Between the sacred and the mundane: A historical inquiry into travel and travelling practices on the Ottoman pilgrimage road from Üsküdar, c. 1517-1800.

Project Information

OTTOHAJJ

Grant agreement ID: 101130753

DOI

10.3030/101130753

Project closed

EC signature date 9 May 2023

Start date 11 October 2023

End date 10 October 2025

Funded under

• Widening participation and spreading excellence

Total cost

No data

EU contribution

€ 148 478,40

Coordinated by

SABANCI UNIVERSITESI
Türkiye

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - OTTOHAJJ (Between the sacred and the mundane: A historical inquiry into travel and travelling practices on the Ottoman pilgrimage road from Üsküdar, c. 1517-1800.)

Reporting period: 2023-10-11 to 2025-10-10

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

From trade and diplomacy to warfare and migration, the roads of the Ottoman Empire were alive with movement. Yet the most regular and symbolically powerful journeys were the annual peregrinations of men and women travelling to the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina. After 1517, when the Ottomans assumed responsibility for organising the hajj, unprecedented numbers of pilgrims—many of them Turkish-speaking subjects from the empire’s central lands—joined the overland caravan that set out from Üsküdar, crossed Anatolia to Damascus, and then continued to Medina and Mecca. This journey, which could last up to nine months, was at once logistically demanding and spiritually charged.

Despite the importance of this caravan, we still know surprisingly little about how early modern Ottoman pilgrims actually experienced the road: how they prepared, what they carried, the infrastructures they relied upon, and the landscapes and sacred sites that shaped their journeys. Existing studies tend to focus on politics, high-level administration, or fortress-building, leaving everyday travelling practices in the shadows. The OTTOHAJJ project responds to this gap by shifting the focus from sultans and officials to pilgrims themselves and by using the tools of history, manuscript studies, and digital humanities to reconstruct their world.

The project’s main objectives were to: build a new corpus of early modern Ottoman hajj guidebooks authored by pilgrims; analyse these texts in terms of authorship, circulation, and intellectual and social milieu; reconstruct the infrastructure of the Üsküdar–Damascus–Mecca route, including sacred sites, facilities, and places of rest and leisure; examine the material culture and practicalities of travel (supplies, remedies, animals, equipment); and investigate how pilgrims interacted with landscapes, sacred geographies, and sites of sightseeing and visitation.

Taken together, these aims allow OTTOHAJJ to offer a bottom-up history of mobility on one of the early modern world’s most important pilgrimage roads. The project provides new historical data on travel, environment, and religious practice in the Ottoman domains, supports the study of manuscript and guidebook cultures, and lays foundations for future digital mapping and heritage work on historic hajj routes.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

During the project, an extensive manuscript-based investigation was carried out in libraries, archives, and digital collections. Around forty Ottoman hajj guidebooks dating from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries were identified, documented, and analysed. These texts were examined for their authorship, circulation, scribal practices, and the social and intellectual backgrounds of their writers.

The project reconstructed the infrastructure of the Üsküdar–Mecca route by analysing hundreds of references to waystations, settlements, sacred places, facilities, and sites of rest and leisure. A new typology of stations and roadside amenities was developed, providing the first systematic overview of how the route functioned in practice.

Material culture and everyday travelling practices were studied through close reading of the guidebooks and related sources. The project examined the objects, tools, supplies, medical remedies, and equipment used by travellers, as well as their social organisation, patterns of movement, and understandings of hardship, safety, and hospitality.

Work began on the critical edition of Enîsü’l-Hüccâc, an important guidebook from the period of Sultan Mehmed III. Digital datasets were created for waystations, routes, manuscript metadata, and social networks of guidebook authors. Preparatory work was conducted for future georeferencing and mapping of historical routes. A substantial portion of the planned monograph was drafted, integrating manuscript research and historical analysis. The monograph is planned for publication in 2026–27.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The project produced several results that advance current knowledge. It assembled a comprehensive corpus of early modern Ottoman hajj guidebooks and provided new insights into the social worlds in which these texts were produced. The identification and classification of these manuscripts significantly expand the sources available for the study of Ottoman religious life, mobility, and travel writing.

The reconstruction of the Üsküdar–Mecca route offers the first analytical overview of its infrastructure, combining historical geography with insights from travellers’ own writings. The new typologies developed for sacred sites, facilities, and rest points reveal how the route evolved over three centuries and how pilgrims interacted with changing landscapes and local communities.

The project deepens understanding of the material culture of travel - examining clothing, provisions, tools, medical practices, and social norms - and provides a rare view of the embodied and sensory dimensions of pilgrimage. The datasets prepared during the fellowship lay the groundwork for digital mapping of the Ottoman hajj road. Once integrated into future digital platforms, these will support further research in historical geography, heritage studies, and digital humanities. These results have potential applications beyond academia. They offer new historical evidence for heritage institutions, museums, and cultural bodies working to preserve, interpret, and present pilgrimage routes and related cultural landscapes. They also support future collaborations in exhibitions, public history, and digital cultural heritage projects.