The Man Who Heard Words Move: Evliya Çelebi, Dreams, and the Weight of Language
- Seda
- Jan 22
- 5 min read
If you are learning Turkish, you will eventually come across the name Evliya Çelebi.
Usually in passing. A name in a textbook. A street sign. A footnote.
He is often introduced as “a famous Ottoman traveler.” That description is correct, but it barely touches what made him extraordinary.
Evliya Çelebi was not simply someone who moved through places. He moved through language itself. Through how people spoke, feared, exaggerated, joked, and believed.
He listened to words while they were still alive.
For Turkish learners, this matters. Because Evliya shows us that Turkish has never been only a system of grammar. It has always been a way of understanding the world.
Who Was Evliya Çelebi?
Born in Istanbul in 1611, Evliya Çelebi grew up in an educated household connected to the Ottoman court. He studied theology, music, calligraphy, and languages. He knew how to write formally, speak politely, and serve within official structures.
But he chose something else.
Over the course of more than fifty years, he traveled across Anatolia, the Balkans, the Caucasus, the Middle East, and North Africa. He recorded these journeys in a massive ten-volume work known as the Seyahatnâme.
This book is not a list of monuments. It is a record of voices.
Evliya wrote about how people argued in markets, how they joked, how they cursed, and how they described fear. He cared less about how the empire wanted to be seen and more about how life actually sounded.
A Dream That Redirected a Life
According to Evliya himself, everything began with a dream.
One night, sleeping in the Ahi Çelebi Mosque in Istanbul, he dreamed that the space was filled with light. He realized he was standing in the presence of the Prophet
Muhammad. Overcome with emotion, he tried to speak.
He wanted to ask for spiritual intercession.
He meant to say:
“Şefaat ya Resulallah.”(O Messenger of God, grant me intercession.)
But what came out of his mouth was different:
“Seyahat ya Resulallah.”(O Messenger of God, grant me travel.)
These are not two versions of the same word. They are different concepts that happen to live close to each other in sound.
In Turkish cultural imagination, spoken words are not neutral. Once said, they carry force. In the dream, the Prophet smiles and grants both requests. Evliya receives the blessing he intended and the life he accidentally named.
From that moment on, his life is shaped by a spoken redirection.
Recording the Living Language
What makes Evliya Çelebi unique is not just where he went, but how he wrote.
He documented how Turkish changed from region to region, how words shifted meaning, how local dialects bent grammar, and how humor softened fear. He paid attention to exaggeration not as a flaw, but as a storytelling tool.
Evliya understood something essential: language does not only describe reality. It creates it.
This becomes most visible in the words he records for fear.
Obur: From the Undead to the Everyday
One of the most revealing words in the Seyahatnâme is obur.
Today, a Turkish learner meets this word as an adjective meaning “gluttonous.”
Someone who eats too much. A harmless personality trait.
But in Evliya Çelebi’s time, obur meant something far darker.
The obur was believed to be a being that rose from the grave, endlessly hungry. It fed on blood, life force, and vitality. It was not just greedy. It was never satisfied. The word comes from the idea of devouring beyond need.
Evliya describes villages where people believed an obur was responsible for illness and death. He writes about graves being opened, bodies examined, and rituals performed to stop the hunger from spreading.
This is not accidental. Pause for a moment and think about it.
What we are witnessing here is semantic narrowing in action.
Over centuries, as fear lost its supernatural frame, the word "obur" shrank. The undead creature disappeared. The hunger remained. A word that once named terror became a comment on appetite.
This is how languages survive fear. They don’t erase it. They domesticate it.
Cadı: Fear That Once Had a Body
The same process appears in the word cadı.
Today, it often sounds childish or symbolic. But in Evliya’s writing, a cadı is not metaphorical. She is described seriously, with locations, dates, and witnesses.
Evliya records stories of witch battles in the Caucasus, of flying figures, and of terrifying nights filled with noise and light. These accounts are written not as fairy tales, but as things he claims were seen.
Before gothic novels, before modern horror, before popular fantasy, Evliya was already preserving a world where fear was collective and linguistic.
In his pages, fear has vocabulary.
Why This Matters for Learning Turkish
At this point, you might wonder why a Turkish teacher would write about dreams, witches, and undead creatures.
Because Turkish is a language where words are believed to carry weight.
A slip of the tongue is not always just an error. A word can redirect a life. A meaning can shrink, shift, or survive for centuries.
Evliya Çelebi teaches us that to learn Turkish is to learn how language once held fear, faith, imagination, and fate together.
His life begins with a spoken mistake. And that mistake becomes a fifty-year journey across languages and lands.
The next time you stumble over two similar Turkish words, remember this: sometimes a slip of the tongue is not an error. Sometimes it is a direction.
Vocabulary
Şefaat → spiritual intercession
Seyahat → travel, journey
Rüya → dream
Kısmet → fate, destiny
Seyyah → traveler
Seyahatnâme → book of travels
Obur → today: gluttonous; historically: an undead, endlessly hungry being
Cadı → witch
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Q: Was Evliya Çelebi a historian or a storyteller?
A: He was both. His work blends careful observation with narrative imagination, preserving how people spoke and believed.
Q: Did Evliya really believe in oburs and witches?
A: He recorded what people of his time believed to be real. That makes his writing a valuable cultural and linguistic record.
Q: Is the Seyahatnâme useful for Turkish learners today?
A: Yes. In simplified editions, it offers rich exposure to descriptive language, idioms, and cultural concepts.
Q: Why is Evliya Çelebi still relevant?
A: Because the Seyahatnâme is one of the richest firsthand records of the 17th-century Ottoman world. It does not only list places; it captures how people spoke, worked, prayed, joked, feared, traded, celebrated, and argued. For anyone trying to understand Ottoman society through language and daily life, Evliya is a rare kind of witness: he preserves accents, local vocabulary, professions, rituals, food culture, urban noise, and provincial detail that official chronicles often ignore. Even when his storytelling grows dramatic, the texture remains valuable, because it shows what an educated Ottoman mind found believable, entertaining, and worth recording.
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