Er Dede’s Shrine: A Fictional Confession of Evliyâ Çelebi

Abstract

Er Dede Sultan, who was narrated through a dream account in the last section of the monograph on Ankara in Evliyâ Çelebi’s Seyâhatnâme, has captured the attention of readers, including Ahmed Hamdi Tanpınar. Although there have been attempts to find Er Dede Sultan’s shrine in the historical parts of the city, it could not be located or was mistakenly assumed to be discovered. This article, by looking into an intermediary structure of the dream account between fact and fiction, aims to lay out the unusual narrative strategy and show how narrated facts and conveyed messages are intertwined, which oftentimes present challenges for today’s scholars and readers to believe in what is narrated in the text. This far-reaching aspect of Seyâhatname, which goes beyond being a dry travelogue, is well illustrated in the dream account of Er Dede Sultan, one of the most striking narratives in Seyâhatname. In light of contemporary historical events and documents and the circumstances of Evliyâ’s travels, this article examines the fictional structure of the dream account in order to address why and how such a dream account was narrated. It demonstrates that Evliyâ, who shed light on the sacred landscape of the city with this dream account, blended political liaisons with human frailties by fashioning this narrative from within the historical reality and through an “adab” mentality and aesthetics that conveyed a message to the readers.