Merchants wade into these pools and collect the oil in ladles and fill goatskins with it, these oil merchants then sell them in different regions. Of oil merchants in Baku Çelebi wrote: "By Allah's decree oil bubbles up out of the ground, but in the manner of hot springs, pools of water are formed with oil congealed on the surface like cream. Çelebi visited Crete and in book II describes the fall of Chania to the Sultan in book VIII he recounts the Candia campaign. While visiting Vienna in 1665–66, Çelebi noted some similarities between words in German and Persian, an early observation of the relationship between what would later be known as two Indo-European languages. He wrote: " cursed those priests, saying, 'Our world used to be peaceful, but it has been filled by greedy people, who make war every year and shorten our lives.'" Çelebi claimed to have encountered Native Americans as a guest in Rotterdam during his visit of 1663. He visited Tirana, Lezha, Shkodra and Bushat in 1662, Delvina, Gjirokastra, Tepelena, Skrapar, Përmet, Berat, Kanina, Vlora, Bashtova, Durrës, Kavaja, Peqin, Elbasan, Pogradec, Kavaja and Durrës in 1670. Çelebi travelled extensively throughout Albania, visiting it on 3 occasions. Çelebi also included the central mountains of Kosovo within Arnavudluk. He viewed the "Kılab" or Lab river as having its source in Arnavudluk (Albania) and by extension the Sitnica as being part of that river. Çelebi referred to the "mountains of Peć" as being in Arnavudluk (آرناوودلق) and considered the Ibar river that converged in Mitrovica as forming Kosovo's border with Bosnia. The highlands around the Tetovo, Peć and Prizren areas Çelebi considered as being the "mountains of Arnavudluk". In 1660 Çelebi went to Kosovo which is a toponym in Serbian language and referred to the central part of the region as Arnavud (آرناوود) and noted that in Vučitrn its inhabitants were speakers of Albanian or Turkish and few spoke Serbian. It is thrown from rock to rock as high as the sky." Kosovo Çelebi wrote that it "is like a rainbow arch soaring up to the skies, extending from one cliff to the other.I, a poor and miserable slave of Allah, have passed through 16 countries, but I have never seen such a high bridge. He wrote that the name Mostar means "bridge-keeper", in reference to the town's celebrated bridge, 28 meters long and 20 meters high. Bosnia Įvliya Çelebi visited the town of Mostar, then in Ottoman Bosnia and Herzegovina. They included descriptions of first hand encounters, third party narrator witnesses and invented elements.
He recorded variety of historiographic and ethnographic sources. Įvliya Çelebi died in 1684, it is unclear whether he was in Istanbul or Cairo at the time.ĭuring his travels in South Slavic regions of the Ottoman Empire Çelebi visited various regions of the modern-day Croatia including northern Dalmatia, parts of Slavonia, Međimurje and Banija. Departing from the Ottoman literary convention of the time, he wrote in a mixture of vernacular and high Turkish, with the effect that the Seyahatname has remained a popular and accessible reference work about life in the Ottoman Empire in the 17th century, including two chapters on musical instruments. The collected notes of his travels form a ten-volume work called the Seyahatname ("Travelogue"). His journal-writing began in Constantinople, with the taking of notes on buildings, markets, customs and culture, and in 1640 it was augmented with accounts of his travels beyond the confines of the city. He was also trained in the theory of music called ilm al-musiqi. Çelebi had studied vocal and instrumental music as a pupil of a renowned Khalwati dervish by the name of 'Umar Gulshani, and his musical gifts earned him much favor at the Imperial Palace impressing even the chief musician Amir Guna. Though employed as a clergyman and entertainer at the Imperial Court of Sultan Murad IV Evliya refused employment that would keep him from travelling. Ī devout Muslim opposed to fanaticism, Evliya could recite the Quran from memory and joked freely about Islam. He may have joined the Gulshani Sufi order, as he shows an intimate knowledge of their khanqah in Cairo, and a graffito exists in which he referred to himself as Evliya-yı Gülşenî ("Evliya of the Gülşenî"). Evliya Çelebi received a court education from the Imperial ulama (scholars). In his book, Evliya Çelebi traces his paternal genealogy back to Ahmad Yasawi, an early Sufi mystic. Both his parents were attached to the Ottoman court, his father, Derviş Mehmed Zilli, as a jeweller, and his mother as an Abkhazian relation of the grand vizier Melek Ahmed Pasha. The house of Evliya Çelebi in Kütahya, now used as a museumĮvliya Çelebi was born in Constantinople in 1611 to a wealthy family from Kütahya.