Vehbî’s Aural Vision: Tracing the Sonic Artifice of the 1720 Istanbul Festival

Abstract

While current memory of the 1720 Ottoman imperial festival is largely based upon visual miniatures, this study approaches the event's official chronicle (surnâme), written by court poet Seyyid Vehbî, as an active loom that constructs the historical sensorium. My discussion employs the notion of textual wayfaring in order to navigate Vehbî’s manuscript as a resonant space, demonstrating how the sensory atmosphere of the festival was imagined and constructed through his içitsel tasavvur (aural vision). I trace the author's sonic architecture in the text’s mukaddime (introduction), where the act of writing is framed as a musical performance, as well as his deployment of an auditory vocabulary that orchestrates the festival’s multisensorial atmosphere. Vehbî’s literary artifice represses dissonance and amplifies imperial authority by weaving disparate urban sounds into a unified resonant meshwork. Functioning as an instrument of sensory governance, the narrative transforms an ephemeral event into an authoritative archived memory, generating an enduring memorial resonance designed to echo through the reading assemblies of Ottoman society. Engaging with this aural vision provides critical insights into the interplay of poetics, power, and the constitution of sensory memory in eighteenth-century Ottoman Istanbul.