Student Journal:

Have your students play a selected chapter of Seyahat: A Journey to Mecca and have them record a journal as their character explaining each choice they came across and explain why their character made that choice. Use the following chapter list which details the types of stories/themes included in each chapter.

Students can “continue” their Seyahat story in Hajj Trail if they add the same character details if you wish to make this a longer project.

Design an Encounter:

After having your students play through the game (or a selected chapter), have them read selected sections from either of the two primary sources - Evliya Çelebi’s Seyahatname or Osman Ağa’s Prisoner of the Infidels. Then task your students to write a dialogue of a game encounter (for their character from Seyahat) inspired by one story from one of these two primary sources. Ask them to think about what decisions historical actors had to face and how their character might have acted differently when compared to the primary source reading. Students can write these by hand, work in groups, act these dialogues out, or write them in the program Inky or Twine.

Evliya Çelebi, An Ottoman Traveller: Selections from the Book of Travels of Evliya Çelebi, tr. Robert Dankoff and Sooyong Kim, (London: Eland, 2011)

Osman of Timisoara, Prisoner of the Infidels: The Memoir of an Ottoman Muslim in Seventeenth-Century Europe, trans. Giancarlo Casale, (Oakland: University of California Press, 2021).

Coffeehouse Storytelling

Have your students play a selected chapter or a longer section of Seyahat as a homework assignment. Pair this with selected readings from the stories of Evliya Çelebi (see above). Task the students with writing their own story in the style of Evliya Çelebi and have each student recount their experience ‘as a storyteller in an Ottoman coffeehouse’ to other students in a small group. This should not be done as a summary of events but rather someone recounting a story of an adventure or an unbelievable tale. Students should be evaluated on how well they paint the historical picture of the Ottoman world (peoples, legends, places, challenges) in line with what they encountered in the game and sources.