The Story of a Forbidden and Censored Book: Early Editions of Evliya Çelebi's Seyâhatnâme

Abstract

Evliyâ Çelebi’s Seyâhatnâme (Book of Travels) did not receive much atten- tion until the nineteenth century. From this century onwards, it gradually became a popular work thanks to, fırst, the Müntehabât composed by Hammer in English and then to a compilation of excerpts in Turkish. Encouraged by this interest, Ahmed Cevdet, the owner of İkdâm newspaper, set out to publish the ten volumes of the Seyâhatnâme.  Although incomplete,  censored  and  sometimes  incorrect,  he  man- aged to publish the fırst six volumes between 1896-1901. Because of the complaints against the Seyâhatnâme, he then had to stop printing and was obliged to lock the printed volumes in storehouses. Although both the Müntehabât-ı Evliyâ Çelebi and the  fırst  six  volumes  that  Ahmed  Cevdet  published  were  banned  by  government, they helped expanding the Seyâhatnâme’s readership. This article discusses the Ot- toman Turkish editions of Evliya Çelebi’s Seyâhatnâme, which were instrumental in conveying the work to large masses and also effectively forming a negative public opinion about both the work and its author.