Its importance lies in three areas: a) It reconstructs Ottoman Palestine – its cities, towns, fortresses, roads, and buildings – which hardly survived. One version was translated and published in English in the 1930s. We still lack, even in Turkish, a scientific annotated edition of the passages concerning his sojourn in Ottoman Palestine. His work is unique in its scope, in its richness and the numerous possibilities to reconstruct Ottoman mentality and worldview. Yet they did not generate a serious phenomenon of pilgrimage as did Jerusalem and other sites in the Holy Land for Christians and Jews through the ages.Įvliya Çelebi, an Ottoman learned person with good connections in the Sultan’s court, was an exceptional figure who devoted forty years to travelling within the vast boundaries of the Ottoman Empire, and left a ten-volume book on his travels ( seyahatnamesi). It was mainly significant as being the most relevant route from Damascus to Cairo and as the locus of various holy places, of which the Haram al-Sharif and the al-Aqsa mosque in it, were the most important. This lacuna could be well explained by the absence of a tendency towards travelling among Muslim scholars and moreover by the fact that Palestine was a province of minor importance in the Ottoman Empire. In contrast to the hundreds of books from the 16 th to the 19 th century, written by Christian travelers and pilgrims to the Holy Land in various European languages, and the dozens of books written by Jewish travelers and pilgrims in Hebrew, there are only few descriptions written in Arabic or Turkish.
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