In his monthly series “The Lives of Others” over at the Paris Review, Edward White introduces us to globe-trotting Turkish writer, Evliya Çelebi, and the esoteric but lively book of travel stories he penned almost four centuries ago:
Evliya so adored the bustling energy of Istanbul that he dedicated the first volume of the Seyahatname to it. In his telling, it was a place of learning, culture, and endless sensory stimulation, where acrobats from Arabia, Persia, Yemen, and India performed in the streets, and where ‘thousands of old and young lovers’ exposed their ‘rosy pink bodies, like peeled almonds’ to the summer sun, swimming and canoodling in the open.
