Doing It the Evliya Celebi Way

Doing It the Evliya Celebi Way

By ANDREW FINKEL

ISTANBUL — Whenever I set out to tour Turkey with my wife, I understand exactly what Diana, Princess of Wales, meant when she complained about there being “three of us” in her marriage. My rival’s name is Evliya Celebi, and he spent much of his life on a horse. He was born 400 years ago and Unesco decided to celebrate his birth this year. I can’t compete.

For a start, he was more productive than I, or indeed most people, could hope to be. Once Evliya hit the road in 1640, he never stopped traveling. (“Celebi” means “esquire.”) The accounts of his journeys run to 2,400 folios, or ten volumes in the recently completed Turkish edition. He is Marco Polo and Samuel Pepys rolled into one; a Muslim Michel de Montaigne, an Ottoman Herodotus.

Through his eyes we witness a dental operation at the Hapsburg court; the risqué shenanigans in a bathhouse in Bursa, Turkey; torture in Safavid, Iran; and the Parthenon in all its 1668 glory — 20 years before a cannonball hit an ammunition dump inside the temple and blew it to smithereens. He fends off brigands in the forests of deepest Anatolia and leads the call to prayer after the Ottoman conquest of Crete. Above all, he is the historian of the common people and offers a unique first-hand account of everyday life at the peak of the Ottoman Empire.

So while my wife Caroline, a historian of the period, is happy to leave home without me, she’ll never leave without Evliya. Only the other day she set out to recreate the first stages of his 1671 pilgrimage to Mecca. Caroline and a group of like-minded enthusiasts, including botanists and cultural historians, rode in his hoof-prints for 40 days. They wound their way from a spot across the Gulf of Izmit near Istanbul, inland down the west of Turkey toward Kutahya, Evliya’s ancestral home. In so doing, they carved out what has now been dubbed the Evliya Celebi Way, Turkey’s 13th official cultural route and the only such trek documented for both riders and hikers, with G.P.S. coordinates and detailed descriptions.

The route winds through settlements and along paths that have been largely unchanged since antiquity. Exploring this landscape through Evliya’s eyes is not just a game of historical make-believe but a way of preserving it for the future. Developing long-distance treks in Turkey as a way of saving the environment was the brainchild of Kate Clow, an IT specialist turned eco-warrior. Her mission has been to prevent Turkey’s booming tourism industry from churning up everything in its path.

For years Turkey vowed not to replicate the Costa del Chaos of Spanish-style budget resorts, and for years developers built one bed-factory after another. Some 30 million tourists visit Turkey every year; the industry is worth $20 billion. Yet no one has calculated the environmental cost of establishing golf courses along the arid Mediterranean coast or bulldozing great swathes of it. Meanwhile, the profits might soon hit a cap. Those hoping to get rich quick off the sun-broiled backs of Northern Europeans should consider this paradox: the more visitors come, the less they spend. Expenditure per tourist in Turkey is going down.

Clow set out to generate more sustainable tourism by appealing to people’s appetite for traveling in time. Visitors who come to Turkey to take in its natural and historical wonders contribute more to the economy than those whose purview is limited to bars and beaches. Clow’s first long-distance trekking route, the 500-kilometer Lycian Way, which opened in 1999, now attracts some 15,000 visitors every year (most don’t walk the entire stretch, however). Hikers stay in tents or rural homestays, not concrete towers. And they provide an income for the villages through which they pass, encouraging the natural custodians of the countryside to stay on the land.

Backpacking or riding horses through river beds isn’t everyone’s idea of a restful two-week holiday. But with Evliya at one’s side it’s easier to remember that the journey is often more interesting than the destination. Even I can get used to the idea of that ménage à trois.

Andrew Finkel has been a foreign correspondent in Istanbul for over 20 years, as well as a columnist for Turkish-language newspapers. His latest book, “Turkey: What Everyone Needs to Know,” will be published next year.

via Doing It the Evliya Celebi Way – NYTimes.com.