Evliya Çelebi in Kurdistan

At a Glance

Evliya Çelebi was born in Istanbul in 1611 and spent his life on the roads. His ten-volume Seyahatname, the Book of Travels, is the richest travel text of its age.
He crossed the Kurdish lands on three great journeys: 1646, 1649-50 and 1655-56. Martin van Bruinessen has traced these routes step by step.
In the Seyahatname the name Kurdistan appears as a matter of course. By it Evliya means not just an Ottoman province but the wide country where Kurds live.
Here is Evliya's measure: seventy days' road from Erzurum to the outskirts of Basra. His numbers run high; his geography is exact.
The word was ordinary in the state language of the day, too. The Ottomans even created an administrative unit named the Province of Kurdistan in 1847.
At Bitlis he was the guest of the ruler Abdal Khan and came away full of admiration. On the 1655 campaign he witnessed the khan's overthrow and the looting of his rich library; among the scattered books he recorded the Sharafnama.
He listened to Kurdish: word lists, a song, poems, and a qasida he copied at Amadiya. According to Bruinessen, that qasida may be the oldest known copy of a Kurdish poem.
Evliya loves to embellish: figures like 776 castles or six thousand tribes must be read through a filter. Bruinessen's verdict is balanced: the Kurdistan sections are scattered, yet close to the truth.
The Sharafnama and the Seyahatname are two witnesses to the same century: one a mîr (a Kurdish prince) writing from the inside, the other a traveller looking in from outside.

Bitlis, 1655. Soldiers fill the palace courtyard. The Ottoman army has entered the city and thrown the ruler's mansion open to plunder. Carpets, weapons, clocks change hands. And books: volumes carried out into the courtyard, knocked down to the highest bidder.

In the crowd stands a man: a traveller who came with the army, around forty, sharp-eyed, his notebook ready. He watches the books pass from hand to hand, and will later write down the name of one: the Sharafnama, the book in which the old ruler of Bitlis set out the history of his people. It was written sixty years before this looting, perhaps a few rooms away in this palace.

The traveller's name is Evliya Çelebi. His notebook is the Seyahatname, which will one day reach ten volumes. In this article we look at the Kurdish lands through his eyes: what he saw, what he heard, what he stretched.

Who Was the Traveller? Forty Years on the Road, Ten Volumes

Evliya was born in Istanbul in 1611, fourteen years after the Sharafnama was finished. He grew up in court circles, was well educated, and with his fine voice became a reciter of the Quran and a caller to prayer. Then he found his life's real work: to travel. For close to forty years he wandered the Ottoman realm and its neighbours. His death is dated to the 1680s; the sources point, with small differences, to Cairo.

The Seyahatname is a strange book. His contemporaries found it disordered, no serious history. A state document and a bawdy anecdote, mosque architecture and a recipe, a saint's legend and political gossip all sit on the same page. Today it is valued for exactly that. The official chronicles write the rulers; Evliya writes the street, the table, the clothing, the language. Bruinessen underlines the point: on the condition of women, on popular piety, on minorities and languages, Evliya is almost the only source among the Ottoman writers of his century.

One more caution. The printed editions we read today are troubled: the first appeared under Sultan Abdülhamid II, and censorship altered the text here and there. The archetype, the manuscript reckoned to be Evliya's own, could only be studied later. To read the Seyahatname is a work of repair, layer by layer.

Three Journeys Across the Kurdish Lands

Evliya made three great crossings of the Kurdish lands. Where did the roads lead? Bruinessen sets them straight.

The first, in 1646: the young Evliya, in the retinue of the pasha posted to Erzurum, took the northern road and only grazed the edge of Kurdistan. The second, in 1649-50, ran from Damascus and Aleppo to Urfa, then through Harput, Pertek, Palu, Genc and Muş to the Bingöl mountains. The third is the longest, 1655-56: when his kinsman Melek Ahmed Pasha became governor of Van, Evliya joined him. He stayed long in Diyarbekir and Bitlis, settled in Van, went on to Hakkari and Iran, and came down to Baghdad. From there he turned north again, on a southern loop reaching Mosul by way of Amadiya, Cizre and Hasankeyf. We wrote separately about Hasankeyf, now twelve thousand years underwater.

The fate of this last section is sorrowful. Evliya never finished that notebook; blank pages and unfilled headings were left behind, and he went on adding to his notes until his death. This half-finished notebook on southern Kurdistan is, in Bruinessen's judgment, a priceless source for the least-known region of the period.

The Name Kurdistan in the Seyahatname

Now to the real question. What did Evliya mean when he said "Kurdistan"?

In official Ottoman usage, Kurdistan was the name of a province, an administrative unit. Evliya more often uses the word broadly: setting political borders aside, he means the country where Kurds live. In one place he grumbles at the hard road and calls the terrain "Kurdistan and Turkmenistan and sengistan," a land of Kurds, Turkmens and stones. The city man's disdain for the mountains is in that sentence too; Evliya was no angel.

On other pages, though, the description turns serious. Here is his measure. Kurdistan reaches from Erzurum in the north, through Van, Hakkari, Cizre, Amadiya, Mosul, Şehrezur, Harir and Erdelan, down to Baghdad and near Basra; its length is seventy days' road, its breadth fifteen to twenty-five. In these lands, he says, live five hundred thousand Shafi'i Muslims who bear firearms; Shafi'ism is the Sunni school of law widespread among Kurds. He counts 776 castles and adds that all are sound. The figures are Evliya's, and we will return to them. The geography is startlingly clear.

Evliya also passes on a reason of state. These six thousand Kurdish tribes in the mountains, he writes, are a firm rampart between Iran and the Ottomans; without them the Persian army would march easily into Anatolia. Bruinessen ties this buffer argument to older sources, a line from İdris-i Bitlisi to the Sharafnama and on to Aziz Efendi's reform treatise. The relative autonomy of the Kurdish emirates (mîrliks, hereditary principalities) was part of the empire's security policy. Evliya saw it working: in a small hükûmet like Palu, a self-governing Kurdish district, there was no timar (land revenue granted for military service) and no janissaries. Revenue stayed with the local ruler, who in return fielded two thousand horsemen in wartime.

A note on the word itself. The name Kurdistan was ordinary in the maps, decrees and chronicles of that age, and the Ottomans created a province by that name in 1847. The tension the same word took on in the following century is the story of modern times, not of Evliya; that file belongs to other articles.

Bitlis: Abdal Khan's Palace and Library

Where in the Kurdish world did Evliya stay longest and write most? In Bitlis. On his first arrival in 1655 the ruler Abdal Khan took him in. Evliya is openly full of admiration: he describes a scholar-ruler whose accomplishments cannot be counted, and writes at length of his palace, gardens and library. Bruinessen's verdict: the Bitlis pages are a picture of daily life in a Kurdish mîrlik, alive as no other source can match.

Then things went wrong. Abdal Khan and the Ottoman administration came to a standoff, and the governor of Van, Melek Ahmed Pasha, led a punitive campaign against the khan. Evliya was with the army and saw everything. The Ottomans overthrew the khan and set his son in his place; the soldiers looted the palace, and the rich library was scattered, its books knocked down at auction. Among them Evliya recorded the name of the Sharafnama. This is his only mention of it; in Bruinessen's reading, he had heard of the book but seems never to have read it.

The end is more striking still. A year later Evliya passed through Bitlis a third time and found Abdal Khan back on his throne; this time the traveller stayed a while as the khan's hostage. The one who threw the khan down and the one who put him back were parts of the same order: the balance of power between empire and mîrlik ran on such tides. The Bitlis pages were later carried into books of their own by Köhler, Sakisian and Dankoff.

Diyarbekir, Van, Hakkari: Three Cities, Three Notebooks

Evliya reached Diyarbekir in 1655 and wrote the city down with appetite: its fortress, its bazaars, its gardens along the Tigris, its fifty-okka watermelons. He gives the city's weight by an official measure too: the Diyarbekir judge's salary was five hundred akçe, the Palu judge's one hundred and fifty. Its merchants traded with far countries. We told this city, with its walls and its Hevsel gardens, in a separate article.

Van was the base of the third journey. Here Evliya lived beside Melek Ahmed Pasha and set out into the surroundings at every chance. He also went on an embassy to Iran, a section whose reliability is disputed, as we will see.

And the Hakkari notes? A treasure of their own: on its tribes and local politics Evliya left details found in no official record. Researchers complain that this section long went without a proper printed edition. For the reader curious how the tribal order worked, we have a separate article on agha, shaikh and mîr in Kurdish society.

Evliya Listening to Kurdish

The most valuable thing in the Seyahatname for Kurds? That Evliya gave ear to the language.

First, the legend of its origin, as he tells it. Leaning on an Armenian historian he calls Mighdisî, Evliya relays that the first city founded after the Flood was Cudi (the mountain where Islamic tradition sets Noah's landfall); that from Noah's community a certain Melik Kürdim lived six hundred years, settled at Meyyafarikin, and made himself a new tongue, neither Hebrew nor Arabic, neither Persian nor Dari nor Pahlavi. Kurdish, he says, takes its name from this Melik Kürdim. Folk memory tells it this way; the document is silent, and no one has yet identified the source Evliya calls Mighdisî. But even the legend is precious: it shows, from an Ottoman traveller's own pen, that in the seventeenth century Kurdish was reckoned a separate and ancient language.

Evliya the observer speaks too. Kurdistan is an endless land of stone mountains, he says, so Kurdish has twelve kinds, and at times the speakers understand one another only through an interpreter. Linguistics today places Kurdish in the Iranic family (like Persian) and maps its dialects by other lines; but the variety itself Evliya saw rightly.

Then he turns to examples. Near Meyyafarikin, close to today's Silvan, he compiles a word list; he writes down a song in the Cizre dialect and sentences in the Hakkari dialect. He relays a long poem from the Bitlis region that he records as Rojiki; by Bruinessen's study, that text's grammar is in fact Turkish, its vocabulary full of Armenian words. So Evliya's record documents the interwoven languages of the age too.

The most valuable record comes from Amadiya. Evliya arrived as the khan's guest; he describes with amazement the town's armed, warlike and famous ulema, and writes that its tradesmen wore striped şal û şapik, the traditional jacket-and-trousers of the Kurdish man. He reckons Amadiya's Kurdish the most literary of the dialects, and copies out a qasida, the long form of classical eastern verse, by the local scholar Molla Ramazan Kürdiki. Its first couplet runs:

Reyi li Asef diken, walih û heyranê 'işq Dersê Aresto diden, serxweş û sekranê 'işq

Roughly: love's madmen give counsel to the vizier; love's drunkards teach Aristotle his lessons. Bruinessen's judgment is large: this copy may be the oldest known written copy of a Kurdish poem, since the manuscripts we hold of older poets are far later. And Evliya says he saw a rich world of Kurdish poetry at Amadiya. So Melayê Cezîrî was no lone miracle; he was the best-remembered name in a wide circle of poets. We told of the summit of that circle in our article on Ehmedê Xanî and Mem û Zîn.

The Traveller's Exaggerations: How Do You Read Evliya?

So far we have praised. Now the honest warning. Evliya loves to embellish: he rounds his numbers, swells them, sometimes invents them. The 776 castles and "all of them sound" is an exaggeration with a confident face. Six thousand tribes, five hundred thousand men under arms: not a census but speech calculated for effect.

The more serious trouble is in the Iran section. Bruinessen's finding is plain: part of Evliya's account of western Iran is so wrong that one wonders whether he saw those places at all; he seems to be repeating a much older geography, the work of Qazwini. Does this discredit everything? No. The same study's other verdict is just as plain: the Kurdistan sections are scattered, yet close to the truth, and comparisons with archival documents confirm Evliya's observations in places.

The historian's method is settled. Evliya alone does not count as proof; he is weighed against another source. When a number arrives, the sieve tightens; when a custom, a garment, a language, a street arrives, trust in the traveller's eye rises. Evliya is not a camera but a telescope of coloured glass. Whoever knows the colour of the glass reads the view rightly.

Two Witnesses, One Century: The Sharafnama and the Seyahatname

Bruinessen's study opens with a sentence: about sixty years after Şerefxan finished the Sharafnama, Evliya Çelebi travelled Kurdistan from end to end. Set the two side by side, and what appears? Two windows onto the seventeenth-century Kurdish world.

The Sharafnama looks from the inside: from the pen of a mîr, ordered and systematic, writing dynasties, genealogies, administrations. The Seyahatname looks from the outside: scattered, but it knows the street, and writes the woman, the dervish, the tradesman, the song, the watermelon. One is the ledger of the state and its families, the other of life. Bruinessen says the two complete each other: the Sharafnama is the single most important source for Kurdish history, and Evliya makes the daily life it passes over speak.

The century's two witnesses, each unaware of the other, did the same work: they kept a record, one in his castle room, the other on horseback. Everyone who writes Kurdish history today must open both notebooks at once. We told the Sharafnama's own story before: in 1597, from a mîr's pen, the first Kurdish history. This article is its companion on the road.

Frequently Asked Questions

When did Evliya Çelebi go to the Kurdish lands? On three great journeys: in 1646 along the Erzurum line, in 1649-50 through Urfa, Harput, Palu and Muş, and in 1655-56 through Diyarbekir, Bitlis, Van, Hakkari and, in the south, Amadiya, Cizre and Hasankeyf. The records are in the Seyahatname, above all its fourth and fifth volumes.

Does the word "Kurdistan" appear in the Seyahatname? It does, and as a matter of course. Evliya uses the name both for the Ottoman province and, more broadly, for the country where Kurds live; he sets its bounds from Erzurum to near Basra, seventy days' road. The word was ordinary in the state language of the age.

Who was Abdal Khan? He was the Kurdish ruler of Bitlis in the seventeenth century. Evliya was his guest and admired his learning, his palace and his library. In 1655 an Ottoman campaign overthrew him and the soldiers looted his library; a year later the khan took power back. Evliya witnessed it all.

What did Evliya record about Kurdish? He wrote that Kurdish came in many kinds, and collected word lists and samples of verse. The qasida he copied at Amadiya may be, in Bruinessen's view, the oldest known copy of a Kurdish poem. He reckoned Amadiya's Kurdish the most literary of the dialects.

How far can we trust what Evliya tells us? With measure. He exaggerates his numbers and some scenes of heroism, and the Iran section carries serious doubt. His Kurdistan observations, though, are found close to the truth and confirmed by archival documents in places. He is read not as a lone source but as one that is weighed.

Sources and Further Reading

Primary sources (from the Bedel Boseli Collection):

Martin van Bruinessen, "Kurdistan in the 16th and 17th Centuries, as Reflected in Evliya Çelebi's Seyahatname", The Journal of Kurdish Studies 3 (2000): the backbone of this article; the travel routes, the description of Kurdistan, the Abdal Khan pages, the language samples and the qasida come from here.
Şerefxan Bidlisi, Sharafnama (Dr. Mehrdad R. Izady's English edition): for the comparison of the two witnesses.
The collection's study record "Kurdistan in the First Half of the 19th Century and the Founding of the Province of Kurdistan": the source for the 1847 Province of Kurdistan.

Social Media Summaries

The following summaries are ready to share; copy and use them.

In the 17th century the Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi named Kurdistan as a matter of course, and measured it: seventy days' road from Erzurum to near Basra. One witness's notebook: bedelboseli.com/en/evliya-celebi-in-kurdistan
In 1655 Ottoman soldiers looted the palace of Bitlis and its books were sold at auction. Evliya was there, and among the scattered volumes he recorded the name of the Sharafnama. A witness to a library: bedelboseli.com/en/evliya-celebi-in-kurdistan
The qasida Evliya copied at Amadiya may be the oldest known copy of a Kurdish poem. Kurdish in the Seyahatname, read through Bruinessen's study: bedelboseli.com/en/evliya-celebi-in-kurdistan
776 castles, all of them sound: Evliya loves to swell a number. So how does the historian read him? Through a sieve. The traveller's exaggerations, and his truth: bedelboseli.com/en/evliya-celebi-in-kurdistan
One century, two witnesses: the mîr Şerefxan writing from inside, the traveller Evliya looking in from outside. Two windows onto Kurdish history in a single article: bedelboseli.com/en/evliya-celebi-in-kurdistan