Giritli Ali Aziz Efendi

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"Muhayyelât" of Giritli Ali Aziz Efendi

Giritli Ali Aziz Efendi was a Turkish author of the 18th century, notable for his sefaretname relating his mission as the ambassador of the Ottoman Empire in Prussia in 1796, and for his novel "Muhayyelât" (Imaginations), a unique work of fiction blending personal and fantastic themes, well in the current of the traditional Ottoman prose, but also exhibiting influences from Western literature.

1 Biography
2 Muhayyelât
3 Books
4 References
5 External links
6 Footnotes

[edit] Biography

He was born in Crete to Turkish Cretan parents. The details on his life are rather sparse and scattered. He rose through the Ottoman hierarchy and was sent as ambassador to Prussia in 1796.

In June 1797 he was sent on a second embassy mission to Prussia, and died in Berlin in 1798. His burial marked also the opening of the first Turkish cemetery in Berlin.^[1]

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[edit] Muhayyelât

Written in a laconical style contrasting with its content, where djinns and fairies surge from within contexts drawn from ordinary real life situations, Ali Aziz Efendi often pursues by pulling the reader towards description of magic and to extraordinary occurrences. Inspired by a much older story written both in Arabic and Assyrian, the author also displays in his work his deep knowledge of sufism, hurufism and Bektashi traditions. Muhayyelât is considered to be an early precursor of the new Turkish literature to emerge in the Tanzimat period of the 19th century. It also influenced Tanzimat literature directly when the manuscript was printed in 1867 and became a very popular book of the time. His work is re-discovered by Turkey's reading public rather recently and is increasingly admitted as a classic.

Ali Aziz Efendi also wrote further and shorter works of prose, which present as complementary extensions to Muhayyelât, as well as some poetry, and kept a correspondence with a number of notable figures of his time, both Ottoman and Western.