Evliya Çelebi’s Seyahatname (‘Book of Travels’), the impressive historical-geographical work onsidered a masterpiece of seventeenth-century Turkish literature, is a veritable mine of linguistic information too. In fact, the “Ottoman globetrotter” (giramondo ottomano, as Bombaci 1969: 400 calls Evliya) proves greatly interested in the languages of the various countries visited and usually provides a number of samples of each of them. Among these languages is Hungarian, since he had the opportunity to pass several times through territories inhabited by Hungarian-speaking people during his travels. The aim of this paper is to examine the Magyar lexical material scattered in the Seyahatname, pointing out that we will only deal with words, phrases and sentences specifically mentioned by Evliya Çelebi as foreign vocabulary, not with (varyingly turkicized) loanwords of Hungarian origin found in his work, which are generally known from other sources too (f.ex. biro(v) ‘judge, head of a village’ < bíró, erşek/ irşek ‘archbishop’ < érsek, nemeş ‘noble’ < nemes, papişta ‘catholic’ < pápista, turvin ‘assembly’ < törvény, varoş ‘suburb’ < város, etc).1 We only made an exception for tabur, including this item given the importance of Evliya’s account.

Evliya Çelebi’s Seyahatname (‘Book of Travels’), the impressive historical-geographical work onsidered a masterpiece of seventeenth-century Turkish literature, is a veritable mine of linguistic information too. In fact, the “Ottoman globetrotter” (giramondo ottomano, as Bombaci 1969: 400 calls Evliya) proves greatly interested in the languages of the various countries visited and usually provides a number of samples of each of them. Among these languages is Hungarian, since he had the opportunity to pass several times through territories inhabited by Hungarian-speaking people during his travels. The aim of this paper is to examine the Magyar lexical material scattered in the Seyahatname, pointing out that we will only deal with words, phrases and sentences specifically mentioned by Evliya Çelebi as foreign vocabulary, not with (varyingly turkicized) loanwords of Hungarian origin found in his work, which are generally known from other sources too (f.ex. biro(v) ‘judge, head of a village’ < bíró, erşek/ irşek ‘archbishop’ < érsek, nemeş ‘noble’ < nemes, papişta ‘catholic’ < pápista, turvin ‘assembly’ < törvény, varoş ‘suburb’ < város, etc).1 We only made an exception for tabur, including this item given the importance of Evliya’s account.