Monday Talks / Pazartesi Konuşmaları

In this talk, Vjeran Kursar will present the book "Evliya Çelebi in the Borderlands: New Insights and Novel Approaches to the Seyahatname (Western Balkans and Iran Sections)" he co-edited with Nenad Moačanin and Kornelija Jurin Starčević, and discuss some of its important aspects. The book is closely focused on two borderlands of the Ottoman Empire, the Western Balkans, bordering the territories of the Republic of Venice and the Habsburg Monarchy in the west, and Safavid ruled Iran and Azerbaijan in the east. Such conception provides an opportunity for a comparison between the eastern and the western borderlands of the Ottoman Empire, concerning topics related to economic and social history, urbanization, ethnic and confessional relations, and others. Evliya's own attitudes toward borderland locals, Muslims and non-Muslims, Christian "infidels" and Shi'ite "heretics," are particularly interesting. The second part of the book deals with issues of reception and use of the Evliya Çelebi's travelogue's editions and translations in historiography of countries of the Western Balkans in comparison with the original manuscript and the new manuscript based uncensored edition (YKY).

Vjeran Kursar (PhD, University of Zagreb) is Associate Professor of History, and Hungarian, Turkish and Judaic Studies at the University of Zagreb. He has published on topics of Ottoman ethno-confessional, legal, and social history, mainly related to Bosnia, the Balkans, and Istanbul. He is the author of Croatian Levantines in Ottoman Istanbul (2021) and co-editor, with Nenad Moačanin and Kornelija Jurin Starčević, of Evliya Çelebi in the Borderlands: New Insights and Novel Approaches to the Seyahatname (Western Balkans and Iran Sections) (2021).

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