A Real 17th-Century Dungeon Delve

Earlier this year, I read An Ottoman Traveller: Selections from the Book of Travels by Evliya Çelebi , in part following a very exciting and happy trip to Istanbul in December/early January. Evliya Çelebi was a seventeenth-century Ottoman nobleman, muezzin, Qur'an reciter, and possible Sufi initiate who embarked on a life-long endeavor of travel following a dream wherein the prophet Muhammad, the…