It was 22 October 2009, Day 31 of the Evliya Qelebi Ride, and serious his­torical fault lines were emerging for the first time.

In what was to be a jour­ney of a legendary 40 days and 40 nights, never had we encountered such a show of hostility. We were camped on the village common at Ovacik (“little grassy plain”).

We—Donna and Mac, both of us literary and cultural historians—will return to the incident at Ovacik, but we will first reflect back on how it came about that, in company with a small group of equestrian enthusiasts, we were riding across western Turkey in the hoofprints of the Ottoman traveler Evliya Qelebi (1611-c. 1687), author of the ten-volume manuscript Seyahatname, or “Book of Travels.” We describe our initial goals and how they developed, in the early stages of planning the expedition, into a pro­ject that engaged directly with questions of historical reenactment: the Evliya Qelebi Ride and Way, investigating Ottoman history on horseback and producing a guidebook for future travelers following in the hoofprints of our route.

DOI: 10.4324/9780429445668-13 closely as we could manage. We argue that taking Evliya as our guide intro­duced questions of horsemanship and hospitality, and we describe how Evliya’s ideal vision of the Ottoman past differs from the neo-Ottomanism of the current political moment in the Turkish Republic. After revisiting Ovacik and elaborating on how it represented an anomalous rupture in our experience of rural hospitality, we recount and analyze a number of other unforeseen encounters that illustrate how continuities with Ottoman codes of hospitality have shaped patterns of migration to and within Turkey in sometimes unexpected ways. We ourselves as reenactors, avowed followers of Evliya ^elebi, benefited from the hospitality traditionally offered to trav­elers. But we also discovered that the Turkish Republic had often continued to practice remnants of Ottoman hospitality to migrants—silent reenact­ment was ongoing all around us.

At first, the Evliya ^elebi expedition came together through a love of horses. We (Donna and Mac) had the idea to make a long-distance ride across Anatolia. Our initial plan was to commemorate, and reenact, not the plethora of Western travelers who will have gone before us but those less well-known trailblazers, Eastern, Ottoman travelers. We hoped to unlearn Orientalism, the Western grid of perceptions regarding the East, as we went along, as we entered in, and as we learned from the local culture (Landry, 2004). We would do what Edward Said has accused many Western scholars of not doing—attempt to leave our previous assumptions behind and learn from the Other. We discussed our plans with Ottoman historian Caroline Finkel, who wanted to come along, and she at once suggested that we con­sult Evliya ^elebi for our route. One of the longest works in world litera­ture, Evliya’s Seyahatname documents 51 years of equestrian travel from Tabriz to Vienna, from the Sea of Azov to Sudan.

It soon became clear that Evliya was the Man to Follow as we set about preparing project descriptions in order to attract sponsors (for a list of these, see Landry, 2010; they include the Leverhulme Trust, which awarded Donna a 2009 International Academic Fellowship). Not only did he wear a ring inscribed “the world traveler Evliya” (Dankoff, 2004, p. 126), but he carried letters of introduction that described him as “a man of peace” who hoped “to study the many nations and races of mankind” (Stathi, 2005­2006) as he went along, recording the stories, dreams, histories, jokes, lies, and fantasies of the people he met along the way. When we set out to find horses, Caroline contacted Patricia Daunt, English wife of a former British Ambassador, and she introduced us to Ercihan Dilari, horseman extraordi­naire; he in turn persuaded Susan Wirth and Therese Tardiff to come along, more from a love of horses than from an interest in the Ottoman past. With Sedat to look after the horses and Metin Aker driving the support vehicle and organizing food for horses and riders, we set off to follow a section of Evliya’s 1671 pilgrimage route to Mecca. Beginning beyond the congested

Figure 10.1 Shows the route of the Evliya Qelebi Way with the UNESCO logo fea­turing a beardless Evliya. Evliya speaks of himself as clean-shaven and a “world traveller.”

Source: Photo by permission of Kate Clow and Caroline Finkel.

environs of Istanbul at Hersek, we rode along the southern shore of the Sea of Marmara, through or close to the towns of Iznik, Bursa, Kutahya, Afyonkarahisar, U⅞ak, and Simav, and through the many villages, moun­tains, and forests in between (Figure 10.1). Evliya was free on this journey to ramble as he wished, a true wayfarer, taking many months to reach Mecca before settling in Cairo (Finkel 2014; 2013).

By the time we set out, our initial aims and ambitions had developed from the desire to go for a long ride across Turkey into a project defined by the twin aims of “Reenactment” and “Reconnection.” We did not plan on wearing Ottoman costumes or using antique horse tack, nor did we plan

Figure 10.2 Captures riders and horses from the 2009 ride in the Yalakdere (Yalak River, the Drakon of antiquity), suggesting how traveling on horseback might be a form of time travel.

Source: Photo by permission of Kate Clow and Mehmet Qam.

on carrying tents and supplies by spare horses (but rather in a specially con­verted truck).

Horses were an animating force for Evliya; unusually for an Ottoman author, he speaks openly of his love for horses (Landry, 2018, p. 53; 2015a). But Evliya also articulated very explicitly an ideal of Ottoman hospitality and openness to cultural difference that matched our aims of unlearning Western prejudice. Describing himself as a Sufi dervish, Evliya distin­guishes himself as being, out of “the many kinds of dervishes in this world,” “the kind who goes out among people, rides horses, and keeps servants” (Dankoff and Kim, 2010, p. 146). “First the companion, then the road” was Evliya’s motto. If there is one principle of travel knowledge (Kamps and Singh, 2001) to be derived from the Seyahatname, it is to suspend judg­ment and inhabit imaginatively another’s point of view. Writing of the Shi’aExpedition and Reenactment 199 Albanians drinking and dancing in the streets with their boy-beloveds, Evliya remarks to his Istanbul audience: “This is quite shameful behavior, characteristic of the infidels, but it is their custom, so we cannot censure it (budahibir bed-sunnetdirkimayin-ike[fe]redir, ammaboylegoregelmiξler, bunιdahi ‘ayblamaziz)” (Dankoff, 2004, pp. 72-73). Evliya’s foremost English translator, Robert Dankoff, observes how the very phrasing—ayblamaziz— contains the refusal (-ma-zιz) to attribute disgracefulness to acts that Evliya’s audience would likely consider disgraceful (ayιb or ayιp): “‘We cannot cen­sure it’ is literally ‘we cannot say it is ayιb^,—in other words, 'ayιbdegil!' [‘No disgrace!’].

In addition, therefore, to being a richly immediate, densely empirical, at times novelistic travel book, the Seyahatname conveys Evliya’s belief in the pax Ottomanica, that among the diverse peoples and cultures of the empire, there arises the joyful possibility of an ethical embrace across difference. Evliya’s openness to celebrating cultural diversity brings him close to advo­cating what Jacques Derrida has termed “unconditional hospitality” in distinction from Immanuel Kant’s view of conditional rights (MacLean, 2013, pp. 121-122; Yegenoglu, 2012, pp. 29-98). This concept as a horizon of possibility for travel and reenactment may sound utopian. Yet if it matters “what thoughts think thoughts” and “which worlds world worlds and which stories tell stories” (Haraway, 2015, p. vii), why not follow such an ethical ideal? Evliya was also a very human and worldly personage, as well as a believer in a common humanity. He was not without his prejudices, and he remained a man of his times, as Dankoff has definitively shown (Dankoff, 2004, pp. 9-82). Yet as a horizon of possibility, the Ottoman system as expressed by Evliya in the form of ideals, which Evliya himself shows to have been far too often compromised in practice, represents an enlightening alternative way of thinking to “the acquisitive European way of empire” (Finkel, 2005b, p. 168).

By adopting Evliya (₁'elebi as our guide, we hoped to explore how and in what ways his version of Ottoman hospitality and openness to cultural dif­ference might have survived. In this respect, we were acutely aware that these ideals differed from the nationalist neo-Ottomanism being promoted by the Turkish government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Once deliberately forgotten in Turkey by decree of Mustafa Ataturk’s Republic, the Ottoman past had become of compelling interest to both Turkish and international audiences with the accession to power of the AKP, or Justice and Development Party, in 2002.

With reenactment, as with all historical investigation, there follows the question of “Which past are we reproducing?” In 2009, when we set out to follow Evliya’s route, the AKP investment in Ottoman precedents remained an open question. Discussion of democratic rights and protections for minorities and celebration of a multiethnic, multicultural Ottoman past promised benign developments, countering ethno-Turkish nationalism. As we look back to 2009 over a decade later, it appears that such promising initiatives have largely stalled or backfired. 2009 still seemed to us a time of optimism and hope before Erdogan hard-liners managed to abrogate the mitigating influence of President Abdullah Gul and other founding mem­bers of the AKP (MacLean, 2014, pp. 299-308). Questions of Turkishness and foreignness, of rootedness and migrancy, of privilege and social divi­sions, of homogeneity and harmony and hospitality were all necessarily on the agenda of our expedition, but we were not always conscious of these fault lines at the time. These questions were all Evliya’s questions, too, but we did not yet know how fully until we had followed his itinerary. When we set out, it was harvest time, and people offered us surplus produce or freshly baked local specialties. Hospitality exchanged around the campfire with local people soon became a nightly feature, while our days involved frequent stops to drink tea in village coffeehouses where we were enthusias­tically, or at least courteously, received.

So when fault lines emerged at Ovacik, they concretized what had been only intimations of divisions in the village. Having been welcomed by the old muhtar, and given a lavish lunch, we then found ourselves summarily banned from entering the village guest-house and our horses banished from the municipal enclosure where they had been happily grazing. The new muhtar was recently elected and keen to prove a point. Exiled to the common at the edge of the village, we pitched our tents and picketed our horses sur­rounded by eager schoolchildren and smiling village men and women who presented us with apples from a nearby orchard. So beautiful and peace­ful in its setting, high in rolling hills of grassland bordered by woodland,Expedition and Reenactment 201 Ovacik featured female as well as male farmers coming forward to welcome us. There were tractors in use, but also over 50 horses and mules. Never before had we come upon so many working horses still being harnessed to carts and plows and so many big, handsome mules employed in plowing and harrowing. With its well-maintained traditional wooden houses and even wooden ambars—grain stores built high on stilts, with decorative curved roofs and interior compartments for storing the different sorts of grain— this picturesque place appeared proud of its traditions. There was no sense of anyone feeling immiserated by the coming of modernity here on the out­skirts of the prosperous town of U⅞ak. Or at least this proud resilience and openness remained among some of the inhabitants. There appeared to be at least two acrimoniously differing camps, partisans of the old muhtar and the new, suggestive of further rivalries among families, extended family or clan loyalties, and perhaps ideologies.

Here, as elsewhere, horses were a potential common denominator, a mediator of friendship. Horses can travel anywhere and everywhere, and though they do learn different languages and culturally specific codes from the humans with whom they associate, they are far more cosmopolitan than humans are. In Ovacik, some villagers applauded our traveling by horse, just as they themselves continued to drive and plow with them. But there

Figure 10.3 Shows 2009 riders and horses being welcomed to Ovacik, illustrating how the fellowship of the horse makes arrival on horseback an exciting occasion, especially for children released from school.

Source: Photo by permission of Gerald MacLean.were others who were suspicious of our motives for adopting a slow form of travel when we could have driven. Why were we so interested in horses? Why were we choosing to camp with tents or, when they were offered, stay in village guest houses?