From Istanbul to Mecca

Evliya Çelebi · 1671 CE – 1672 CE · Earth

From Istanbul to Mecca — Evliya Çelebi · 1671 CE – 1672 CE · Earth — Recorded expedition route · schematic map

Perform the hajj at last, and describe every town, shrine and stage of the road on the way.

Historical context

The hajj was the best-organised journey of the seventeenth-century world: an imperial caravan left Damascus each year under a commander named by the sultan, carrying the mahmal and the surre, the sultan’s purse for the people of Mecca and Medina and for the Bedouin tribes who supplied the road and were paid to leave the pilgrims alone. Evliya had wanted to make the pilgrimage since his youth and finally made it at sixty, by a long road through western Anatolia, the Aegean islands and the Syrian coast. In 1672 the caravan also carried a political errand: its commander came to depose the Sharif of Mecca. The Seyahatname Evliya wrote afterwards in Cairo turns that road into an inventory of the Ottoman world, town by town.

The voyage, step by step

  1. Leaving Istanbul

    21 May 1671

    At sixty, after three decades on the roads of the empire and beyond, he sets out at last for Mecca.

  2. Bursa of the mosques

    1671 CE

    He spends a week as a guest in the first Ottoman capital, then rides into the robbers’ country of Mount Domaniç.

  3. The Aegean detour

    1671 CE

    From Afyon, instead of going on east, he turns back west through Manisa to Izmir and the islands, gathering towns.

  4. Aleppo of the caravans

    1671 CE

    In the great market city of northern Syria he paces the walls and counts khans, shops and coffeehouses.

  5. Damascus and the caravan

    February 1672

    He joins the imperial pilgrim caravan forming under the governor of Damascus, Hüseyin Pasha.

  6. The desert stages

    March 1672

    Nearly forty days from Damascus to Medina, marching by day and by torchlight between forts, pools and Bedouin camps.

  7. Medina

    March 1672

    He visits the Prophet’s tomb, sweeps its floor beside the pasha and leaves a lamp of his own.

  8. The hajj of 1672

    April 1672

    More than forty years after the dream that started him travelling, he completes the pilgrimage and sees the Sharif of Mecca deposed.

Outcome

Reached Mecca two days before the standing at Arafat in April 1672, saw Hüseyin Pasha depose the Sharif of Mecca, came to Cairo with the Egyptian caravan in June 1672 and wrote the ten volumes of the Seyahatname there.

Evliya Çelebi

Ottoman gentleman-traveller whose ten-volume Book of Travels records forty years on the roads of the empire and beyond, among them the pilgrimage to Mecca of 1672.

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Sources

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