Ninth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

Evliyâ Çelebi was an enlightened Ottoman (as his name çelebi indicates) who wrote his travels, lasting over 40 years from the Aegean to the Sea of Azov, from the northern Black Sea steppe to the upper Nile. Seyahatnâme (The Book of Travels) which is in ten volumes narrated in first person is an important text, representing one of the few accounts of the 17th century’s Ottoman world and its periphery from the perspective of a Muslim intellectual. Seyahatnâme is not just based on factual accounts but also it depicts of Evliyâ’s great imagination, his skill in storytelling that ran alongside, elaborating, exaggerating, and fantasizing. In 2011, the year which would have been his 400th birthday, Evliyâ is being paid homage as UNESCO’s Man of the Year. Upon this, prominent studies have been conducted by scholars such as Caroline Finkel, Cemal Kafadar, Heath Lowry and Seyahatnâme has been rediscovered in cultural and academic field on an international scale. As a part of the ancient Greek and Roman rhetorical practices, ekphrasis basically means the verbalisation of a visual object, and it has become a literary tool in time. Since the description of Achilles’ shield in Homer’s Illiad, ekphrasis has been a frequently used literary practice which writers, historians, art critics apply. Ekphrasis can be applied as the description of visual art objects through the fictional forms such as poetry and novel as well as it occurs in the prose concerning history, art criticism and travelogues; it is studied in order to analyse writer’s handling with the description of the object.