Pierre MacKay's recent publication about the 17th-century Seyahatname or 'Travel Journal' by Turkish traveller Evliyâ Çelebi has confirmed his reputation as one of the leading experts on this text. The following, translated by Google with many revisions by Professor MacKay, is an excerpt from a recent book about Çelebi:
In 1975, Pierre A. MacKay, Professor of Classics and of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Washington (Emeritus) recognized the significance of the Seyahatname (Travel Journal)in the larger framework of the Ottoman intellectual world. Following Franz Taeschner, MacKay wrote a detailed study of the contents and the physical condition of manuscripts of the Seyahatname.* He confirmed Richard Kreutel's identification of the "Baghdad Kiosk, series S" manuscripts as the author’s original archetype, copied by a secretary under the supervision of Evliya Çelebi himself. MacKay has recently (2008) shown that, contrary to past beliefs, when he relied on his own observations Evliya gave precise and remarkably accurate information about roads and distances in the Seyahatname**
Tezcan, Nuran, and Semih Tezcan, Evliyâ Çelebi, Ankara: 2011, p. 79.
* "The manuscripts of the Seyahatname of Evliyâ Çelebi. Part 1. The
Archetype." Der Islam 1975 : 52, 278--298.
** "Real and Fictitious Journeys in Evliyâ Çelebi's Seyahatname:
Some examples from Book VIII," Journal of Turkish Literature, 2009, 6:110-29;
"Evliyâ Çelebi's use of Ottoman Geographers in the Seyahatname,"
in Evliyâ Çelebi's Written Sources (Evliyâ Çelebi'nin Yazılı Kaynakları),
Karateke, Hasan and Hatice Aynur, eds., Ankara: 2012, 92-103.