Professor Donna Landry provided a keynote address at the Centre for 18th Century Studies conference, ‘Encounters, Affinities. Legacies: the Eighteenth Century in the Present Day’ which took place at the University of York on the 28th and 29th June 2013. The interdisciplinary conference and arts festival looked at the ‘complex webs of interconnection between the long eighteenth century and the long twentieth century’ and welcomed international speakers from a variety of disciplines.
Abstract: ‘Reenacting Enlightenment: Ottoman Nostalgia and Evliya Ҫelebi (1611-c.1685)’
Nostalgia for lost empires is a phenomenon not confined to Britain or other European powers. That the formerly disavowed Ottoman past is undergoing a revival in Turkey and elsewhere is evidenced by the international success of Ottoman tv soap operas, the popularity of Ottoman motifs and designs, and talk of a neo-Ottoman idiom in politics and culture. Yet whose Ottoman past is being reconstructed? The figure of Evliya Ҫelebi, a Sufi dervish and the greatest of Ottoman travellers, exemplifies in his ten-volume ‘Seyahatname’, or Book of Travels, Ottoman alternatives to traditional notions of cosmopolitanism and Enlightenment. Evliya, his times, and the traces still left of this Ottoman past deserve to be better known. The Evliya Ҫelebi Way project seeks to unearth through reenactments of his travels whatever remains of this hitherto neglected legacy.