Evliya Çelebi’s Book of Travels represents the most comprehensive description of the Ottoman realm in the seventeenth century. And recent scholarly attention has shifted away from his reports on the core regions of the Balkans and Anatolia toward his accounts of the more distant Arab provinces and beyond. Despite that shift, little attention has been paid to Damascus, a city that Evliya Çelebi regarded as one of the six greatest in the Ottoman realm and a proverbial paradise. The paper focuses on his account of Damascus, a city he visited twice. It first situates the account in the context of his empirical and imperial mapping of the Ottoman realm and then considers the particular narrative trajectory, since his two visits were taken under different circumstances and separated by some twenty-five years. Damascus, as will be argued, is ultimately rendered by Evliya Çelebi as a site for affirming personal piety as well as Ottoman authority.