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 in the seventeenth-century world: an imperial caravan left Damascus each year under a commander appointed by the sultan, carrying the surre, the money that paid the Bedouin tribes to keep the wells and leave the pilgrims alone. Evliya had put off his own pilgrimage for forty years while he travelled everywhere else, and finally made it at sixty, by the longest possible road. The Seyahatname he 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

    May 1671

    At sixty, after forty years of travelling everywhere else, he sets out at last for Mecca.

  2. Bursa of the mosques

    1671 CE

    He counts the fountains of the old Ottoman capital and tastes its water one spring at a time.

  3. The Aegean detour

    1671 CE

    Instead of going straight east he swings west through Manisa and Izmir, gathering towns.

  4. Aleppo of the caravans

    1671 CE

    In the greatest market city of Syria he counts khans, soap works and languages.

  5. Damascus and the caravan

    1672 CE

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

  6. The desert stages

    1672 CE

    Forty days of night marches between cisterns, forts and Bedouin escorts.

  7. Medina

    1672 CE

    He visits the Prophet’s tomb and describes the mosque room by room.

  8. The hajj of 1672

    1672 CE

    Forty years after the dream that started him travelling, he completes the pilgrimage.

Outcome

Reached Mecca for the pilgrimage of 1672, went down to Egypt and wrote the ten volumes of the Seyahatname in Cairo.

Evliya Çelebi

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

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Sources

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