyacinths and herbs flourish in these gardens as in the gardens of Paradise. In the month of July, however, the air is heavy and thick, although it is very pleasant in winter. The water is very tasty and pleasant, and there are thousands of springs flowing abundantly, so that in every trellised melon patch there is a spring of sweet digestive water. The lovely boys and girls are famous, and both boys and girls are doe-eyed, or gazelle-eyed, sweet-voiced, radiant-faced fairy creatures, fit for a king to gaze on.

Among the celebrated products are silk cloth and thread, crimson (pirnokok) vegetable dye, tart black mulberries and black figs. All the people are Greekish, and since they mingle continually with the Greek infidels in their buyings and sellings, they are Muslims who speak the purest form of the Greek tongue.

Evliya's Manuscript

25 March 2011, Google birthday homage to Evliya Çelebi

Pierre MacKay had the pleasure and privilege to be the scholar who identified Evliya Çelebi's own manuscript.  I have asked him to recount that remarkable experience.

* * * * * *

One painless way to acquire a smidgeon of academic notoriety is to attach oneself to someone whose 400th birthday is worth remembering. I had the good fortune of doing so in 1964, even before I knew who Evliya was, and he has been my companion ever since.

I was in Princeton that summer, and able to use the open stacks of the Princeton University library where, in a search for a different and at that time better known author, Katib Çelebi, I ran into a fragmentary English translation of two volumes of Evliya's great ten-volume Travel Journal (Seyahatname). I had little time to find out much about Evliya, because I was preparing for a year in Egypt then, but I was intrigued and, in August, at the 4th International Congress of Classical Studies held in Philadelphia, I found myself talking to Alexander McDonald of Clare College, Cambridge, (a Livy scholar) who knew quite a bit about Turkey, and was also intrigued. He suggested to me that if I found an opportunity to look at manuscripts there, I should not go through the official bureaucracy, but approach the doorman of the library I was interested in, and get help from him. 

 

Pierre MacKay in the 60s. 

In February, 1966, I was granted freedom to  study the manuscripts of the Seyahatname in a way that has possibly never been equaled for any scholar before or since. It was not that I was specially prepared to do this work—in most senses I was not prepared at all. All I had was the command of some rather halting spoken Turkish—it is still not good—and the experience of some important manuscript work in Classical Arabic the year before. I taught myself Ottoman by reading the introduction to an edition of the 7th volume of the Seyahatname on cold winter days at the library of the Turkish Historical Society in Ankara. (Seyahatname 7 and 8 were almost the last books permitted to be printed in Arabic script at the time of the Ataturk language reform of 1927–28.) There was a providence working here.

1965–66 was an unusually cold winter in Ankara, and it was a great relief to head west to Istanbul in early February to stay in the charming and utterly impractical Köprülü summer house (the American Research Institute in Turkey. The high fenced grounds of this place were attached to one of the damp towers of the Byzantine sea wall at the southeast corner of the city, which was, disastrously, taken over for a library, and the fence protected an open area where my wife, Theodora, and I could chase our beautiful Egyptian dog around for hours in the evening.)

 Ayyusha, by Theodora MacKay

I had three major libraries to search, the Sultan Ahmet III library in Top Kapi, the great Süleymaniye manuscript library, and the decaying University library, which had a expanding crack in the masonry running all the way down through the grand central stairway so that all the books had been piled near the center to keep it from splitting apart. I had three weeks for what I needed to do.

At the Sultan Ahmet library, almost unvisited by tourists, I got into conversation with the doorman, and within the hour I was in the office of the Museum director. An arrangement was made that I would pay for tourist entry to the grounds and then go immediately to the library where I was given a long table all to myself. I was asked which manuscript of the many available I wanted, and had to say that I really did not know.  "Then," the Director responded, "you should have them all," and the library staff brought out every single one.

"All" was two full sets of ten volumes and several partial sets, including the one that turned out to be Evliya's own manuscript. There was no way I could do any meaningful collation and that too turned out to be good fortune. I concentrated on physical inspection: bindings, sequence of gatherings, watemarks, notes of ownership and bequest, usage of red and black ink, and almost anything but the text. I was able to take the manuscripts closer to the somewhat opaque windows and look through pages for watermarks, which gave me the opportunity to record the unique Venetian heraldic watermark on the paper used by Evliya. 

 

When not at Top Kapı, I was at the Süleymaniye, or the University library, where the sweet, utterly gracious librarian Makbule Hanım took me in charge and found for me the outstandingly fine copy of volume 10, for which Evliya's own original is lost. At the end of three weeks I had enough raw material for twenty lifetimes of work, and the germ of a belief that I might be able to single out one archetypal manuscript and avoid the drudgery of endless hours of collation.

Close to the last day in Istanbul, when I met the Museum director again, I was asked whether I would need microfilm, and which manuscripts I would prefer. Once again I could only answer that I had some good ideas, but no sure sense of which ones I needed. The response was astonishng. "In that case we had better arrange to film all of them." I made a hasty calculation of my resources of travelers checks, gulped, and accepted this extraordinary offer, and when I took up my position at the University of Washington that fall, the rolls of film, beautifully photographed, had arrived before me. I also got films of the manuscripts in the University Library, and from Süleymaniye a copy of the Haci Beşir Ağa manuscript (which was sadly out of focus, but it turned out that it didn't matter).

In 1967–68, the University of Washington gave me a generous research fund for technical assistance, and I was able to make large Xerox copies of all the manuscripts, which I carried with me in a trailer when I drove across country to take up a year's fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.


There was a "Eureka!" moment there—a day when everything fell into place, not slowly, but in a sort of cascade of discovery. There is no simple way of showing what led up to it, and readers in haste may want to skim quickly through what follows. I remained focused on the physical organization of the manuscript, in part because my knowledge of Ottoman Turkish was still not sufficient to read one of the richest and most variegated prose styles in the history of the language. Evliya, as Robert Dankoff, who knows him better than anyone else living today, points out, can be quite bewildering at first glance. 

A particular problem was disorder in in the text of book 4, which divided the surviving manuscripts into two distinct families. To get a clear view of the evidence, I hung a "do not disturb" sign on my office door and laid out on the floor a sequence of twenty or so pages from every copy of book 4 I had available. It was quite easy then to eliminate the later copies, and I was left with three sets of pages, one characterized by copious added notes written sideways in the wide margins and by other features that had led a few earlier scholars to suggest that the annotated copy might be the original.  

This manuscript which, for historical reasons I called S, had a fixed maximum of 34 lines per page, and included many, apparently random, areas on which nothing was written, an unusual waste of paper for the 17th or 18th centuries. The writing was consistent in size, and ran along even and regular baselines. These features were not consistent in the two manuscript facsimiles, both dated 1742, that lay on the floor beside them. The 1742 manuscripts (P and Q) usually had 34 lines per page, but sometimes crowded in more lines, which were often written in increasingly cramped and condensed letters. The notes from the margins of manuscript S could be found incorporated into the main text of P and Q and, even more significantly, when a page of S ended on a specific word, so did the corresponding page of both P and Q. The folio numbers for the three manuscripts are not a reliable guide, but the "catch-words" at the bottom of every second page (the b side of the folio) which is repeated at the top of the next page, are very consistent. (The terms for Latin and Greek manuscripts are recto and verso , but it makes no sense to call the first side of a folio of Arabic script a recto , since it is always on the left side when the book is opened.) They are an essential guide for keeping the pages in the right order before the gatherings are sewn together.


That was already enough evidence to identify S as the origin of all other manuscripts, but there was even more. The disorder in page sequence mentioned above was caused by the insertion of several folded sheets, not in the center of a gathering, but off to one side. That arrangement is reflected in copy Q, but not in P, because the added folios fell out and were mistakenly inserted into the center of the gathering, and the copyist of P simply copied them where he found them. At the top margin of the migratory folios of S, someone has written sequence numbers for that gathering only, in hopes of preventing the mistake from happening again.

When manuscript S was conclusively shown to be the origin of all other copies, it remained only to show that it was Evliya's own manuscript, and Richard Kreutel had two years earlier made a case for that by comparing the very personal style of handwriting on the manuscript with a number of dipinti on walls and columns left by the self-styled world-traveler on monuments he visited. In the part of book 4 discussed above there is a precious note from Evliya to himself. "I must find something to fill in all this blank space."

Beginning in the mid 1670s, Evliya went through his trunks full of loose notes, organized them, and passed them to a secretary who wrote out the fair copy. As soon as each volume was finished, he began emending the copy, adjusting diacriticals and vowel marks where needed, adding copious notes in the margin and sometimes even tracing over a letter when he was dissatisfied with its shape. This revision seems to have been about half completed when he died. The notes continue through volume 8, but are much sparser near the end.

Because I was able to get copies of all manuscripts, even one that was dismissed as a trivial collection of extracts, I also found the short history of how the Seyahatname was put into its present shape in one immense effort at the end of Evliya's life in Cairo, and brought to Istanbul 50 years later, when three out of the four surviving complete copies were made, all in the same year.  

All these discoveries are summed up in:

``The manuscripts of the Seyahatname of Evliya Çelebi. Part 1. The

Archetype.'' Der Islam 52 (1975): 278–298.