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The Evliya Çelebi Ride 2009
The Evliya Çelebi Ride (EÇR), the first phase of the project, is an essential preliminary towards successful realisation of the EÇW.
In May 1671 Evliya Çelebi, age 60, set out from Istanbul with 8 servants, 3 companions, and 15 horses, to make the pilgrimage to Mecca. On this occasion, he was not in the company of any dignitaries, as he so often was. His usual brief of seyahat, ticaret, ziyaret – travel, trade, and pilgrimage – remained his watchwords. He and his party took more than two months to cover the distance between Istanbul and the neighbourhood of Kütahya, his ancestral city on his father’s side, by a meandering route that guaranteed he saw everything there was to see in this region.
The EÇR 2009 is an international venture whose core participants included Turkish horsemen and women, a Scottish Ottoman historian, an English botanist, two UK-based cultural and literary historians, a German photographic editor living in America, a French Canadian businesswoman, and an English writer on architectural history with a diplomatic background. Our interests were at once equestrian, archaeological, historical, cultural and botanical.
The first EÇR was successfully completed between September and November 2009. A guidebook to the first EÇ Way is forthcoming.
Having made the first modern ride of reenactment in the hoofprints of Evliya Çelebi in western Anatolia, with the aim of demonstrating the value of such a route ‘on the ground’, rather than in the abstract, we are now planning future rides in 2010 and 2011.