Evliya Çelebi in Albania and adjacent regions: Kossovo, Montenegro, Ohrid : the relevant sections of the Seyahatname ISBN: 9789004116245 Platform/Publisher: ACLS / Brill Digital rights:Users: Unlimited; Printing: Ten pages at a time; Download: Ten pages at a time Subjects: Middle Eastern: 632-1918;
The Turkish traveller Evliya Çelebi toured Kosovo in 1660, northern Albania and Montenegro in 1662, and southern Albania in 1670. The present volume includes a critical edition and annotated translation of his descriptions of these regions, extracted from Books V, VI and VIII of his Sey h atn me or Book of Travels. For seventeenth-century Albania, and in particular for the interior of the country, the Sey h atn me constitutes a mine of information and is a work of inestimable value. Evliya offers us detailed itineraries througha virtual terra incognita, including, among many other things, surprisingly accurate descriptions of market towns, fortresses, mosques, pilgrimage sites and pleasure-grounds, and a sample of the Albanian language. His writings are of particular interest for our knowledge of the spread of Islam and the dervish orders in Albania. Evliya's descriptions of Albanian towns and villages reveal that these encompassed all the elements of a refined Islamic culture, of which tragically few traces have survived the course of history.
Robert Dankoff , Ph.D. (1971) Harvard University is Professor of Turkish at the University of Chicago. He has published several works on the seventeenth-century Turkish traveller Evliya Çelebi, including Evliya Çelebi in Bitlis (Brill, 1990).
