We have seen the evidence for localized urban growth in the coastal towns and upland regions of Greece for this era. Noting the rise of a more independent, indigenous species of middle-class merchants, shippers, financiers, and proto-industrialists in such towns and large villages, we can add that the decentralization of power and wealth from the capital to the provinces further stimulated the flourishing of such lesser centers. The proliferation of urban mansions, imitating Ottoman styles inside and out, as well as Western fashions in interior house design and personal dress, merged together to emphasize the internationalization of the rising Greek bourgeoisie (Sigalos 2004, Vionis 2005a, 2009). Owing to the early rise in the Southern Mainland of the independent Greek state and its understandable rejection of all things Ottoman in the aftermath of the bloody Revolutionary War, little remains there to reflect this phase of Greek town life, whereas in the North of the Mainland the later incorporation into the Greek state allowed much more to survive till today (Sigalos 2004).
Nonetheless Athens, the goal of numerous Travelers and Western artists during this period, is sufficiently recorded to allow us a view of the later Ottoman town (Camp 2001). Increasing insecurity from both pirates and foreign invaders led the governor to rewall the lower town in 1778, Hadrian’s Arch becoming one of its gates. Hadrian’s Library was used as the basis for the governor’s residence. The Acropolis had a garrison and an associated upper town covered its surface (see this book’s cover). The Parthenon’s mosque was
Figure 20.5 Eighteenth-century Ottoman complex behind the Tower of the Winds, Athens, today.
Author.
Figure 20.4 Eighteenth-century Ottoman complex behind the Tower of the Winds, Athens, in the early nineteenth century.
Painting from Theodore de Moncel, Vues pittoresques des monuments d’Athenes. Paris 1845. © 2011The British Library Board. All rights reserved. 648.a.28.
Rebuilt after its predecessor had been destroyed with much of the ancient temple during the seventeenth-centuryVenetian bombardment. A sad reflection of the modern city’s continuing failure to come to terms with all its rich past is the following encounter made by the author in 2010: if you visit the fine Hellenistic Tower of the Winds in the Roman Agora, a solid fence and an entrance ticket lead you to a well-conserved and presented ancient monument. But stand outside that fence and turn around 180 degrees and across the road stands a fragmentary ruined eighteenth-century Ottoman gateway of considerable refinement, and associated ruins: bushes grow from it, it is unfenced and unmarked and its days are surely numbered. It has long been identified as an Islamic religious school (medrese) from 1721 (Travlos 1993) (Figures 20.4 and 20.5).
A much more sensitive attitude appears in an article by Pallis (2006) on the Athenian rural suburb Kifisia and its Ottoman monuments. He describes its use as a summer retreat for Athenian Turks, with mosques, a religious school, bathhouse, travelers’ hostel, country residences, and other features, while regretting the late nineteenth-century atmosphere of ultra-Hellenism in which all these buildings were demolished.
World History
