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~ THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND THE WORLD AROUND IT ~
that Evliya reproduced certain stories told to him by his tour guide.34 Thus, like the Augsburg physician and many other Christian visitors, the Ottoman traveller reported that the priests serving the sanctuary were locked up inside the church for a significant portion of the year, and that the building was only opened to pilgrims after the latter had paid a substantial entrance fee.35 This remark thus may be regarded as ‘standard’, no matter whether Christians or Muslims authored the description. Whenever the building was closed, the priests were supplied through a window opened for this purpose in the wall of the compound. Evliya was much impressed by the ascetic life lived by the clergy serving in the church, and also by the pictorial qualities of the mosaics of the Pantocrator and the Virgin Mary. He also made a laudatory reference to the canopy set over what was considered to be the grave of Christ.36 This was indeed ‘a place worthy of being seen’ (temaşagâh) and upon leaving, the author prayed that the church, whose porch and overall architecture he highly acclaimed, would one day be transformed into a mosque.37 Some ambiguity is apparent from this account. Evliya evidently found things to admire in the architecture and interior decoration of the church, and even in the lifestyle of the priests. At the same time, he was quite aware of the ‘pious fraud’ of the supposedly heaven-descended fire, which the Orthodox and Armenian clergies repeated every Easter, or as he called it, the kızıl yumurta günleri (‘days of the red eggs’) ‘of evil reputation’.38 Evliya was also cognisant of the material interests involved, observing that the wax of the Easter candles produced considerable revenue for the clergy; this was because the latter sold candles to the pilgrims whom they put up in their establishments. In addition, the numerous Orthodox and Armenians who, at the time of Maundrell’s visit, lit their tapers at the Easter fire probably also bought them from priests and monks.39 Evliya also claimed that his guide had himself admitted that the reason for having images in the church at all was not their intrinsic virtue, but rather the impression that ‘our Orthodox (Rum) are a bunch of thick-headed and credulous men’, who could not be moved by preaching alone but whose generosity could be stimulated by a judicious use of images.40 Thus Evliya tells us that the priest who guided him was a ‘an unbeliever, a heretic and a dissolute person’ and thought nothing of addressing the man as ‘you damned one’. But at the same time, Helena the mother of Constantine and herself a pious Christian – as Evliya was well aware – in this author’s tale was made responsible for the restoration of the Muslim sanctuary known as the Mescid-i aksa. Apparently for Evliya Çelebi the pilgrimage church of the Kumame was an interesting site well worth visiting, where one could encounter strange people, assert the superiority of one’s own faith and, last but not least, enjoy a piece of handsome architecture. Other Muslims also entered the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on what we may call ‘touristic’ visits, of which we have at least indirect evidence. The Nuremberg soldier Hans Wild (1585–after 1613/992–after 1022), a prisoner of war in Ottoman lands between 1604/1012–13 and 1611/1019–20, was the slave of a merchant who, when passing through Jerusalem, decided to pay a visit to