Aromas of knowledge, networks of scent: tracing the olfactory imagination of a 17th-century Ottoman traveler

Abstract

ABSTRACT Standing in as a monumental work of Ottoman first-person prose that is without precedent, the Seyāḥatnāme (“Book of Travels”), at once a travelogue as well as a literary composition, is an ideal source for conducting a sensate history of Ottoman-Islamic society in the 17th century. Using characteristic flair and imagination, its author Evliyā Çelebi relates a number of fantastical anecdotes where scent plays a key narrative purpose, once in the context of conversing with the sacred dead in a dream, and on three occasions during visits to the caves of various Islamicate religious figures from the past. This paper will analyze these anecdotes to determine the narrative functions of scent in the text and in doing so tease out how olfaction was implicated in the Ottoman religious and social imaginary.