Abstract
PROSE WRITERS SPLIT FROM POETS IN OTTOMAN-TURKISH LITERATURE
Evliya Çelebi is an extraordinary writer not only in terms of the content of his writing but also in terms of his language and style. Having set out to express many original observations and narrate many scenes from life, Evliya Çelebi seems to have realized that the inşa style of the classical prose, which was based on poetic aesthetics, was not adequate for this purpose. Instead of taking the aesthetics of inşa as an end in itself, he used it as an instrument for telling stories about man and society, and carved a language and style of his own out of the vocabularies and narrative possibilities of both the inşa language and the vernacular. Both the idiosyncrasies of his language and his mastery in fictionalizing his experiences clearly show that he was not only a traveler but also a writer. With his uncommon attitude towards the classical aesthetics of the Ottoman prose, whose writers were always also poets, Evliya Çelebi appears to have been the “crossroad where prose writers split from poets”.
Keywords
Evliya Çelebi, Seyahatnâme, Ottoman prose writing, inşa, language and style
