When Alex Met Candy: The Ottoman Version of the Story of Alexander and Candace
A Ravi and Seran Trehan Lecture in the Arts of the Islamic World by Edhem Eldem (Columbia University)

This lecture explores a link between Evliya Çelebi’s frequent references to the myth of Queen Kaydafe and Ahmedi’s late fourteenth-century İskendername (Book of Alexander), and it unveils the complex and unexpected ways in which Ahmedi adapted and radically changed the age-old Alexander Romance. In Ahmedi’s telling, Queen Kaydafe stands in for Candace, whose confrontation with Alexander appears in every version of the Romance, East and West. Yet Ahmedi’s İskendername is the first work where the story’s universal “happy ending” turns into a tragedy, fatal to Kaydafe/Candace. Digging through layers of earlier and later texts, Eldem’s investigation reveals how Ahmedi came up with this innovative—and misogynist—twist and laid the foundation for a new and original version of the story, which would spread throughout Ottoman culture and literature at least until the end of the nineteenth century.

February 18, 2026 at 6pm

38 West 86th Street, BGC Lecture Hall