Ahmet Mithat Efendi’nin ‘Avrupa’da Bir Cevelan’ Seyahatnamesi ile ‘Paris’te Bir Türk’ Romanında Hayal ile Gerçeklik Çatışması
Authors: Şahin Can 
Published: September 2023

“Travel Book”, a literary genre, is a type of writing in which the author writes about his impressions of the places he has travelled and seen. In the 19th century Ottoman press, there was a significant increase in the number of travel books written on Europe. In this study, the conflicts between Ahmet Mithat Efendi’s novel ‘Paris’te Bir Türk’, a fictional travel work, and his travel book ‘Avrupa’da Bir Cevelan’ are examined. The reason for presenting this subject to the attention is to question the contradictions in the approaches of the Ottoman intellectuals to Western civilisation with reference to Ahmet Mithat Efendi. The Ottoman intellectuals of the Westernisation period saw Paris as the centre of progress and development and looked at Europe from the Parisian perspective. Ahmet Mithat made Paris the subject of many of his fictional works through novels, history books, geography books, travel guides, travel books, pictures, maps, encyclopedias and his imagination. The author saw Paris thirteen years after he wrote his novel ‘Paris’te Bir Türk’, the most important of his fictional works in which he chose Paris as a setting. In 1889, the author participated in the VIIIth International Congress of Orientalists held in Stockholm as the Ottoman delegate upon the appointment of Abdülhamid II, and his European travels lasted approximately three and a half months. The author travelled to Paris after the congress and stayed in Paris for twelve days. The author devoted more than 300 pages of his 1044-page travel book ‘Avrupa’da Bir Cevelan’, which is a report of his European journey, to his observations on Paris, where he stayed the longest during his European journey. He describes the squares, parks, churches, schools, hospitals, palaces, museums, theatres, exhibitions, libraries, entertainment venues, factories, and cemeteries of Paris in the context of the Istanbul-Paris comparison. The novel ‘Paris’te Bir Türk’, as a defence against Orientalism, is the narrative of a fictional journey, while ‘Avrupa’da Bir Cevelan’, as an occidentalist defence against Orientalist ideas, is the narrative of a physical journey. The Paris that the author describes with his imagination in ‘Paris’te Bir Türk’ and the Paris that he introduces with his observations in ‘Avrupa’da Bir Cevelan’ are different from each other, and this situation causes a conflict within itself. In his travel book ‘Avrupa’da Bir Cevelan’, it is observed that the author is in an effort to confirm his images and assumptions about Paris, which he learned from books, and his effort to bring Paris, which he learned from books, from his mind to reality gives rise to contradictions. Although he emphasizes that the imaginary Paris he constructs in his mind coincides with the reality, there are some contradictions: Clothes determine prejudices and ideas about people, Europeans’ false images of Islam, Ottomans and Turks, the Seine River, the Eiffel Tower, and the Opera House are small and unpretentious. In our study, we have concluded that Ahmet Mithat Efendi approached Western civilisation with superficial knowledge with the evaluations and determinations we made on the contrasts between an imaginary travel and a physically realised travel.