ABOUT US

Established on June 27, 2021, within Fatih Sultan Mehmet Vakıf University, the Evliya Çelebi Studies Center operates with the aim of bringing together academic studies on Evliya Çelebi and his unique work, the Seyahatnâme, under an institutional framework and opening up new fields of research in this area.

Our Center seeks to examine Evliya Çelebi—one of the foremost representatives of our cultural heritage at both national and international levels—through an interdisciplinary approach. It promotes interaction among researchers from diverse fields such as language, literature, geography, history, sociology, architecture, and anthropology, thereby creating a foundation for new studies on the Seyahatnâme.

The Center also supports academic research on the regions visited by Evliya Çelebi within the context of travel literature, carries out projects aimed at compiling works in the travelogue genre, and encourages high-quality postgraduate research in this field. With its digital archive and online database, the Center aims to share this corpus with researchers and preserve the historical and literary legacy of travel culture for future generations.

In this framework, the first event in the International Evliya Çelebi Symposium series was held in Istanbul on October 5–7, 2023, under the theme “History and Culture of Travel.” The second symposium will take place in Sarajevo on November 13–15, 2025, in collaboration with and hosted by the Oriental Institute of the University of Sarajevo, in honor of the Institute’s 75th anniversary. The main theme of this meeting will be “Cultural and Historical Processes in Bosnia and Herzegovina from the 15th to the 19th Centuries.” The symposium series will continue biennially, focusing on themes related to the countries and cities featured in Evliya Çelebi’s Seyahatnâme.

Click here to explore the Evliya Çelebi Studies Center.