The World Tour of Piri Reis and Katip Çelebi Continues, Next Stop: Paris

MEDAM, our country's first Center for Civilization Studies operating within Bahçeşehir University, is now taking its exhibition "The Ottoman View of the World from Piri Reis to Katip Çelebi", organized as part of the celebrations of the 400th anniversary of Katip Çelebi's birth, to Paris after the USA.

The exhibition, which previously met Turkish history enthusiasts in Istanbul and Ankara, was displayed in the US state of California throughout last October. Prepared with the support and patronage of our Ministry of Culture and Tourism and through the joint work of Bahçeşehir University Center for Civilization Studies, the exhibition is now setting off for Paris.

The fifth edition of the "Map Exhibition: The Ottoman View of the World from Piri Reis to Katip Çelebi", carried out under the patronage of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of the Republic of Türkiye and Bahçeşehir University Center for Civilization Studies (MEDAM) by Prof. Dr. Bekir Karlığa and Prof. Dr. Mustafa Kaçar, will be held in the UNESCO halls in Paris in cooperation with His Excellency Gürcan Türkoğlu, Permanent Delegate of Türkiye to UNESCO.

Following the opening ceremony on Monday, 7 December 2009 at 12:00, a panel will also be held on the same day at 16:30 at the Paris Promotion Office of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism on the Champs Elysées, titled "2009 Katip Çelebi Year": Katip Çelebi in the 400th Year of His Birth . The panel will be moderated by Turkish Ambassador to the Vatican Prof. Kenan Gürsoy, and the speakers will be as follows:

- Türkiye Coordinator of the Alliance of Civilizations Project Prof. Dr. Bekir Karlığa;

- Renowned historian and Turkologist Prof. Dr. Jean-Louis Bacqué-Grammont;

- Chair of the Muslim Heritage Foundation's 1001 Inventions Project Prof. Saleem al-Hassani;

- Faculty member in History of Science, Istanbul University Faculty of Letters Prof. Dr. Mustafa Kaçar;

The panel will focus on "Katip Çelebi, his era, personality, worldview and philosophy". The exhibition will be open to visitors in the UNESCO halls from 7 to 11 December.

For Information:

Bahçeşehir University Center for Civilization Studies (MEDAM)

Exhibition and Symposium Organizing Committee:

External Relations Coordination: Tuba Posbıyık Urcu, Semra Meral

Internal Relations Coordination: Agah Karlığa.

Tel: +90 212 381 09 80

Fax: +90 212 381 00 37

E-mail: katipcelebi@medam.org.tr

Website: www.medam.org.tr

About the Exhibition:
Though not to the extent of today, merchants, explorers, geographers and famous pirates traveled the Indian Ocean, the coasts of China and Japan, the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean, and set sail with large ships in the Mediterranean and the Aegean. Among these seafarers were famous Ottoman sailors. One of them, the world-famous Piri Reis, in addition to serving as an admiral, became a guide for Western sailors as well with the maps he drew based on his personal observations and his book Kitab-ı Bahriye (Book of the Sea). In the following century, another Ottoman scholar, Katip Çelebi, shut himself away in libraries writing works, drawing maps, translating geography books and drawing new maps that corrected them with additions. For the Ottomans, the world was no longer as small as it used to be.

When news of the discovery of America reached the Ottoman world, for the Ottomans, one of the greatest empires of the Old World consisting of Europe, Africa and Asia, the world had become twice as large. The question "How did the Ottoman view of the world change after the geographical discoveries?" still attracts attention today. The maps produced from the beginning of the 16th century to the end of the 17th century, in short the period from Piri Reis to Katip Çelebi, and the works in Ottoman geographical literature provide some clues on this subject.

In addition to the works of these two famous Ottoman scholars, a total of 53 maps are exhibited, enlarged using digital imaging techniques: Ottoman versions of maps drawn by Islamic geographers from the 9th to the 15th centuries, some maps by important historians and geographers describing America and other geographical discoveries, and maps referring to Western geographers, together with the maps in the version of Katip Çelebi's work Cihannüma (Cosmorama), prepared in 1648, published with additions by İbrahim Müteferrika in 1732. The exhibition aims to shed light on how the Ottomans perceived the world 400 years ago.

The maps on display reflect, very naively, the techniques of the time and the illusions of the discoveries. Unlike the drawings in today's atlases and the maps we are used to, some depictions of the globe and the continents are reversed and some are drawn upside down. Some use lines of latitude and longitude, while in others the projection centers for finding direction and location are decorated only with compass roses.