Empire: World History - 32. The Greatest Ottoman Adventurer

Episode Date: February 7, 2023

Evliya Çelebi travelled for 41 years. He documented his adventures, which included interactions with vampires, humans transforming into chickens, and dervishes riding rhinos. Listen as William and Anita are joined by Caroline Finkel to discuss this man and the vivid descriptions he provided of the Ottoman Empire. *This episode was recorded before the devastating earthquake hit Turkey and Syria. Our thoughts are with those who have been affected.* LRB Empire offer: lrb.me/empire Twitter: @Empirepoduk Goalhangerpodcasts.com Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. Hello, this is Anita from the Empire podcast. Just to let you know, this episode of Empire was recorded before the devastating earthquake hit southern Turkey and northern Syria. We'll be talking about the impact of that next week on the podcast. Also, this is not an episode to listen to with children. Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnand.

And me, William, William. I'm very excited about today's program, William. Really excited. We have one of our favourite people. Oh, he's a right character. Isn't he a one? Isn't he a one, as they say? We've both spent the week giggling reading.

All the things I like and all the things that you. All the things I like and all the things that you are. So he is the original itchy feet, a man who cannot stay still for five minutes. Some may say the Turkish peep, Samuel Peepes, because he's a fabulous recorder of his experiences. And he's also the most delicious thing of all spectacularly rude. And I love this. So the man we're talking about William Daryample is drum roll. I mean, I'd say that because I always get ticked off for spoiling your punchlines.

Literally giving you the drum roll and permission. Who are we talking about today? The drum roll comes. Evelier-Cellaby, not a name that is a household name to many people yet. Not yet. But we'll be thanks to Caroline Finkel and us. Caroline Finkel is our guest today and someone who not only has written about Evilead Cheleby, but has also followed in his footsteps.

A historian and somebody who's steeped, not just in Ottoman history, but also in Turkish life because you spent, how many years were you living in Istanbul, Caroline? No, no, it looks like 30 with a sort of. extra bits, a long time, and it may not be over yet. Oh, good, I'm glad. Your husband is still there as we speak. He is. He's doing important business there. Important business. Well, listen, I just have to say, because this is not a visual medium, I do feel as if I'm an extra in the snowman. What is wrong with the pair of you? You're in different parts of the world. William is wrapped up in a Chadha of some sort, and... It's not a chada, it's a beautiful, beautiful Kashmiri rap. Oh, I do beg your pardon. Do you make

you're pardoning, a beautiful Kashmiri wrap. But Caroline, I'm very confident in saying is wearing fingerless gloves from southwest London. Is it very chilly where you both are? Well, we're both Scottish, Willie, and, you know, some of us are more abstemious. I won't see me because that feeds into the myth than others. Or maybe that's what it is. I'm just a few degrees up on the thermostat.

Don't tell my husband he hates it. Anyway, look, Caroline, we're here to talk about this remarkable character, Evilia Chelleby, who was born in 1611. There is this place, and you'll know it very well as somebody who is a local from Istanbul, which is the Ahi-Celeby Mosque. It's sort of on the seafront. I haven't seen it, but I've read all about it. And it says there's a plaque on it, which says, this is the mosque for Elie Chelyer Chelyby, the writer of the first travel book in the history of the world. Now, is that an accurate assessment of the man we are talking about today? This is wonderful. I think that's quite a recent

development. So, Everley was born in 1611, and in 2011, 400 years later, suddenly he was sort of discovered within Turkey. He was a courtier. He was brought up. His father was a goldsmith at the court. He was brought up in the court. He had a typical education for someone of his status, but he always wanted to travel. And this mosque is where he had a, what you might call, a predictive dream. He dreamt that he saw the luminaries of Islam, including the Prophet, and he was in this, it's quite a long description, rather wonderful. In this exalted crowd, he was introduced to the Prophet and he asked him for, not actually for travel, apparently, which is what he ended up doing, but the intercession.

He mispronounced it, apparently. He mispronounced the word and he ended up becoming a traveller. I mean, it was a miracle. I mean, I think this is glorious. And actually what he was asking for was a blessing, but he tripped over his tongue and then what he got was, you know, the itchy feet that we're talking about. Years of wandering the gloat. Can we just first of all just set the scene here?

Because I, you know, there's a, as you're saying, most people don't know about him. But when they do talk about him, I often see this, well, how do I put it? This liar, liar pants on fire accusation. So, I mean, you've just told us about this extraordinary dream that launches him from the seafront to this journey that will take the rest of his life. But he does also, you know, say other things when he talks about his childhood, as you were saying, he had a pretty standard upbringing. But when he talks about it, he was the most precocious boy in the land. He memorized the Quran and he could say it forwards, backwards, sideways and on his head. How much should we trust this man right at the offset?

Well, I think that we're now trying to sort of fight back against this idea that he is a documentary writer. This has very much been the way that he was looked at in the olden days. But now I think we're coming much more to appreciate what he does present us with, which is a mixture of fact, fiction, fantasy, jokes, and all sorts of fantastifications. And I think that to, you know, to look at him first of all, to find the truth, whatever that is, is really to sort of lose some of the appreciation of what he does. So you're saying just wallow in Chenebby, which I'm very happy to do. Just wallow, exactly.

Let's all wallow together. Okay, so William. Because he's a very, very affable guy, isn't he? He's a storyteller. He tells jokes. He's funny. He tells unlikely stories, whether it's about dervishes on rhinoceros back or what the crocodiles and the Nile do, or a woman who turns into a hen and wanders around and comes back again. It's a very entertaining mixture of stuff. And more than that, I mean, he was essentially all we know about him, or basically all we know about him, his life story, there are one and two documents, is what he tells us himself.

So, you know, he was a musician, he was a Quran reciter, as you mentioned, which was fairly common amongst his class at that time. You know, he was a boon companion to Pashas, to Sultans. He could compose, you know, a poet. He was a polyglot, he tells us, he tells us he knew some languages. He's interested in language too, isn't he? He sort of spots links between German and Persian, long before William Jones invents Indo-European languages, for example.

That's right. He was so highly curious and highly educated and the result is this amazing travelogue. And we should say what's spectacular about this travelogue and we'll come to the places that he went because you followed in. Ten volumes of travelogue. Ten huge volumes of travelogue. And as you say, not just I went here and I did this. But what's interesting, I found really fascinating about him is that he tries to get. under the skin of the place through language, as William was saying. So he'll do little glossaries along the way. Like here is how you count to 10. This is the phrase for...

In Armenia. Whatever he goes. There are this many mosques, this many churches, this many people. Sometimes there are gaps where you think he might go back and count, but he's forgotten. But also, I think there's a lot of very hilarious. I don't know whether it's sort of meaning to editorialize or not. But he sort of, he'll get choice phrases from the area. So when he's talking about room, he says, you know, this is how you count 10.

And this is how you say, how much for your mother? You're like, what? I beg your pardon. What? So I mean, how playful is he, Caroline, before we get to the actual footsteps and follow them? Yes, it's interesting that one. I just came across, I can't find which language it is. But the phrase that he mentions is, you know, and where can I get?

get some wine. But then he tells us when he was with the in Tabriz in Western Iran. And they offer him wine and he's horrified. Yes, they were forcing wine on him and he was absolutely refusing. As a good Muslim, he supposedly didn't drink. He's taking the boys but refusing and taking the kisses from the boys but refusing the wine. Exactly. So, you know, stuff about your mother, you know, why not? Why not? I mean, this is playful and extraordinary. It's kind of wonderful, kind of weird mixture. People's customs, quite a lot of sex, superstition, vampires. We even have some vampires. What is this about vampires? You say, what is this?

Because you wafted vampires at me early on when we were discussing Chenebys. So there are two things I want to know about. And then we are definitely going on the trail with him. Okay, so let's clear these things up. Vampires first. Vampires and then dervishes on rhinoceruses, please. So, okay, who wants to go vampire? So you're both bursting to tell me.

Caroline, go for it. William can do the vandal. I'll tell you, but I mean, the rhinoceros, he's up, he goes far up the Nile. He's trying to discover the source of the Nile towards the end of his life, 16, 70s, 80s. and he comes across a dervish a wandering dervish on a rhinoceros doing what? Along with all sorts

But just doing, why is he on a rhinole? He's wondering on a rhinoceros. Does he not ask the supplementary question? What's you doing up there? What you're doing? Dervishes are everyone. I'll leave the vampires to William. The vampires is when he's course in the Balkans.

And it's interesting because this is the same sort of period, maybe a little bit earlier, that you begin to get vampire fever appearing in the Balkans, in the bits on the kind of Austro-huntering. Hungarian side, you get the first reports in the 17th century of vampism. And Evel Chelyby preempts that and talks about it in Turkish a century earlier. And it's interesting. I mean, it's obviously a folk tale that's been around for a while and these are old stories.

I mean, right, and we're going to have loads more of these pop up along that popcorn along the Chelybee way, if we put a bit. As somebody who has sort of saddled up, because he did this great journey. How many miles in the end did he end up doing, Caroline, do we know? Well, I'm afraid I think we count in years. Okay. Not in miles. I mean, there is a map, you know, of all his journeys laid out and someone could or could have counted the miles.

But 41 years is what he says. And if you sort of count through his work, this is sort of what it comes to. He came back to Istanbul in between his travels, but basically he was on the road. And it's wearing a rich variety of hats, too. In some, he's a sort of courtier, another type. he's a boon companion or entertainer, and other times cavalryman, a tax collector. What is a boon companion? You're flinging the term boon companion around as if we all have one.

What is a, I don't, and I want one. What is a boon companion? I think a boon companion in that context, I mean, it's your sort of best friend, your confidante, the person you trust, the person you will ask to do anything for you. Oh, you'll ride or die. Got it. Okay, everyone should have a ride or die. Well, I don't you'd have to die.

No, no, it's a friend. On some of the expeditions, he went as Boone Companion, so he would, you know, also, as well as performing services like, you know, calling the prayer and such things, he would entertain his. But at other times he's actually a formal diplomat. I mean, he goes to Vienna, for example, doesn't he? Very much as the Sultan's envoy. Tax collector. Okay. Sometimes, too. But let's go back to when he's packing his suitcases as a 20, 21-year-old young man, with the 40 years laid out. ahead of him. What is he taking with him? And how is he, he's not going to do this on foot, Caroline. What did he do? Well, he went by horse, of course, as those who could did. But not by

himself, of course. I mean, as we've sort of alluded, he very often was attached to a Pasha or to some bigwig, some Ottoman bigwig, who was perhaps on business somewhere in the empire. And then he would break away from the proceedings and he would go off on his own and do on expeditions. always with horses. He names his horses. Sometimes he names his dogs. His servant, he had servants with him. And he has slave boys. He always talks about his slave boys. Yes. And companions. And the companions varied. You know, sometimes he tells us, sometimes he doesn't, who they were. But you get the impression of a sort of gregarious gossipy. It sounds like you. He's you. He's you. He's you, William. Does Willie ride? Willie, do you have a horse? Well, that's something I'd pay to see. I used to ride.

I used to ride a lot as a child. Okay, but Caroline, you did saddle up, didn't you? So, I mean, where did you go first on the Chalabee Trail? Well, with friends, I'm sorry, I can't name them because it would take too long. Yes, it was a great coincidence, actually. Your boon companions, in fact. Yes. Yes, well, like Evilly, we had companions and horses.

It was a great coincidence because we talked about this at the beginning of the 20th century. And then by the time we got around to it, it was two years. short of the 400th anniversary of Evlia's birth. I mean, that was a miracle in itself worthy of Evlia that this should happen. So we decided, and another convenient coincidence, was that the one place or one of the places he really didn't know well and therefore went to later on his life, which is when we followed him, was Western Anatolia. So we just set off from south of Istanbul, obviously not from the city, because that would be total chaos now and impossible. and we followed him in Western Anatolia.

I guess that during his, you know, sort of his productive life, his professional life, let me say, he hadn't gone there because there wasn't so much trouble, perhaps, as these missions he was sent on further away. He was from there too, wasn't he? He was from Kutai, which is, I don't know how many, like a six hours, eight hours bus trip from Istanbul and not very good in miles. But it was happened to be also that trip was the start of his trip to the HADD, the pilgrimage trip. which he did when he was 60 years old later in his life. So we followed the early stages of his pilgrimage. If only we'd been able to go the whole way, he went the whole way, and he never returned to Istanbul.

He spent the last decade or so of his life in Egypt, in Sudan, you know, going up the Nile and so on. Right, okay. So he, I mean, I did read, and there's a rather wonderful piece of work. I mean, as you say, he's not well known because he hasn't been well translated. Robert Dankoff is an academic who's done more about bringing chelope's words to life. But only as recently as 2010, I think the first English edition comes out. And I don't understand because it's lush stuff.

So I mean, you do read that the reason he opts for horse, which is not the quickest way of traveling around. And very grudgingly, every so often he'll get onto a boat. It's because very early on he sees a boat sink. and the people sort of perish who are on this boat. And so there is a... He's shipwrecked. He shipwrecked himself. Oh, he's shipboat it went off.

And it's so traumatic off the Crimea. I mean, it's a very long description. And it's like many of the descriptions, I mean, I hope people will be able to read this book that you. It'll be on your website, perhaps. There's such rich descriptions, such personal descriptions of his feelings of everything he sees around him. I mean, you know, whether he's fighting a battle, as he did against the Habsburg forces, say,

or surviving the shipwreck in the Black Sea. I mean, you could be there. It's so immediate. He even tells us at one point that some of the people in the ship that was shipwrecked in this terrible storm were sort of clinging to the same piece of timber as him and he pushed them off

because he knew, always a little boat at that stage. He pushed them off because he knew that, you know, whatever he was clinging to wouldn't be able to stay above the waves. It's terrible, really. Great admission, though, and a measure of his honesty that he tells that story. One of the admissions, I mean, William very quickly outed him. I don't know how people would feel about that, but, you know, he was bisexual.

Do we know, did he admit that he was bisexual? If he was coy about drinking, was he open about his sexuality? I think quite unscandalist at the time, wasn't it, Caroline? It was the Ottoman gnome. Yes, I mean, you know, not just within Ottoman society. I mean, it was quite widespread, I think, everywhere. Perhaps the Ottomans, I mean, not just him, there's a whole, you know, array of poetry, which implies it's not, I mean, some of, well, exactly. I mean, it's, you know,

it's not as if this was something, something sort of special. But he describes it in the most, sort of the sweetest terms in a way. He talks about, you know, the darling boys, the beloveds. And he's himself, he does in his work give some mentions, there's rather a nice one. When he's out in the far eastern step near the Kuban River, he comes across the Kalmukes, which is this rather wild tribe who practice cannibalism. And he talks about eating flesh and he says anyone who has

kissed a darling boy will know that human flesh tastes very nice. Yeah. So that's just one instance. There are so many of them. The other cannibalism one which I just, I mean, I was appalled by,

but also really interested as a journalist. I thought his approach was actually very much like a journalist. So I think it's when he's among the tartars, and one of the very important tartars has died. I can't remember where this is in his life, maybe sort of 20 years into his journeying. But one of these sort of, for want of a better word,

chief and sons have died. And they're roasting him over an open fire, this boy. And they're all about to eat him. And he just asks, very simply, without judgment, why are you doing that? That's it. That's it. And then they describe, you know, this, and he writes,

it's very powerfully, this is how you make somebody live forever. They become part of you and therefore they never die. And he doesn't do judgment at that point, but he does just bucket loads of judgment elsewhere, doesn't he, Caroline? Well, he does judgment, but also in many instance, he says, well, the implication from the phrase he utters or writes is, you know, we don't do it like that. This is how they do it.

This is their custom and who are we to judge? He can certainly be judgmental. I mean, he's more, yeah. Yes, he's quite judgmental about, you know, Christians. What does he say? He refers to the moment always as the infidels, doesn't he? So what does he say? Well, and, you know, there are phrases which sort of stock phrases, like there's a special phrase for the Franks.

There's a special phrase for, you know, for Christians. There's a special phrase for, you know, Armenians. I mean, and even for Turks. So even though he was Turkish, he was a very elite Turk. And, of course, lots of people in the, within the Ottoman Empire at that time, I mean, and at all times, but within the elite were not, you know, Turkish heritage. cultural heritage and ethnic heritage. And his mother was an Abkhazian slave from Georgia.

He considers himself a Turk, which many didn't. But he calls them sort of mind like mindless bumpkins. When he uses the word Turk, he adds this, which he's talking about the common people, the rural people in Anatolia perhaps. So judgmental, yes, in some, you know, one could interpret it like that. Well, I need your interpretation of one of the episodes.

So I think, isn't it, sort of 1652, he arrives in Bulgaria, in Sofia. And I don't get what happens next. What happens next here, Callow? This is the old lady and the ashes. Oh, the old lady and the ashes. I don't know. Don't wave me off now, lady, because I'm traumatised by that passage. What happens in 1652 and why am I still traumatized by this piece of writing?

About that particular episode. What happens? I want you to. But it's a family. program. And I didn't know if I dare say. Listen, it's a disgusting program. We're often in trouble and we're filthy.

So what happens? As Evelia describes it. So he's in the house of some crone, a witch. And she takes ashes and rubs them on her vagina. She has some daughters, some girls there. And she throws the ashes on them after she's done that. And they all turn into chickens. Evlia's amazed.

Now, wait a minute. Can I just circle back to the, is he always telling the truth thing? What the hell is happening? at that point, Caroline, because yes, that's exactly what I read, but what does it mean? Well, let's just have the end. So then what happens? An infidel. A note that it's an infidel. It's not a Muslim or anything comes along and pisses all over them and they turn back into girls. So that's the story. You know, these can be folk stories. I mean, there has, you know, Evelier research has been actually more lively outside Turkey than in Turkey,

though that's now changing. You know, Bulgarian folk tales, imaginations. But he says it like He's there. That's my issue. He says it like it's happening in front of it. And he goes, and I was astounded when she took the... I mean, he literally says, I was astonished. Imagine my surprise. So that's what my point is. We shouldn't be so literal.

You know, this is my fault. No, no, I accept all blame. I'm so terribly sorry. William, which are the bits that are BBC trading, letting you down again, Rita. So sorry, so literal. Okay. So after that, William, what are the parts of? of the journey that you completely fell in love with.

Well, what we should start with is Istanbul, because he gives the greatest image, the greatest portrait of Istanbul at the peak of its glory that exists. I mean, it itself is a kind of booklet in itself. If it had nothing else had survived, he'd be famous for that, wouldn't he? He does, and it's not just the buildings. And I say that, you know,

when he's in Istanbul, this sort of fantastification is really not an element in his account. I mean, he does compare what he sees to certain other wondrous things and exaggeration might come in. But he, you know, was so much an Istanbulite and he describes it with the city with such love and affection. He also describes the people. For instance, there was a parade of the guilds. I mean, there were many, many guilds. It's a wonderful description of all the different guild members.

It's incredible. Such a rich description of the people who went past in the parade and, you know, what they did and how they got on with the other guilds. some history about them. When you're talking about guilds, you're talking about our understanding of guilds as well. Professional guilds, the butchers, the candle makers, whatever it is. And he also talks with sort of a great deal of compassion about bits of Istanbul that are not Muslim. I mean, he sort of sort of ventures off into suburbs, which probably nobody's really paid much attention to. I don't know the area like you do, but Galetta's not far away, is it?

And it's filled with Christians, but he finds their iconography charming. He writes in quite interested ways, yeah. He's very, very curious about things he's not familiar with. And as you say, not judgmental. He does. I mean, yes, one feature of everywhere he goes basically, or not everywhere he goes, but a lot of place he goes, most place he goes, is that he says how many there are from each, you know, religious community. And of course, in Gallata, there are more Christians, Greek Christians, room in his language than elsewhere. And he describes them, he particularly describes the mehanes, the taverns, because, you know, as a good,

Muslim, you're not meant to be drinking. So in Istanbul, the walled city, there may have been secret taverns. But these taverns were very much in the open in Gallata, and he describes the sort of practices that go on there, the fun to be had. He describes it in very exuberant terms, and he describes, as you say, you know, the architecture and the what he sees that is not familiar to him. It must have been rather a foreign land in a way, Gallater, even though it's so close, just across the Golden Horn from Istanbul. Then, of course, like Istanbul, it was walled, so somewhat set apart with a completely different history. Well, I mean, it is sort of the anti-orientalist in many ways, you know,

and you always find people coming over and looking at the strange Muslim people and their strange ways. And yet here he is sort of doing the opposite, both in his own kingdom. And he will venture further from his own comfort zone, if you will. Join us after the break, where we take the next chapter of this journey. And you'll be surprised where we end up. Welcome back. Now, we have, we're delighted to have the wonderful Caroline Finkel who we are making, well, I hope I'm not too uncomfortable. We're just going over stuff that he wrote the great travel writer 10 volumes, Everleer Cheleby. But William, you were going to take us on another leg of this journey. Where are you taking us next? I mean, the one that sort of most, he seems to dislike most. And the one where he seems to be most frightened is the Crimea, which is sort of ravaged by Tatars. And, and he, and he seems to be, he finds it a very threatening place.

Well, the Crimea itself was a vassal state of the Ottomans, and they were very close in a way. In fact, there were often rumours that the Crimea Tatars were going to come and usurp the Ottomans when the Ottomans were in very, you know, polished conditions in the early 17th century, say it's a bit further west, the Kuban step where these Kalmucks in particular were the people who really scared him. And it was incredibly cold when he was there. I mean, his descriptions of the cold are amazing.

trying to cross the rivers, the horse, all their goods. As we've already said, these Kalmucks were supposedly cannibals, eating these people they knew very well. He's friends and family, yeah. And it's a society, he says, where there's twice as many slaves as there are free people, that more than half the population is enslaved. Well, yes, that's as may be.

I mean, the Ottomans had many, many slaves themselves. Everlier had slaves. maybe there was something about the proportion that he found unsettling. And the slavery, of course, was very, I mean, there are debates about this, whether you want to slavery is slavery or whether plantation slavery was obviously such a different type of slavery from the Ottoman slavery. But it obviously made him uncomfortable, though he wouldn't have mentioned it. Perhaps he wasn't self-reflective enough on that point.

And he often goes as a diplomat to places that are enormously hostile to the Ottomans, But the one he likes best and the one that he's most sort of attracted, certainly to the people, of course, is Persia. And he's very taken by Persian boys and girls, he says. But not by the wine, despite the entreaties of his hosts. No, he seems to have had rather a wonderful time there in Tabriz. And it's in a way perhaps surprising because the Safavid Muslims of Iran were the antipathy of the Sunni Muslims of the Ottoman Empire. of these sort of official, there were a lot of Safavids, obviously, the East, where the Ottoman Empire shaded into Iran. But he doesn't really, well, there's a long talk about how they put people

to death. Yes, he doesn't like the tortures. There's too many torches. He doesn't like the torches at all. But I mean, in general, he seems to have had a fine old time there. What was it about the tortures? I mean, because for those people who haven't read it, what does he, what does he, what does he, what does he hate? There are 40 or 50 different kinds of torture that they put there, condemn men through. very, very nasty stuff. I mean, I'm sorry we can't read it. No, no, no, let's not. But, I mean, he...

I was reaching for my copy to get it. Oh, okay, William's going to do it. But it, I mean, he does revel in sensual, whether it's essential, which is lovely, which is sort of the touch of a hand or a lip, or the taste of the food that he's eating, or the sheer horror of the kind of things that go on around him. And in that respect, Caroline, he's quite unusual to be writing at his time. and not writing the courtly style of, you know, I met so and so, he was delightful, I met so and so not so delightful. He actually does something which is quite contemporary,

I find. Yes, I mean, within the sort of the Ottoman canon, he has been, you know, he's not translated. He's very little known. I mean, this is within, you know, he wasn't translated into Turkish until later than many other authors. It's interesting. I mean, he ended this chronicle in Cairo saying, the 1680s, but it lay in a cupboard there till 1740. Wow. When a black eunuch brought it to Istanbul. Exactly. Black eunuch brought it to Istanbul because they came from Abyssinia, the black eunuchs, who guarded the harem and other such such tasks. But so, I mean, the whole history of the manuscript is very interesting and different from most court chronicles where the author was either commissioned to write it or they sat down and wrote a chronicle, perhaps to gain favor within

court circles, but he went off on his own tantam. How did he not get clobbered? I mean, you know, he sort of, as William said, he walked into enemy territory. You know, the Safavids were not that fond of the Ottomans. They wouldn't have liked. There's religious reasons. There's also sort of power struggles going on at this time. He was an official diplomat at this point, I think. So he's under diplomatic protection. Yeah, no, but Caroline, I mean, just talk us through, you know, what it is about the period that means he was protected. Well, I didn't, I, you know, I'm was surprised by the Persian stuff. I mean, I guess he really was good company and did manage to endear himself to his Iranian hosts. Yes, as we said, I mean, the enmity between the Ottomans

and the Safavids was pretty much as bad, worse than against the Christians, the Habsburg Christians in the West, and we often forget that. And, you know, diplomats get bumped off all the time in this period. But he does not. They do. Yeah. And he also has, he reports, records narrow escapes he has on the battlefield when the Ottoman army is fighting the Habsburgs in the 1660s say, you know, he's there at these engagements, these military engagements. A horse is shot underneath them, isn't it? That's right. And he has to go and get a new horse. And so he's right in the thick of it. And yet he finds a way to escape. It is rather, you know, do we believe it? I don't know. Once he's gone the other side and he's with the Sultan and getting a new horse, he sees this terrible

defeat behind him on the other bank and sees all his friends getting massacred by the Habsburg. But he says that he does, he's a bit of a sort of, you know, doing what ambulances do. He does come along and patch people up. He reads the last rights or the equivalent. You know, he does seem to be there in various roles on battlefields, which he escapes them. He escapes it all. I found the passage on the torches of. We underestimated it by a factor of 10.

Have you? Okay. Oh, Lordy. Okay. All right, Caroline. Fast on your seat, but he's doing it. He's doing it. Can I just do the warning?

if you are of a delicate disposition, please, I mean, just go and make a cup of tea. He'll still be, he'll still be doing the gory thing when you come back, no doubt. But just go, go. I won't read it all because he actually enumerates 360 tortures that the condemned men are put through. Do you want to pick your top ten? I'll start off. He says, first they give the offender 300 lashes with a whip called the elephant penis. Then they strike his knee with drumstick breakers.

Then they drive pieces of straw under his fingernails. They brand him all over with branding arms. Then they force him to swallow a greasy rag. They pull it out by a thread which pulls out the stomachs and the guts as well. Anyway, it goes on like that for pages and pages. And he said, this is horrible. He does say it's horrible. It's a bit like being hung drawn and quartered or being on the rack.

You know, what's the difference? Exactly. And he says, my Khan, what is the purpose of torturing people to this degree? And they replied, my brother, these are criminals whose guilt has been established by witnesses. but he's horrified. And again, it's just sort of, you know, you very much get the impression of this humanist who's curious and humane and willing to see humanity in people of other nationalities and other religions. Yeah, the enemy, in fact.

I mean, if it's in Persia, it's, yeah. But you know what, Caroline, you've actually hit on something really interesting because you have a lot of Westerners who are travelling east and saying, look at this very exotic and very extraordinary thing. And let me tell you about this other thing that you won't believe that I've seen. he tells actually the opposite. He travels west. He travels towards Western Europe.

But he writes in a very similar vein, doesn't he? There's some wonderful passages. I've got it in front of me when he goes there. And he says that the Hungarians are more honorable and cleaner than other infants. He says they wear the same dress, but they're cleaner in their ways and they're eating. But he says the climate is delightful. The lovely boys and girls of the city are renowned. Indeed, the men and women do not flee from one another.

The women sit together with us, Ottomans, drinking, chatting. So he has a lovely time. And he says that in somewhere he says, as an aside, the reason the women can do this can mix with these strange outlandish Ottoman people in their robes is because women run things in Vienna. He goes to the St. Stephen's Cathedral. I mean, he gives a long, long description, perhaps as long and as, you know, as wonderfully appreciative as he does of the Soleimani Mosque in Istanbul or of the churches in Jerusalem. Mosque. in Jerusalem, where he also goes. And he keeps referring back to it in his work.

He describes it in great detail. He doesn't, of course, hold with figurative art, you know, the Mother Mary's and the Jesuses and so on. But he's interested in it. But in general, he really enjoys his visit there. He has a wonderful description of the emperor. He actually meets the emperor, Leopold. And he describes how he is.

He says that he has his skull is the shape of a bonnet, of a mevli, of a mevla, of a mevlana, of a whirling dervish, essentially. I mean, you can imagine this so well that his faces as long as a fox. His ears are like children's slippers. And then he says his nose is as large and as red as an obergine of the Peloponnese. Well, obviously, his readers couldn't vote to Vienna like he did. But they would presumably know these vegetables. Peloponnese was part of the Ottoman Empire.

And he says that his lips are as big as a camel's and that he drools. Exactly. So, you know, this very incredible descriptive vein that he had, this talent he had when on his trip to Vienna shows it off to very good effect. One thing that intrigues me is that the moment he's traveling, in a sense, is the cusp of the moment when the West, which has been on the defensive against the Ottomans for so long. And great chunks of Eastern Europe has fallen to the Ottoman armies. But that is sort of coming to a close when Chelyby is travelling. And he himself sees an army defeated by the Hapsburgs in Hungary and very narrowly escapes. And some of the mechanisms and the kind of automatones that he sees in Vienna are things that he wonders at, you know, as if the technology is already moving ahead in the West.

Do you think that he's on that cusp, that he's the kind of last generation of Ottomans who have the hotter of. of running an empire, but realize that the West is now catching up and in many ways is the equal, if not the superior to the Ottomans in terms of technology? And not just technology. I mean, superior, yes, but he compares the way that the West, in the case of the St. Stevens Cathedral in Vienna, how well that's looked after, you know, what good condition everything is from the library to the statues to everywhere, compared to the way that the Ottomans are looking after their architecture.

And I think this is in a way a sort of metaphor for what's happening in a wider sense. I mean, as historians, you know, way back in the old days, we used to talk about this as decline. And this idea of decline very much came from, you know, you have a decline, but it has to decline from something. And what it declined from was the supposed golden age of Suleiman, who I think you've talked about on your podcasts, who's built up as this figure who can, you know, do no wrong. I mean, it's, I won't say Henry the 8th comparison because his faults were very evident. He was slightly choppy. But the, you know, the sort of the undercurrents that were rumbling away in Suleiman's time,

for historians, we're not really brought out by historians until fairly recently. So, you know, you had this great resurgence, you had the apex, the summit, and then it was downhill. But downhill slowly. But Evelier was living at a time not only when he was seeing. with the evidence of his eyes, say technical stuff, as you mentioned it. But the Ottoman lands themselves were undergoing a lot of turmoil. There were huge rebellions in Anatolia from around 1600 when all these generals, these provincial governors were basically ganging up together. You know, sultans were deposed. There were rebellions in Istanbul, Janus rebellions.

There's an enormous fire, isn't there in Istanbul? And the whole quarter of get destroyed? There's a huge fire, yeah, and 1660 and other ones earlier. Yes, rather very close to our fire here to the 1666 fire, of course. But his, when he sets out, his aim is to, basically to big up the Ottoman Empire, both to describe it fully, so everyone can appreciate its, you know, its extent and its virtues, but also to make known what it is. Is there any sign of what's going to come in terms of restive peoples in the Borklands with Serbs and Balgars and Greeks, a century hence will begin to throw off the yoke of the Ottomans. Is there any sign of that in his travels? I think it's a bit early for that. I know that interests you a lot, and I don't want

to go back too early. I mean, in his time, this sort of the main case of, perhaps one could say It's not quite in the Balkans, but the Hungarians, you know, who are at that time, from Suleiman's time, they become, Hungary becomes part of the Ottoman Empire. But the Habsburgs consider it theirs, poor Hungary. So, you know, it's always contested by the two empires. But within Hungary, of course, there are Catholics and Protestants, and the Protestants are sort of more on the Ottoman side. I mean, they don't like these Catholics at all. So it's certainly not a homogeneous picture. And he's very aware of that, isn't he?

understands the divisions between Protestants and Catholics and writes about it with great interest. Yeah. He understands it very well. I mean, he spent a lot of time traveling around there, talking to people, hearing what they had to say. And then, you know, he went off on this, for this peace treaty at the end of one of the Ottoman-Hapsburg wars went to Vienna, as we just said. I mean, just picking up on William's point. Do you, I mean, you said he speaks in metaphors when he says, you know, look how beautifully the, you know, the Habsau-S-wist look after their monuments. and I wish we did the same thing.

Does he ever address the fact that they are a threat, or does he just always assume the Ottoman Empire is going to go on forever? That's a good question. I'm sure he, I mean, he criticises, as, you know, courtiers did, or as government officials did, who wrote. You know, they tended to criticise the people around the sultan. I mean, they can certainly see the cracks. For instance, or, you know, other grand viziers, whoever it is,

not the figure of the sultan directly. but there is certainly an undercurrent of concern, let us say. I mean, talking about these rebellions, for instance, he goes, he's all over Anatolia and he's with these people. He's sometimes very sympathetic to them to these, you know, Anatolian Pasha's governors, provincial governors who are fighting the central state. Then he has to pretend he's not, and he has to find a way out of that situation he's got himself into. So he's obviously very good at that too.

And again, I'm just sort of minded of the fact that this is a, This is a man who's desperately in need of translating, honestly, because it's just so, there's so much to this. So you've got this sort of very broad spectrum commentary that's going on. And, you know, from a smart guy who understands the world that he lives in. And then you have this kind of obsessive detail of dental procedures in Vienna. I just blew me away. And you can just imagine him just sort of sitting there, mouth, a gog, looking at this poor man having his skull drilled into. Do you think he wrote stuff down contemporaneously as he traveled?

Or did he then, you know, sort of like Alistair Campbell, for example, to name somebody in our sister podcast? Or did he sort of at the end of his life sit down and say, oh, I remember when that happened or I remember when this happened? Oh my goodness. That is a question that much exercises academics. Now try not to be too nerdy about it. But sometimes, you know, at one point he says, there's an impression that he wrote it down as he went. He did go back to Istanbul. Yet at other times, the final, we have, there's 10 books, we have an autograph of eight of these books.

Two of them were copies of later versions. But he does go back to these earlier books and say, for instance, I've been traveling for 41 years when he's been traveling for 20 years. So the way it's put together is not very clear. There's lots of notes on the side where he suddenly remembered things. But we found when we were riding horses across Anatolia in 2009, I find it incredibly difficult. to remember what had happened two days before, which village we were in, who we spoke to. If you don't sit down every night, and of course he had servants to do the cooking, we had someone to do the cooking as well, but it does all sort of, you know, go into a sort of bit of a mishmash.

And you really do have to make good notes when you're, when you're, you know, on the road. I'm pretty sure he must have kept notes because, I mean, particularly when he's, each city he goes to, he has very detailed accounts of each mosque, each, each, yeah. I mean, it's definitely someone who is writing a gazetteer really at times. But does he put it all together at the end of his life? Does he then haul them all off to Egypt? And he doesn't tell us why he never comes back. I mean, he leaves Istanbul in 1671 to go on the pilgrimage,

dies in the mid-1680s, never says why he never goes back to Istanbul. Did he lug all these notes with him? Or had he done sort of rough copies and then he, you know, does a fine copy at the end? I mean, how do we know how he died? what were the conditions around her? We don't know. No, it's so sad. No gravestone has been found. Gosh. People have looked somewhere, not necessarily in Cairo. This is, in a sense, the most amazing thing about him is that considering the credible detail, the unique detail of so much of what he's doing, that he's only become known both in Turkey and in the West relatively recently. His book doesn't

turn up for 100 years after he dies. It's only well known in Turkey, as you say, in the last 20 or 30 years, people have really got to grips with his text. And it's only in the last 10 years that even a selection of his work has appeared in English. So, I mean, basically, two things happened. One happened that because he traveled everywhere, academics in whichever country it was in Serbia, in Iran, whatever, would extract those passages and translate them into their language. So that was one thing that happened. I mean, for example, his description of Palestine, I think, is one of the only descriptions of 17th century Palestine extent. There's nothing else. So his very detailed look at what's going on. What does he say? Well, it's a complete picture of a

of a Palestine, which is about, I think, 30% Christian, 10% Jewish and 60% Muslim. And he goes into great detail about the mosques and the Sufi dervishes and the different kankas. And it's a very, very detailed snapshot of Palestinian history, which without him would simply not be known. So when you look at books that describe early modern Palestine or early modern Levant, you have to use Evelace Cheneby as your source. Yes, that's true. I mean, and also, you know, many monuments that he mentions, we only know or can only trace through what he says about them. Let me just say that I don't want to give the impression that he's never been in English in any form. He was at the beginning of the 19th century. The first two books, which is the

book about Istanbul and his first travels, his first expeditions, were translated into English. I've written an article about this. It wasn't a very good translation by a very eminent Austrian scholar called Joseph von Hammapurgstahl. I mean, who's very important in, you know, the history of that time. So, and that is available. You can get it on Google, but don't think that it's as good as it should be. We should say, because I've got it in front of me,

that anyone wanting to read more about this should consult the very, very good edition published by our friend Barnaby Rogerson, who has been on the podcast. earlier. His publishing company Eland produced a book 10 years ago called An Ottoman Traveller Selections from the Book of Travels by Evlia Cheleby, translation and commentary by Robert Dankoff

and Sunyong Kim. And it's a big fat, funny, entertaining book that is hugely hugely to be recommended. And of course Caroline Finkel's work, which is why you're here because we love it. Thank you very much indeed. That's all we've got time for is goodbye from me, Anita Arnon.

And goodbye for me William Duremberg.