The great seventeenth-century Sey??atn?me of Evliyâ Çelebi reflects a mythology that illuminates the extent to which the Genoese were remembered centuries after their power had vanished in the eastern Mediterranean. Several times he mentions a Genoese king in Istanbul, and to describe the distant or unknown past, he uses the idiom “the time of the Genoese,” which still existed in twentieth-century Turkish. Though his account of the Genoese is infused with myth, it nevertheless reflects the Genoese imprint upon these lands and peoples. The Genoese maritime empire was at its height in the fourteenth century, and the complex interaction between the the Genoese and a rising Ottoman principality echoes in Evliyâ’s writing, as his quasi-biblical genealogies tell the story of how the Genoese expended into the islands of Chios and Cyprus, Caffa in the Crimea, and Pera across from Constantinople. In raiding the Sey??atn?me for historical data, historians have misunderstood this masterpiece. The worldviews of Evliyâ and his interlocutors is not to be dismissed in our hurry to isolate a few pieces of data. In this paper, I examine the Ottoman memory of the Genoese through the prism of Evliyâ’s writing, and argue that his mythical distortions are not an obstacle to be overcome, but a worldview to be explored.