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.
