Simeon of Poland

They had enjoyed cultural autonomy since medieval times as the Polish King Casimir III the Great allowed them to have their own courts and keep their traditions upon conquering the region.

[1] Simeon's father Mahdesi Martiros and mother Dolvat Khatun were originally from the coastal city of Kaffa in Crimea.

According to historian Nerses Akinean, Simeon may have been classmates with renowned poet and translator Hakob Tokhatetsi, who settled in Zamość in 1602.

[3] According to his own account, Simeon had a deep interest in traveling to non-Christian lands as well as going on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, Rome, and Mush, where the relics of Saint John the Baptist were thought to be located.

[8] He then joined the Ottoman tax collectors, traveling to Yash-Bazar, where he reported the presence of a wealthy community of 200 Armenian households along with a stone church and a k’ahanas ('ordained priest').

Simeon regarded the nearby Danube as "terrifying, ferocious, wide, and deep, and like a bloodthirsty abyss swallowed people".

On Sunday, 22 August 1608, he passed the river and paid the customs tariff in the village of Mijin, not continuing the travel until three days.

[11] Overall, he claimed the presence of 40,000 Jewish, 40,000 Greek, and 10,000 Armenian households in the city, with no set number of Muslims, along with 80,000 shops, 30,000 taverns, and unnumbered amount of mosques, charitable organizations, religious schools, hospitals, bazaars, inns, plazas, gardens, orchards, and more.

[14] He further detailed that in San Domenic, a large pilgrimage used to take place nine weeks after Easter, when both Muslims and Christians, as well as ambassadors of European states gather for a festival.

[15] A vardapet, Mkrtich Kharpertsi, who was visiting Istanbul at the time, offered Simeon to go on a journey through Bithynia stating that it was five-days from Mush.

They stayed in the town for five days and visited the bath where John the Evangelist supposedly once served as an attendant and Prochorus was in charge of the heating.

[17] Simeon and his companion later found themselves in the town of Mukhalij,[d] staying there for one month and five days, then staying in Bandırma[e] for ten days, and subsequently spending two months in the nearby settlement of Etnjuk[f], half a mile from where there was a large abandoned island housing the ruins of a former colony, Simeon claimed as the original Byzantium.

Simeon wrote his travelogue on the road and later edited it in Poland; therefore, the text includes paragraphs that abruptly switch tenses.