Narrative of Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa, in the Seventeenth Century, Vol. I

In 1611, a boy was born in Constantinople who would spend the next four decades of his life walking across the known world. Evliya Çelebi was a dervish, a courtier, and an obsessive observer of everything around him, and in this monumental work he recorded what he saw with an enthusiasm that still crackles off the page nearly four centuries later. Volume I begins with the story of his prophetic dream a vision that sent him wandering through the Ottoman capital's streets and beyond, to Bursa, to Iznik, into the layered world of 17th-century empire where Christian, Muslim, and Jewish communities rubbed shoulders in bustling bazaars and contested frontier towns. His prose is vivid, opinionated, and often hilariously full of himself: he rates cities like wine, describes a mosque's tiles with more passion than any battle, and pauses to tell you exactly what he thinks of the local food. This is travel writing before tourism, when moving through the world meant encountering it fully, when a single man could contain an entire era's appetite for the new and strange.