The Ottoman historian Evliya Çelebi, born (1611) in Istanbul, is considered a traveler and an Ottoman explorer who traveled independently on missions with the Ottoman armies and expeditions, for forty years, where he started it in 1630 from his hometown, where he recorded his observations on his travels, in his well-known book “Sayhat Namah” book flights in Arabic. Çelebi described one of the most brutal massacres in human history, the “Bitlis” massacre, which was committed against the Kurdish people.

The Turks deliberately defamed the Kurdish nation and accused it of barbarism and backwardness, as they described it as a nation less than the Turkish race, which they consider to be of higher status than other nations. Therefore, Evliya Çelebi described the Kurds as an infidel nation in many of his narrations about them, although he visited their country, lived in the suburbs and admired the country and its diversity and civilization.

Perhaps, and from a historical perspective, it was a mere luck that the traveler Evliya Çelebi was an eyewitness to the horrific crime committed by Sultan Murad IV, out of his jealousy and hatred against the inhabitants of the Kurdish city of Bitlis, a city located on the eastern side of the borders of the Ottoman Empire. Bitlis remained tolerant throughout its history, for example: the Kurds allowed the Armenians to live near them in the city, and to build a number of monasteries. In fact, during the fifteenth century, Bitlis became a center for the production of Armenian manuscripts.

Çelebi recorded the facts of the massacre in his book “Seyahtanama” in 1655, and described that crime that exposed the tyranny of the Ottoman sultans and how they ran the Islamic countries whose misfortune led them to live under the lash of the Turks, so they engaged in all immoral actions, and political and security violence, due to their arrogance and vanity.

Çelebi wrote down his observations and stories through his Ottoman travels, documenting the things he witnessed as he moved from one region to another, from one city to another, and from one castle to another. He detected and recorded all the accurate information about the heritage and folklore of the Kurdish people and their civilization during the Ottoman rule, only to discover some of the hoarded Kurdish heritage, their lost heritage, to be a biased witness to the Ottomans; to eventually obtain sufficient information that no other Turkish or any Ottoman traveler in this span of time, as stated by the researcher Fathallah Hosseini.