An Ottoman Traveller: Selections from the Book of travels of Evliya Celebi Translation and Commentary : Robert Dankoff & Sooyong Kim Evliya Celebi is the great travel writer of the Ottoman Empire, variously described as a Turkish Pepys, a Muslim Montaigne or an Ottoman Herodotus. Born in Istanbul in 1611, he started traveling in 1640 and continued for over forty years, stopping eventually in Ciaro where he died in about 1685. Starting with a volume on his native city, he collected his lively and eclectic observations into a ten-volume manuscript the Seyahatname, or Book of Travels. This translation, which offers selections from the whole work for the first time in English, gives a taste of the breadth of Evliya's interests, which range from architecture to natural history, through religion (particularly Islamic mystical Sufi traditions), politics, linguistics, music, science and the supernatural. What a boon it must have been when Evliya Celebi turned up on your doorstep during his travels. For he is a consummate storyteller with a puckish wit and humor - a repository of tales, from the pious to the bawdy, to suit every possible audience. Who else made a complete recitation of the Koran every Friday night, yet was equally interested in recording the stories of tribes who had sex with Nile crocodiles, the antics at a world convention of trapeze artists and the unbelievable feat of a Kurdish sorcerer who conjured a horse from a log pile? Evliya Celebi has long been a favoured source on the culture and lifestyle of the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire. All historians of this period are indebted to his vivid eyewitness descriptions of peoples, buildings and living languages. In this new translation, his world comes vividly to life for all to enjoy. Robert Dankoff grew up in Rochester, New York… he received his Ph.D. from Harvard University (1971) and has taught at Brandeis University, the University of Arizona, and since 1979 at the University of Chicago, where he is Professor Emeritus of Turkish and Islamic Studies. […] Sooyong Kim is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Bryn Mawr College. He is currently working on a book on the formation of an Ottoman literacy Canon in the sixteenth century.[…]