Most mediaevalist historians work on objects that have vanished over time: Social structures, discourses, trade networks, state institutions, etc.: almost all our knowledge on these objects is indirect, gathered from traces, mediated by sources, in short, fundamentally absent. An important exception to this rule is the rural territory, some of whose components have remained largely unchanged for the past millennium or more. This continuous presence therefore affords us, at least in theory, the ability to directly share an experience with our medieval experience. Such a proposition is not without its challenges, of course, as it entails a significant task of reconstruction of the mental structures through which mediaeval Anatolians perceived the land surrounding them. Insofar as the word “landscape” can be defined as a segment of territory as it is perceived, this paper constitutes the first step in a broader research project aimed at reconstructing late mediaeval Anatolian rural landscape. The project will eventually come to encompass a wide variety of source types, including narrative and documentary written sources as well as archaeological material. At this early stage, however, this paper will survey the preliminary results of the analysis of one particular narrative text, the Vilâyetnâme. This hagiography, centering on the thirteenth-century saintly figure Hac? Bekta? Veli, constitutes an especially rich source for this project insofar as the anecdotes it contains are mostly set in a rural environment, and his intended audience was also most likely familiar with the countryside. The paper will also present the theoretical groundings of the broader research projects, and address the possibility that we may be able to see the world in which late mediaeval Anatolians lived.