Throughout this chapter my debt to the research of my PhD students Lef Sigalos and Nassos Vionis is immense, both having made immense strides forward in their research into the development of Greek houses and settlements from the Byzantine era to the twentieth century AD. I am privileged to be able to rely on their work on the Mainland and islands for much of the detail in this and the following chapter. Apart from several articles in my bibliographies, the main sources for their work are Sigalos (2004) and Vionis (2005). We have already seen that Classical Greek homes have been in the forefront of "house and society" studies, which have now extended backward and forward to include houses from the Early Iron Age to Roman times for the Aegean. For the period of this chapter and the next, that is the Post-Medieval era, apart from a handful of articles by various authors, serious study of pre-Modern homes remained the realm of architects and geographers till some 15 or so years ago.
(p. 460) The greatest contribution has been the multi-authored series of "Greek Traditional Architecture" (Philippides 1983-90), organized region by region
And available in several languages.
(p. 461a) Ottoman-style houses were predominantly used by the middle and upper classes of Greek and other ethnic communities in the Aegean, who had both the wealth and the desire to emulate the styles of the wider empire
In a similar fashion, as we shall see, when Greece became an independent state it was these classes that chose to realign their housing fashions with Western models and, indeed, who possessed the means to do so.
(p. 461b) Ottoman towns in the Balkans were typified by their division into ethnic or religious quarters
The local focus of such urban sectors would be a parish church or mosque, associated with communal facilities such as schools, bath-houses, and markets.
(p. 461c) Towns had usually developed organically rather than to a formal plan
In the wider Islamic world there had been many new cities founded in the early centuries of the Caliphate empire. There is widespread agreement on the main lines of evolution for such Islamic towns (cf., for example, Garcin 1991). These had usually begun in a very different fashion from the typical Ottoman imperial town. They were initially spacious, well planned, and airy, but from the end of the Middle Ages, as a consequence of a congruence of political, social, and economic changes, most began to be transformed into the poorly articulated mazes of winding streets and secluded spaces of the post-Medieval Islamic city, dominated by distinct ethnic and religious quarters. That inheritance would be transferred to new provinces conquered by the Ottomans, in the plans which evolved within existing towns and for newly established urban centers, although what we know of Byzantine cities shows many features of convergent development with regard to the lack of a regular gridplan and developed transport systems.
(p. 462a) In the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries neither Ottoman Greek nor Venetian towns were major industrial centers. The Ottoman towns were usually market-towns for their regions, residences of the provincial elite and of more specialized trades and services
According to the fifteenth-century Ottoman tax records, 217 out of 355 Muslim household heads in the town of Larissa were craftsmen, 121 out of 255 in the town of Trikkala, both of which were in Thessaly (Lawless 1977). Lawless nonetheless considers Ottoman Balkan towns as usually parasitic on their regions rather than as centers of production. They were largely composed of service industries and the homes of the ruling class, and hence formed the chief concentrations of provincial wealth. Faroqhi (1990) comments that the sixteenth-century Ottoman Anatolian town was primarily engaged in managing regional agricultural production and local markets.
(p. 462b) Venetian towns, typically maritime, were in contrast usually nodes in international trade in and out of their regions and in transit traffic passing through them
See Herzfeld (1991), Stallsmith (2007).
(p. 462c) Two - to three-story town houses appear in the seventeenth century and spread rapidly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as the result of the rising wealth of the urban landowning and commercial classes
The wealthiest set their town houses within walled gardens.
(p. 466) Venetian Crete gave rise to a lively production of the arts, including literature and painting
Ricks (1992) notes that the ambitious Cretan artists and poets of the later Venetian era aimed at a synthesis of Western and Eastern cultural traditions, and also that a sense of Cretan ethnicity appears in place of a sense of Hellenism or Greekness.
(p. 468a) The oldest longhouses in traditional Boeotian villages usually lay with a similar alignment, often north to south to allow one long face to gain maximum morning sun
Stedman (1996) argues in detail that the alignment shielded houses from winter weather, the summer sun, while bringing optimal light into the working east-facing yard during the long morning. Archaeological evidence fits this recent scenario: at the deserted sixteenth - to eighteenth-century hamlet of four longhouses found on the Tanagra Acropolis, aligned northwest to southeast, the surface ceramic finds were concentrated on the southeastern long side of the houses, where winter sun was available (Vionis 2006). The wide spacing allowed much of life to be out of doors and in open contact between neighbors, while accommodating plentiful space for the dominant agricultural economy of the household. Lawless (1977) notes that Thessaly, depopulated when the Ottoman conquerors arrived, was filled with voluntary and forcibly moved colonists from Anatolia, whose village homes were different from previous local designs in being built in the middle of gardens. It is unclear if this implies vegetable gardens, shaded work and leisure spaces, or a combination, but this kind of multipurpose planted area before the house is found in traditional longhouse societies in both traditional Albanian - and Greek-origin rural communities.
(p. 468b) The wide spaces separating longhouses allow family expansion to be accommodated, either by extending the longhouse or by adding a second house to one end of an existing home
There are numerous examples of double longhouses, end to end, belonging to brothers, where family expansion retained a physical attachment between separate family homes. One such house was recently digitally recorded by our Boeotia Project in the village of Agios Georgios (Bintliff et al. 2009). In the same way, as villages expanded, kin-groups tended to stay in close proximity, so that traditional rural settlements were composed of clusters of houses belonging to related families (Sigalos 2004). The four end-to-end longhouses found on the Acropolis of ancient Tanagra by our project (Vionis 2006) are exceptional.
(p. 469a) At another deserted Boeotia giftlik, Guinosati, a likely controlling tower (konak) has also been identified amid dispersed longhouses
This small deserted hamlet is to be identified with the Ottoman tax village of new Albanian settlers called "Kinos Bala," numbering 10 households in 1466, and last recorded as a giftlik in 1646 with three households. Its peak, predictably in the sixteenth century, is marked by 34 households. Plans and photographs of the site are to be found in Vionis (2006, 2008). Site planning of standing ruins has indicated seven longhouses and traces of a further five, as well as a probable estate manager's house into which a limekiln was built in the 1940s. The open plan of dispersed longhouses running north-south across the contours agrees with other recorded pre-Modern settlement plans in Central Greece. Near the houses local villagers recall a now demolished small church servicing the community.
(p. 469b) A useful overview of the physical form of rural villages in Thessaly, especially the common giftliks, is provided by Lawless (1977)
Marzolff (2006) also describes surviving examples of estate-center towerhouses in coastal Thessaly.
(p. 469c) The estate centers of the Middle to Late Ottoman era _ a towerhouse from Lesbos
Increasing wealth from commerce on the larger Aegean islands encouraged the construction of elaborate estate centers in the countryside, although towerhouse forms (pyrgospiti) were favored because of risks from piracy and other external threats (Sigalos 2004, Vionis 2005).
(p. 471a) Mani in the Peloponnese: a proliferation of defensive towers marks the skyline of surviving traditional community architecture
Before the seventeenth century, when the introduction of lime mortar provides a chronological divide, houses were of stone and commonly two-story, while in the subsequent era increased feuding and exposure to outside contacts led to much higher tower-focused house complexes (Saitas 1990, Sigalos 2004).
(p. 471b) There is growing interest in the khans or wayside travelers' hostels
See Lee et al. (1992) for archaeological recording of khans in Palestine.
(p. 472a) Mosques: pictorial records of lost examples. One such example I discovered in the background of an icon of St. John the Baptist from Thebes
It came to my notice at an exhibition of photographs of ecclesiastical art and architecture in the Central Greek province of Boeotia by a colleague, George Kopanyas, in the regional capital of Livadhia. I observed what appeared to be a detailed representation of that town at the height of the Ottoman era, including a mosque of remarkable proportions and complexity.
It is sad that the vast bulk of Ottoman mosques in Greece have either been destroyed or survive in neglected ruins, with notable and praiseworthy exceptions in certain towns. To understand towns of the Ottoman era, where the majority of Islamic inhabitants dwelt, the prominence of each quarter's religious focus had greater significance than communication routes around the community. As Kezer (1996) stresses, the mosques of the Ottoman town (to which with justice we can add churches and synagogues), were the social and spiritual focus of urbanites in their distinctive ethnic and religious suburbs, anchoring ritual by situating it in the collective map of social life.
(p. 472b) At the major churches and monasteries there can be found impressive works of art from the Ottoman centuries. Thus on Mount Athos the sixteenth century witnessed great buildings and art and many of the most accomplished Greek artists went to work there
Such as the sixteenth-century paintings in the refectory of the Dionysiou Monastery (Runciman 1975). Machiel Kiel (pers. comm.) has noted itinerant Orthodox artists whose work appears over wide regions in Ottoman-era churches, such as two from Thebes whose art can be traced all over Mainland Greece.
(p. 473a) Books and articles on Greek castles remaining remarkably vague on questions of phasing
Our colleagues in the Levant are well ahead of us in this respect (Harper and Pringle 2000, Petersen 1998).
(p. 473b) Ottoman castles: promising developments can now be show-cased
To which we can now add a general book on Ottoman fortifications (Nicolle 2010) and one on Ottoman architecture including fortifications in Greece (Brouskari 2008).
(p. 473c) Material culture in the Middle to Late Ottoman era
I did not include a section on burial practices for this era, but we now have an excellent study from Corinth of a seventeenth-century cemetery in the Panagia Field within the former ancient city site (Rohn et al. 2009). This observed distinctions in orientation which reflected a mixed Christian and Muslim population. The excavators believe this could have been a garrison graveyard with Muslim soldiers and Christian spouses and children. However, since the garrison was housed remotely in the Acrocorinth mountain acropolis above, where we also learn from contemporary sources that both Muslim and Christians dwelt, it is unclear why their burial was in the coexisting lower village.
Perhaps this outer community was also mixed. A palaeopathological analysis allows insights into life expectancy, disease, and lifestyle.
(p. 474) We can observe imitation of West European and especially Italian table manners and equipment in the Italianized Ionian Islands during the eighteenth century and in the contemporary Cyclades
In the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries table manners and elaborate place-settings, dress codes, and the deportment of the body were all studiously cultivated to mark the separation of classes in Western Europe (cf. Romano 1993). These behaviors were influential in those parts of Greece that either remained in the political control of Venice, or retained strong Italian connections despite incorporation into the Ottoman Empire (such as the Cyclades).
World History
