EVLIYA, a celebrated Turkish traveller, generally spoken of as EVLIVA EFFENDI, was born at Constantinople in the year 1020 of the Hegira, answering to A.D. 1611. The circumstances of his parentage are characteristic. His mother was a slave from the Abaza tribe on the Black Sea, who was sent when young with her brother to Sultan Ahmed, who kept the boy for a page, and gave the girl to Mohammed Dervish, chief of the goldsmiths. Mohammed Dervish, the father of Evliya, had when young been the standard-bearer to Sultan Solyman at the memorable siege of or Sziget, in Hungary, in 1564, and one of his ancestors had been the standard-bearer to Mohammed II. at the siege of Constantinople. His sham of the spoil at the capture had been a house and piece of ground in a good situation, on which he had built 100 shops, and the profits of this speculation ho had assigned to a mosque, not however so entirely but that the adminis tration of the revenue. remained in the hands of his family. Evliya ' received a careful education, and attended for seven years the college of Harald Effendi in one of the quarters of Constantinople. One of his accomplishments was that of knowing the Koran by heart, as a token of which he assumed the technical appellation of Hails, but he tells us that in his own time there were 6000 men and 3000 women at Constantinople who had the same proficiency. A dream which he had on the night of his twenty-first birthday, and which ho relates with great minuteness at the commencement of his travels, made him resolve to devote his life to seeing the world and writing a description of what he saw, and the next forty-one years of his life were occupied in travelling. His movements were almost always connected with military expeditions or with diplomatic and financial missions, for his appointment to which he had a powerful friend in his uncle, the Abaza slave, Melek Ahmed, who rose from the post of sword-bearer to the sultan, to that of grand-vizier. Evliya tells us that in the
course of his career he had seen twenty-two battles, had visited the countries of eighteen different monarchs, and had beard 147 differout languages spoken. lie made the pilgrimage to Mecca, went to the Meru, Syria, and Persia, and in 1664 was secretary to Kara Manua wed on his embassy to Vienea, after which he obtained permission to travel on his own account through Germany and the Netherlands M . far as Dunkirk, returning through Denmark, Sweden, Poland, and the Crimea. The last ton yours of his life were devoted to writing , his travels in retirement at Adrianople, end ho died about the year 1679.
1 The travels of Evliya occupy four volumes in Turkish, and the I narrative comes down no later than the year 1655, so that it would appear he did not live to complete it. One volume of the four has ! been published in English (part 1 in 1834, part 2 in 1846) by the , Oriental Translation Fund, from the pen of the celebrated orientalist Von Hammer. It consists of a curiously minute account of Con tantinople, of a character which seems to entitle Evliya to the appal ation which he tells us one of his ancestors rejoiced in, "the Turk of Turks." The most childish credulity and superstition are apparent in every page : with some powers of observation and memory there is a total lack of judgment. A detailed statement of the distances round Constantinople, which Evliya walked round for the purpose in 1634-as careful and circumstantial a narrative as Dr. Birch's of his similar walk round London-is followed by a lengthy enumeration of the different talismans by which the city was protected by the ancient Greeks, a striking testimony of the ignorant awe with which the savage conquerors looked up to the superior civilisation they had subdued. There is no work now extant in a European language, from which a correct idea of the Turkish mind may be so easily formed, as from the travels of Evliya.