Evilya Çelebi (II) — Seyhatnâme: in the middle of the sea
Derviş Mehmed Zilli (approx. 1611 – 1685) was best known by his pen name Evilya Çelebi, and originated from Constantine in the Ottoman Empire. He was an Ottoman Turkish explorer, renowned for his recording of over 40 years of exploration across the Black Sea region and beyond in his Seyahatnâme, or Book of Travels.
Excerpt:
We were in the middle of the sea with no coast in sight. But, praise God, the weather calmed a bit. The sun shone and warmed us up. The tossing of the sea died down. An east wind sprang up and drove us forward. God be praised, on the third day some lofty mountains came into view, and at noon the waves drove us ashore. I fell onto the sand utterly exhausted, recalling the verse:
On the boundless sea
Are benefits galore
But for security
It’s best to stay ashore.
Gathering my strength, I gave a hundred thousand praises to the Lord Creator. Consider that Lord of generosity, Who bestowed on me eighteen slaves in Mingrelia and Abkhazia and Crimea, then took them away. When I despaired of life in the merciless sea he again gave me four captives, lovely boys and girls, each of them one in a thousand.
As we were sheltering on the shore at the foot of the cliffs, some Muslims came and seeing us in this state removed their overgarments and draped them over this humble one and my slaves. I questioned them as they conducted us to the top of the cliffs. It turned out that these tall cliffs and orchards were part of the Keligra Sultan mountains which came down to the Black Sea in the province of Silistria (Kaliakra in Bulgaria).
Explanation:
Ottoman traveler Evliya Çelebi’s Seyahatnâme (17th century) offers some of the earliest articulations of the Black Sea littoral space. His writing engages with the turbulent water as a framework for navigating encounters with the sublime and unknown, extensively contemplating the sea space as one of immense power, transformation, and risk. The littoral is a context, for Çelebi, that functions with profound conceptual force – that shapes and clarifies the space around it both spiritually and physically. It is a container of history, time, and the sublime, whilst totally refusing containment itself.
Citation: Çelebi, Evliya, Seyhatnâme, in An Ottoman Traveller: Selections from the Book of Travels of Evliya Çelebi. Trans. and with commentary by Robert Dankoff and Sooyong Kim, Eland Publishing Ltd., 2010, pp. 51.