Hezarfan Ahmed Celebi, the Man who Flew Over the Bosphorus

Almost everyone has heard of Leonardo da Vinci, who is rightly held up as one of the greatest minds in history. Supremely skilled as a painter, inventor, scientist and polymath, his fizzing genius casts a shadow over history few can hope to rival.

Most will also know of Daedalus, the ancient Greek analogue of da Vinci. The figure out of Bronze Age myth may be more legend than fact, but like da Vinci he was possessed of a mind filled with invention. And like da Vinci, he wanted to fly.

Da Vinci almost certainly never progressed his ideas beyond his sketchbook, his crabbed mirror-writing and meticulously observed sketches theorizing that man could fly on a glider much as a bird does. Other sketches show ideas for something akin to a helicopter, and although these are incomplete in design and could not function they show a colossal leap of imagination by the great man.

Daedalus’s story of flight is perhaps the best known fact about him, but also the least likely to be true. We know from the ruins of the great palace of Minos on Crete, for example, that somebody built a grand palace which may well be the “labyrinth” with which Daedalus is credited, but of his aspirations to flight we have nothing.

Furthermore there is much to doubt about this latter tale, where Daedalus and his son Icarus craft wings of feathers and wax to escape their imprisonment on Crete. Icarus of course, exhilarated by flight, flew too high and was killed when the wax melted in the heat of the sun.

Such a story reeks of earthbound invention. The temperature at altitude is of course much colder than on the ground, but then someone who had never flown might not know that. Nor is it possible for a human to attach feathers to his arms and achieve flight. We are simply too large and our arms too weak for such a feat.

So Daedalus and da Vinci may both have dreamed of flight, but neither actually flew. But there was a man who achieved this impossible goal well before the Age of Flight in the early 20th century.

His name was Hezarfan Ahmed Celebi, a contemporary of Leonardo da Vinci living in Constantinople, And he flew right over the Bosphorus at the age of 21.

A Forbidden Achievement

From the achievements attributed to Hezarfan Ahmed Celebi, he certainly seems to have been another da Vinci. A scientist and inventor, he was also a poet, a musician, a chemist and an astronomer. The word “Hezarfan” is itself an honorific, meaning “thousand sciences”: it seems that there was nothing beyond his reach.

But it is for his flight across the Bosphorus around 1630 that he is best remembered today. No diagrams or drawings survive of the device he used to achieve this, but we know from descriptions that it was some sort of glider, said to resemble “eagle wings, using the force of the wind.”

He would practice using this device in short flights over the neighborhood of Okmeydanı, nowadays a part of modern Istanbul. These brief flights appear to have been short gliding runs from a high vantage point across a “pulpit” to a landing zone on the far side.

These experiments attracted interest from the very highest levels of society. The Ottoman Sultan himself, Murad IV, came to hear of Hezarfan Ahmed Celebi and his ability to fly and came to see him try his greatest experiment. 

With the Sultan watching from a vantage point in the Sinan Pasha mansion at Sarayburnu, the young man mounted the high Galata tower, a Genoese watchtower in the northernmost part of the Golden Horn mouth of old Constantinople. There, aided by a following wind, he flew some 3,500 m across the Bosphorus strait to land in Doğancılar Square in Üsküdar, on the other side.

An astonishing achievement. But for those who think this might be too good to be true, it is fair to say that there are questions about the whole thing.

Firstly, this astounding example of early unpowered flight is known from a single source: the traveler Evliya Çelebi. Such writings are often exaggerated, if not outright fiction, and while we can be fairly sure that Hezarfan Ahmed Celebi existed, we can be much less sure about his ability to fly.

These problems are compounded by the supposed details of the flight itself. The Galata tower itself is only 99 m high, and the entire journey of 3.5 km would have been achieved with a loss in altitude of only some 80 m. This is a glide rate that would turn all but the best modern sports gliders green with envy.

The flight itself, despite the supposed practice runs in Okmeydanı, would have been almost impossible to achieve within the limits of 17th century technology. Modern gliders do not rely on the same aerodynamics as eagles, and Celebi would have had to invent sophisticated equipment to achieve such a feat. It is doubtful it could be managed even today.

Sultan Murad IV was said to be astonished at the achievement, rewarding him with a sack of gold. However, perhaps with one eye on the defense of his city, the Sultan then promptly exiled Celebi to Ottoman Algeria where he would spend the rest of his life.

The Sultan’s concerns and the reason for doing so were recorded by the same man who wrote of the miraculous flight: “This man is uncanny: he is capable of doing anything he wishes. It is not right to surround oneself with such people.” The Sultan did not want anyone with such power to upset the natural order of things anywhere near him.

But was any of this true? Ahmed Celebi died, aged around 30, in Ottoman Algeria, so it would seem that he never returned to the city in which he was born. But as to his flight, it may be that his ideas remained as theoretical as those of da Vinci, and his ability to soar like an eagle as fictional as that of Daedalus.

Top Image: Hezarfan Ahmed Celebi was said to have flown over the Bosphorus like another Icarus (George Tsiagalakis / CC BY-SA 4.0)