Echoing Travelogues: The Beyond and Us is a concert project led by Amsterdam-based composer and performer Emine Bostancı, exploring how the intertwined histories of travel and migration have shaped cultural and musical identities. Inspired by centuries of encounters across Ottoman, Persian, and European worlds, the project reimagines historical music as a path toward self-understanding. As the performers trace the footsteps of past travelers and diplomats, they pose a resonant question: "Though we travel to explore the other, what we find often reflects our own story."

Blending traditional Eastern and Western Baroque instruments with immersive historical soundscape technology, the performance invites the audience to experience music not just as sound, but as a spatial and temporal journey. The concert’s multisensory design—melding music, stagecraft, and research—creates a vivid echo of lost worlds. By looking back at these layered histories, the project offers a contemporary reflection on identity, belonging, and the cultural imagination of the traveler. Bostancı makes this journey together with the Turkish, Iranian and Dutch musicians of the Dareyn Ensemble. They use historical texts, a unique Ottoman kemenche and cutting-edge 4D sound. This way, you experience how the music sounded in the 15th century at six ancient locations in Vienna, Istanbul and Isfahan.