On the Cyclades, Crete, and the Ionian Islands, Venetian maritime power came to dominate, although the Genoese and other Italian states colonized Greek islands on a lesser scale. The Cycladic islands were taken over by aristocrat families and their followers, creating genuine colonial urban enclaves within a wider and denser rural landscape of Greek villages. The favored locations for these foundations were visible and defensible locations, and here a highly nucleated town plan was introduced from Italian urban experience (Sanders 1996, Vionis 2001b, 2005, Sigalos 2004). The edges of the colonial settlement were either provided with a wall, or an outer ring of multi-story houses created a defense barrier. The residence of the dominant lord of the island was a central tower or small castle within this nucleation. Regular planning was preferred, for example on Antiparos (Figure 19.3b), but where the terrain was very hilly the rows of domestic houses and the narrow streets run along the contours, as on Siphnos or Astypalaia (Figure 19.3a). Some of these Italian planned towns were new foundations, others redeveloped sites used in earlier eras, but they begin in their planned form from the thirteenth-century Latin conquest of Greece, and most still preserve the main lines of their urban plan and individual house design.
The design scheme seems to echo not surprisingly the built environment of Medieval towns in Italy, with prominent residences for the ruling elite (fortified palaces for dukes and bishops, towers for leading landed
Figure 19.3b Plan of the old town on Antiparos centering on the lord’s castle or tower.
E. Sigalos, Housing in Medieval and Post-Medieval Greece. Oxford 2004, Figure 12.
Figure 19.3a Astypalaia town with its focalVenetian castle. E. Sigalos, Housing in Medieval and Post-Medieval Greece. Oxford 2004, Figure 7.
Families), and street-lining rows of terraced multi-story houses for the rest of the population (comparable to “Borgo” habitations in Renaissance Italy, Sabelberg 1985). There is a significant difference however. In Italy both wealthy and poor citizens of the town lived in the same streets, regardless of class, except for the uppermost stratum of aristocracy. In the colonial towns established on the Aegean islands, the colonial settlers, traders, manufacturers, and landowners occupied the new planned settlements, whilst the Greek peasantry, working for the incomers, occupied rural villages or the irregularly-developing fringes of the colonial town. The colony was centered on the local lord’s keep and an adjacent public square, which represented a spatial and social focus for the community. This echoes on a far larger scale the same concept as the courtyard which accompanied many private family residences.
Within these towns the ordinary colonist house (Vionis 2001b, 2005) was of two storys, terraced with similar neighbors along the street front. The adoption of flat roofs was a reflection of the dry Aegean climate, and it is interesting that also in the Crusader states of the Levant, colonial settlements made the same adaptation (Boas 1999). Often the ground floor was used for animals, storage of agricultural produce, craft production or shops, but sometimes different families occupied the lower and upper floors. Generally however the house was for one household with domestic accommodation in one or more rooms on the upper floor. A simple division in these homes in their Early Modern occupation of less public, more private space toward the interior, could well be applicable to their Medieval use. In recent times the public outer half of the domestic space was ornamented with textiles and ceramics. There could also be a courtyard for work and leisure, although the flat roofs and the streets would also have been in use for various purposes as house extension spaces. It is usually argued that increasing elaboration in the number of built spaces, with associated separation of room functions, including conceptual divisions between animals and humans, is a mark of increasing social complexity (Kent 1990). However the vertical layering of domestic housing in the island colonial towns was just as much a consequence of the compression of large numbers of citizens in Italian towns with high prices for land plots and the constraints of an urban defense wall, as symptomatic of a bourgeois mentality of domestic life.
What is unique in the Aegean is the remarkable conservation till today of what are largely thirteenth-century AD settlement and house designs. The Aegean islands certainly suffered from regular pirate raids, but were little transformed by Ottoman rule, or the devastations of the War of Independence and later industrial developments. Only Syros saw major rebuilding in the nineteenth century, when it briefly formed a national center of commercial shipping wealth and became a focus of Neo-Classical architecture (Kartas 1982). At the beginning of the twentieth century, with the rise of Modernism in Western European architecture, the replicated Medieval whitewashed box-agglomerations of the Aegean island towns had survived to stimulate architects such as Le Corbusier (Michaelides 1972).
On Crete and the Ionian Islands, direct rule from Venice as opposed to the indirect rule on the Cyclades through dominant Venetian families, led to a series of port-towns where characteristic features of North Italian andVenetian Adriatic urban planning and architecture are found: urban defense works which grow increasingly massive over time (Triposkoufi and Tsitouri 2002), major squares associated with state offices, warehouses and fleet facilities, stylish mansions renewed at intervals in fashionable styles for the wealthy elite, and Italianate churches. In the countryside villas accompanied extensive commercial estates, also in imported styles. The physical presence ofVenice, in particular in Cretan Rethymnon, has both inspired a pride in the historic role of the town but also modern resentment at restrictions its citizens now endure when wishing to modernize it (Herzfeld 1991).
Mainland towns under both Frankish and Byzantine control benefited from the rise, beginning in later Middle Byzantine times, of a wealthy residential class, combining extensive landowning with investment in regional trade and manufacture. This class of archontes was very significant to the flourishing of provincial towns, some of which received formal privileges in the Late Byzantine-Frankish era as “communes.” With the political fragmentation of power due to the multiple competing states and duchies, towns could gain more autonomy and economic initiative, which was also stimulated by the general penetration throughout the Aegean of the boats and merchants of the highly commercial Italian states such as Genoa and Venice. The Latin Conquest, in enhancing the inroads of Western commerce, had at least one positive effect in increasing urban exchanges and a greater commercialization of rural markets. In the major commercial towns there were quarters for merchant families of different statehoods, including warehouses, offices, and residences for traveling traders. However, we should not overestimate the urban scale of Frankish towns. MacKay comments: “Corinth was no city, and in the Frankish period probably never much of anything but a fortress town and ecclesiastic center, but it did harbor foreign merchant enclaves” (2003, 419).
At Athens the successive dukes dwelt on the Acropolis, where massive fortifications were erected (Figure 19.4). They converted the ancient entrance-complex or Propylaea into a palace dominated by an immense tower. The Parthenon of the goddess Athena was appropriately rededicated as a church to the Virgin Mary (Camp 2001).
The rather grander Mainland houses in larger villages, castle-settlements, and towns, which could represent ruling elites, are two or more storys high, with separate access to a domestic first floor from the ground floor. The latter was often barrel-vaulted and in use for storage, stabling, and workshops and could enclose a cistern fed by rainwater. An open yard spread before the house, which in some cases could be fortified, with loopholes for archery, although the yards are not normally walled. At the first-floor domestic access point, open balconies can be found of a hagiati type, which thus allowed house occupants to vary their activities flexibly between indoors, outdoors or in an intermediate climate. Rarely a tower is incorporated into such larger houses, of two or three storys in height. The main reception room on the first floor (triklinos in the Byzantine sources) was a long chamber combining, as in the smaller colonial houses on the Cyclades, public social as well as private living space. The display side of wealthier homes and also feudal towers can be seen in architectural refinements on the main reception floor (first or second), such as Gothic tracery windows and vaulting. The lack of genuine private space remains the case for all but three-story mansions, where the extra floor was free of public access. In the case of feudal towers, as noted earlier, the main reception floor could be used for public affairs of the district such as judicial proceedings and the reception of serfs and tenants.
Figure 19.4 The Frankish Athenian Acropolis. Lower right, the Propylaea converted into an impressive palace for the Dukes of Athens. The Parthenon, already a Byzantine church, was rededicated as a Catholic cathedral to the Virgin Mary. The entire hill was massively refortified. On the left are the ruins of the older temple of Athena and next to them the Erechtheum. © Dimitris Tsalkanis, Www. ancientathens3d. com.
In summary, if we except the built colonial towns of foreign aspect implanted in the Aegean and Ionian islands and on some colonial outposts on the Mainland, we might characterize the remaining Medieval Greek settlements as articulated by a small number of narrow and winding streets flanked by freestanding houses with attached open yards in a generally dispersed pattern. Numerous churches would mark distinct neighborhoods and might reflect building and furnishing dedications by the wealthier families.
World History
