Seyahatnâme

Because of his gift in reciting the Quran, Evliya was presented to Sultan Murad IV and admitted to the palace, where he received extensive training in calligraphy, music, Arabic grammar, and tajwid.

[1] Despite his diverse talents and the opportunity to climb the social ladder, Evliya had a keen interest in geography and invested his wealth into life goal of traveling.

His Seyâhatnâme thus appears as a work of 17th-century light literature, which was intelligible to a wide circle thanks to the mixed use of the colloquial Turkish of the 17th century with occasional borrowings of phrases and expressions from the ornate style.

[5] Because of the value of his work, the generic term of Seyâhatnâme is often used to refer to Evliya Çelebi's books in particular, as far as the Turkish language and studies are concerned.

[7] A related genre, specific to the journeys and experiences of Ottoman ambassadors, is the sefâretnâme (سفارت نامه), whose examples were edited by their authors with a view to their presentation to the Sultan and the high administration, thus also bearing a semi-official character, although they remained of interest for the general reader as well.