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The EÇR: Progress to Date
IIn summer 2007 Donna Landry and Caroline Finkel visited segments of the EÇW by car to make a preliminary survey of current conditions along the route. In summer 2008 Donna, Caroline, Mac (Gerald MacLean), and Leyla Neyzi continued to scout the route by car. We discovered that Evliya’s itinerary still takes us to many places that are best approached on horseback. Following in his tracks reveals how open the Turkish countryside remains, and how rideable. Even in Western Anatolia, Turkey’s most developed region, just off the major highways and the tourists’ familiar routes, there is ideal riding country still, as the villagers know. In Anatolia it is still possible to engage in long distance cross-country riding, a rare privilege unknown in most of Western Europe.
People we met as we travelled were well aware that Evliya Çelebi had passed through their village, and were delighted at the prospect of the EÇR and EÇW which they saw as a means of reminding the outside world of their existence and the rich natural heritage and cultural traditions they possess.
Turkey’s renowned equestrian heritage is fast disappearing, yet there are more horses in rural areas than most people realise. We learnt about local horse practices along the EÇW, such as the rahvan (ridden pacing racing)and cirit (mounted javelin) competitions that are a flourishing aspect of rural and urban life in many areas. We made contact with and talked to at cambazları (horse traders) about the business of buying and selling that once sustained horse ownership in the countryside: they will be among the interviewees for our planned oral history of horse culture in the western Anatolian countryside.
The other face of the coin of Turkish horseways is the studs at Karacabey—both the Thoroughbreds of the TJK stud and the Arabians at the government stud. The origins of the Thoroughbred lie in the territory of the Ottoman Empire, and we visited the studs to hear about Turkey’s Arabian and Thoroughbred breeding programmes.
Evliya Çelebi remarked on the particularities of each place he passed through—such as the bridge at Gördes which was wider and more splendidly decorated than that built over the river Drina by Sokullu Mehmed Pasha, or the striped kilims of Demirci, or the cherries of Kayacık which were so famous in Anatolia that the colour red might be praised as ‘as red like the morocco leather and cherries of Kayacık’.
We investigated the following sections of the route in 2007: Afyon-Şuhut-Sandıklı-Banaz-Gediz-Şaphane-Simav-Demirci and Gördes-Kayacık-Akhisar. Rahvan and cirit enthusiasts were ubiquitous, and many of the monuments Evliya Çelebi describes still extant—though others such as the Gördes bridge have now vanished. We climbed up to the fortress at Afyon—the kara hisar for which the town is famed—with our skirts hitched up (etek dermiyan edüp) as Evliya Çelebi did, as wary of the snakes and centipedes (yılan ve çiyanlar) as he. At Sorkhun near Sandıklı we found a yayla and nature reserve where three generations of feral horses (yılkı atlar)—descendants of domesticated stock released into the forest as the tractor became king—run free. We filmed these in their dramatic mountain habitat. Evliya Çelebi’s Gediz, with its külliye (mosque complex) built by the chief white eunuch (kızlar ağası) Gazanfer Ağa in the 1590s, was ruined in the earthquake of 1970. We saw the extraordinary rock of Şahinkayası, near Kayacık, of which he remarks that he never saw another so high in all his 32 years of travelling.
The major discovery of 2008 was the importance of Kütahya, the porcelain capital of Turkey, for Ottoman heritage conservation, and the interest in Evliya that prevails there. The Governor and Mayor were instrumental in our receiving generous sponsorship from local companies (see sponsors page). Kütahya was Evliya’s ‘ancestral town’, as Robert Dankoff puts it. Although Evliya was born in Istanbul, all his father’s family were from Kütahya. There is a museum dedicated to Evliya in the town, housing many period items and images, including the portrait of Evliya on horseback by Nesrin Şarlıgil that we chose for our project logo. It appeared self-evident that the first Evliya Çelebi Ride and Way should pass through and then end at Kütahya.
For details of the successful completion of the 2009 Ride, see the Long Riders’ Guild Report.