Faisal Husain
Skies raining blood, clouds catching fire, and beasts running amok—a surreal mix of fact and fantasy, the kind of which only a malnourished graduate student could conjure up before drifting off to sleep in a cold, dim library.
The Ottoman scholar Katib Çelebi (d. 1657) would beg to differ. The setting for these disturbing images, he reported in his chronicle Fezleke, was Hungary in late June 1619, soon after the breakout of Europe’s Thirty Years’ War. The story is loaded with enigmatic symbolism that I dare not explain, at least not today. Below is a rough translation of the Ottoman text based on the version found in Mustafa Naʿima’s (d. 1716) chronicle, whose prose in this passage is a bit clearer than Çelebi’s. Read more on the blog.
The Ottoman scholar Katib Çelebi (d. 1657) would beg to differ. The setting for these disturbing images, he reported in his chronicle Fezleke, was Hungary in late June 1619, soon after the breakout of Europe’s Thirty Years’ War. The story is loaded with enigmatic symbolism that I dare not explain, at least not today. Below is a rough translation of the Ottoman text based on the version found in Mustafa Naʿima’s (d. 1716) chronicle, whose prose in this passage is a bit clearer than Çelebi’s. Read more on the blog.
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