Avrupa seyahat edebiyatı ve Osmanlı coğrafyasında bir seyyah: Charles Macfarlane

Abstract

Travelling opens the doors of a wide world to the people as living constantly in the same place makes people get stuck in an area. People who live in this way are blind to this, thinking that the whole world is similar to their surroundings. Rather than what these people know and talk about, those around are more interested in what the ones who have travelled to a lot of places tell. Although exploring the unknown corners of the world has been attractive for all communities, the Western world had been ahead of and thus more advantageous than the others in this and travellers from remote countries turned back with valuable information about “the other”. What each traveller told made other adventurers wish to travel. Therefore, many travellers set out and travelled by land or sea to explore the magic lives and geographies of different cultures. However, journeys which had started over a naive desire for exploration, started to change in the 18th and 19th centuries. Travelling was not just for adventure anymore but became a way of dominating the other and a way of bringing most of the values belonging to other cultures to the West. Thanks to the opportunities travelling offered, they developed more than the countries in the other parts of the world and reached their peak in the nineteenth century. The Ottoman Empire which possessed and controlled important parts of the world had long attracted the attention of the Europeans; however, this growing interest towards the Ottoman Empire was felt more and more in the nineteenth century, when the Ottomans were the weakest. Now Istanbul and the other important regions of the Empire were flooded by travellers who had other purposes than just traveling. In this study, firstly some basic information about European Travel Writing which has survived up to the present day changing its aims and shape throughout the centuries will be given. Then, how C. Mac Farlane, who wrote a four-volume book out of his observations in the Ottoman territories during important periods such as the Greek Rebellion and the “tanzimat” reform era, reflects and approaches the Turkish, Greek, Armenian and the Jewish societies will be studied.