Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
MILLI FOLKLOR: INTERNATIONAL AND QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF FOLKLORE, cilt.12, sa.93, ss.41-52, 2011 (AHCI)
In this article, I examine the “unfinished” structure of Evliya Çelebi’s Seyahatname, a structure born
compositionally from the work’s conditions of production and manner of formation, as well as this structure’s
relationship with oral culture and how the work’s departures from standard Ottoman Turkish spelling reflect
that period’s phonetic changes and syncopes. The Seyahatname is a liminal text lying between written and
oral culture, a text that does not simply record the productions of oral culture, but recreates them in terms of
written culture with entirely different contexts and functions, internalizing them through the use of such prac-
tices as oral narrative formulae. In the article, I put a special emphasis on such practices, providing numerous
examples that show how the Seyahatname is an extraordinarily rich, and in fact indispensable, source for the
study of Turkish oral culture. Thus far, the Seyahatname has largely been used by researchers as a source to
confirm objective facts. Now, however, there is an ever increasing emphasis on the necessity of reevaluating
the work as literature in terms of its narrative structure and narrational qualities, especially in relation with
oral culture. In this regard, we now know that it is impossible to make real use of the evidence provided by the
broad historical and oral data presented in this enormous text without establishing the narrative/narrational
principles and foundations on which the text rests and without determining, in a way mindful of the narrative
as a whole, exactly what is told, in what context it is told, and why and how it is told.