Ottoman towns in the Balkans were typified by their division into ethnic or religious quarters (machalades/ mahalle) centered around their own foci of worship and the mansions of their community leaders (Braude 1985) and were taxed and administered as such by the Ottoman authorities. Towns had usually developed organically rather than to a formal plan, with small winding streets, some cobbled, mostly not, little wheeled traffic, and goods generally brought into town by donkey or on foot (Lawless 1977). They had few open spaces, their social centers being the bathhouses (hamam), open markets (suq-bazaar), covered markets (bedestan), merchant hostels (khan), churches, synagogues, and mosques. A castle often serves for the town’s Ottoman garrison and governor. On the Greek Mainland it was common that only public secular and religious buildings were usually of stone or brick, the rest were of wood and mudbrick (but usually on stone foundations). Lawless suggests for Mainland towns of the Early Ottoman era, but especially in the lowland plains, that most town houses differed little from rural village habitations, single-story cottages of mudbrick, a style still observable into the early nineteenth century for the poorer occupants ofTrikkala.
Venetian colonial towns also had quarters focused on churches and elite mansions, and added to garrison-forts elaborate city walls in earth faced with stone. In keeping with Italian practice, large and small squares were frequent as were wider streets, and the main square might be faced by the town hall, governor’s residence, cathedral, and bishop’s palace. A far greater use of stone was in evidence.
In the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries neither Ottoman Greek nor Venetian towns were normally 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. The importance of fairs seems to indicate too that Ottoman towns were inadequate in meeting their regional needs in objects of commerce (Lawless 1977). ButVenetian towns, typically maritime, were in contrast usually nodes for international trade in and out of their regions and in transit traffic passing through them.
Although there arose widespread rural peasant impoverishment and an associated decline in urban populations in Mainland Greece, from the seventeenth century onwards, there were localized signs of recovery by the eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries, both in urban centers and some country regions, connected often to a growing commercial and proto-industrial prosperity (especially from the production of textiles). Both towns and villages participating in this wide trend exhibit the contemporary construction of large mansions for the leading families profiting from these developments. Sigalos (2004) notes how in this era in the Ottoman Balkans, areas on major land and sea routes and those with cotton and wool textile industries witness economic growth, stimulating elaborate houses for a prosperous community, of which a very large number still survive in the towns and villages of Thrace, Macedonia, Epirus, and Thessaly. Lawless (1977) describes how the wealthier inhabitants constructed grand houses in stone and wood to replace simpler dwellings, as well as investing in richly-decorated churches and schools, while developing an interest in intellectual life and thereby cultivating a sense of national consciousness. He contrasts this with the continuing simplicity and poverty of the yiftlik estates in the lowland plains.
Two - to three-story town houses appear in the seventeenth and spread rapidly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as the result of the rising wealth of the urban landowning and commercial classes, and in the countryside, estate-centers linked to commercialization might feature large multi-story tower-houses, or more extensive country mansions (archon-tika). The cachet of class led to the diffusion through these new urban and rural mansions of Oriental house designs, internal furnishings, and associated lifestyles. Although in general the Aegean Islands, Crete included, stayed rather in their “Frankish-Venetian” building traditions, peripheral areas which became networked into these economic developments adopted the International Ottoman style, such as on Thasos and Lesbos in the North Aegean. However although Modern Crete preserves a large number of Italian-inspired urban and rural mansions for both Greek and Venetian wealthy families dating from the Venetian occupation (1204—1669), once under Ottoman rule, there eventually developed a tendency to adopt the International Ottoman style of architecture, so that examples of eighteenth-century date fit the wider Aegean trend. A similar late development occurred in the Cyclades.
According to Sigalos (2004) key aspects ofOttoman fashions in Aegean town houses and the rural residences of wealthy landowners include: (1) a clear vertical division with ground floors possessing attached yards/gardens, combining leisure and open-air work-and storage-space, while the upper floors are for domestic and social life; (2) the upper floors are articulated around a key access space, the iliakos-hagiati, either an open veranda opening to the garden/yard or at least to the outside world, or an enclosed corridor or gallery, the former suited to domestic and social life in the warmer months; (3) opening off (2) are a series of modular rooms of ondas type (see ‘Textile Villages of Mount Pelion’ Box in next section), square units for flexible use usually with built-in benches/beds (sofas) round the walls; (4) especially on the uppermost floor ondas rooms can project out from the house (sahnisia) to allow airflow and light from different directions into the house, and via grilled shutters allow the occupants to observe the townscape without reciprocal visibility; (5) the upper floors may contain a cosmopolitan mix of Oriental furnishings — textiles, carved and painted wall and ceiling designs, and portable objects of metal and ceramic, as well as imports and imitation of the same from Christian Europe. The ondas module is suited to flexible use of space at different times of the day, or the year. A reception room can become a bedroom, since built-in cupboards (mousandres) and the interior of the sofas are used for the storage of bedding and other household materials. Wealthier homes can designate rooms for winter or summer use, for private and semi-public or reception space, and for the seclusion of women. Sigalos emphasizes that the flexibility of the ondas concept marks a distinction of importance to the Western-originating development in Early Modern Greece of invariable, set functions for rooms: being a flexible rectangular space which can be multiplied and ranged either along a veranda or round an internal reception space, allowing functional, gender, and social separation.
The town of loannina in Northwest Mainland Greece (Loukakis 1960) preserves many fine houses of the wealthier class from later Ottoman times. Archontika, or the mansions of the elite of the town, are large multi-story complexes focused on an internal garden. The ground-floor rooms as usual are for work and storage, whilst the upper-floor chambers are ranged behind a veranda opening onto the garden (extended hagiati). As often in pre-Modern traditional houses, the upper floor(s) are reached directly from the ground by a staircase, here a monumental one. There is a generic similarity to the plans of merchants’ hostels or khans. Lesser in scale yet still impressive are the town houses of the middle class (Figure 21.1): two to three storys high, the ground floor (d) has stores and a yard. The first floor (c) has a living suite suited for winter (cheimoniatiko) opening off a reception space (metzopatoma), whilst the second floor (b) has a formal reception room, also suited for winter months, a family living room of ondas type, and a long gallery-room, which may be an open or enclosed veranda (hagiati-iliakos), but suited for domestic and social life in the warmer months. Interestingly, in some wealthy houses there may be a small space reserved for females to retreat on the arrival of male visitors, illustrating the adoption of Islamic standards of domestic modesty amongst the wealthier Christian households. In Ioannina and another regional town of Epiros, Metsovo, such houses of the richer classes combine International Ottoman architectural styles with much internal decoration deriving in fashion but also directly via import from West and Central Europe; wonderful Western carved and painted wall and ceiling art and stained glass mixes easily with other furnishings and objects of Oriental type. The extensive commercial and social contacts of such flourishing towns of eighteenth - and early nineteenth-century Greece are clearly emphasized in such cosmopolitan reflections within the domestic built environment (Philippides 1999, Sigalos 2004).
In the historic town of Kavala in Northeast Mainland Greece, the Greek archaeologist Bakirtzis has pioneered the study of post-Medieval urbanism, with recording and conservation of houses threatened by modern development during the 1970s. In many articles in the journal Archaiologikon Deltion he has outlined the distinctive homes with Ottoman features from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (cf. listing in Sigalos 2004). Architectural styles compare with those already discussed, and likewise here the display rooms were highly embellished with paintings and carved wall and ceiling ornaments, where the attractive merging of Western and Oriental fashion results in the so-called “Turco-Baroque” style.
In the Peloponnese the significant port-town of Pylos consisted of a castle, a walled lower town, and an extramural settlement (Sigalos 2004, Davies 2004). The seventeenth-century traveler Evliya Celebi claimed the following houses for each of these units: 33, 600, and 200. Muslims dominated in such walled settlements, which seem to have been made up of closely-packed houses, with at least the ground floor of stone, some at least with yards, contrasted to the more dispersed extramural settlements with gardens attached to the houses. Another fortified port-town was Kiparissia (Sigalos 2004), likewise in Messenia province. Still today the road to the castle is lined with derelict terraced townhouses of Ottoman style, constructed of stone ground floors with the traditional wood-structure upper domestic rooms overhanging the street.
Study of Ottoman houses has tended to focus on the outstanding mansions of the upper classes and neglected those of the remaining population, due to
Figure 21.1 Town house in loannina.
E. Sigalos, Housing in Medieval and Post-Medieval Greece. Oxford 2004, Figure 60.
Their lesser architectural pretensions. In addition to the case of loannina cited earlier, where less prestige homes were analyzed, we might also mention the town of Verroia in Northeastern Greece, where Chrysopoulos (1960) combines analysis of the archon-tika of the wealthy with homes of at least the middle class, belonging to the laika or non-elite families. They appear to reflect scaled-down versions of grander houses, consisting of terraced homes, with a ground floor garden and storage area, then from the garden an exterior stair leads to a first floor veranda-corridor space suited to much social and domestic life in the warmer months. This latter reception space opens onto two rooms of ondas form allowing domestic life in the cooler months and potential privacy. In the archontika we may note once more that some possess built spaces for temporary female seclusion. The poorer urban families appear to have used the form of the rural longhouse, giving a rustic appearance to the less central zones of Ottoman towns, away from the houses of merchants, manufacturers, the professions, and wealthier landowners. Evidence for this comes from Livadheia (see Text Box) and Argos.
In general, after mosques, little survives of communal buildings from Ottoman towns, but we can admire the modern initiative of the city of Thessaloniki in conserving its fifteenth-century covered market (Bedestan), still in use, and its restoration of a splendid contemporary bath-house (the Bey Hamami) (Kourkoutidou-Nikolaidou and Tourta 1997).
The towns of the Cyclades and most other Aegean Islands remained largely within the Frankish architectural and planning traditions introduced in the thirteenth century, apart from the more traditional Greek vernacular suburbs which lay outside the formally planned colonial central areas, the rural villages, and as seen some local Late Ottoman architectural emulation (Sanders 1996, Vionis 2001, 2005, 2009). The largest collection of pre-nineteenth-century West European-inspired public and private buildings in Greece lie on Crete and the Ionian Islands. Crete remained in Venetian hands to 1669, and contains a rich legacy of fortresses and the urban and rural mansions of the wealthier classes (colonial and indigenous). Study of this heritage has been long underway by architects and historians (Gerola 1905—1932), although till recently integration with archaeological material culture studies has been limited. The elite of the island naturally followed Italian stylistic fashions in the display architecture of their residences, so that Renaissance and Baroque facades and ground plans are widespread (Figure 21.3). The isolation of Crete, after the Ottoman conquest of the rest of the Aegean and of Cyprus, forced the Venetian Republic to invest in urban fortifications of immense scale and sophistication, such as can be admired in Herakleion and Rethimnon, as well as in coastal forts such as Frangokastello. After Ottoman capture however, the island’s elite shifted housing fashions to the International Ottoman style (Sigalos 2004). Just as with the (neglected) flourishing literary and musical
Ottoman Livadheia
The Boeotian town of Livadheia, now the regional capital, provides a useful case study of the problems and potentials of studying Ottoman towns in much of Modern Greece (Bintliff et al. 1999, Sigalos 2004). The Old Town lay alongside the River Herkyna, largely overlying the small ancient city. Medieval and Ottoman Livadheia was a small community, consisting of three zones. The Castle was divided into a military-administrative Acropolis, below which was built a walled lower town. Beyond this lay an extramural quarter, on both sides of the river, associated with the Middle Byzantine church of Panayia. The town appears to have developed into a significant community under later Frankish rule, then prospered in later Ottoman times as the center of a Kaza or administrative unit for Western Boeotia, trading local production of textile dyes, wool, cereals, tobacco, and rice on an international scale. It was drawn and described by many early nineteenth-century Travelers (Tsigakou 1981). Apart from the Medieval Castle, little survives, although Western visitors such as Leake noted the urban mansions with “spacious chambers and galleries in the Turkish manner.” From the late nineteenth century onwards, the town has abandoned its historic core, to spread on a vastly greater scale both to the north and east (where lies the modern administrative and commercial heart).
In the Southwest quarter ofmodern Livadheia, the core of the Old Town is the former extramural district on the left bank of the river. Sources identify the main street as running parallel and west of the river, along which we know of at least three mosques. One lies beneath the modern cathedral (Metropolis), another has been recorded in remnants within later buildings at a small square called Tahachna. Both were associated with a small widening of the street to create market areas. A third mosque miraculously survives between them as a shell above a small shop.
Descriptions of the town indicate its plan was of narrow winding streets, and even today the old Main Street (Odos Stratigou loannou), still possesses this character. This street was fronted by two - to three-story houses with overhanging upper floors, whilst to their rear the riverside houses displayed a similar profile attractively overlooking the Herkyna. Some of these were genuine mansions, but just one has been preserved as a national monument, the house belonging to the most notable of the leading local Greek families (archontes), that of Logothetis. Travelers met a warm welcome from various members of this clan, and the house today shows a typical combination of International Ottoman style architecture and lavishly decorated internal reception rooms combining Western and Oriental designs. Sources remark on the emulation amongst the Livadheia elite of Ottoman lifestyles, for which a famous picture of one of the Logothetis family is an eloquent witness. His Islamic dress, the sofa, hookah pipe, and Oriental fireplace are striking.
The Main Street and the banks of the river were thus faced with several mosques, two - to three-story homes for the landowning, mercantile, and administrative elite of the town, as well as the owners of small shops which opened onto the road. Just one further house in original style (if rebuilt in post-Ottoman times) survived till our own architectural survey, of interest as it represents a less prestigious town house with shop below. Sadly it appears today on the verge of demolition (Figure 21.2). The ground-floor shop and storage area was not connected to the upper residential floor, which was accessed from outside stairs on the slope at the back of the house. This upper floor retains its sahnisi overhang which once would have been largely a veranda with shutters opening onto the street, behind which two rooms would have provided a more private family room and a semipublic reception room or saloni. Leake in the early nineteenth century describes homes in the town as commonly formed of sets of rooms ranged along a veranda.
As one moved away from the Main Street, an extensive suburb stretched uphill to the west, with a smaller one across the river and also uphill to the east. Further mosques and Christian churches formed small neighborhood foci in a warren of
Figure 21.2 A ruined overhang-house, main street, Ottoman Livadheia.
E. Sigalos, Housing in Medieval and Post-Medieval Greece. Oxford 2004, Figure 167.
Tiny alleys and dense house-blocks. In these outer districts it seems likely that “urban” forms of two-story homes were increasingly matched by simpler, more “rural” house forms occupied by poorer families employed in the town or working the countryside around. Their homes would have been of the agricultural longhouse variety, modified often to one-and-a-half-story structures, to take advantage of the typical sloping terrain. In an architectural survey undertaken by our Boeotia project (Bintliff et al. 1999, Sigalos 2004), a surprising number of these homes were recorded, although most were in ruinous condition and since then have mostly been demolished. One fine one-and-a-half-story house we recorded is very rural in all respects but for its urban location. A large yard with a gated wall and ancillary structures for crop-processing, leads to a house with ground-floor storage and stabling. Direct stair access from the yard takes one first to a veranda hagiati, behind which lie the formal and informal domestic spaces.
In the first Ottoman tax record of 1466 (Bintliff 1995, Kiel 1987), some 1000 inhabitants are listed for Livadheia, 30 percent being Muslim. In Boeotia as widely through the Balkans, Islamic and other immigrants (such as Jews), were clustered into towns and fortresses, partly for protection, but also to reflect their dominant role in commerce and as rentier landowners. Hardly any Muslims are recorded in Boeotian villages. Under the positive influence of the Early Ottoman Empire, the town’s population had by 1570 quadrupled, whilst a seventeenth-century source mentions half a dozen mosques and a similar number of churches, which provided the administrative and social subdistricts (mahalles) of the town.
Culture of Ottoman Greece, Venetian Crete gave rise to a lively production of the arts, including literature and painting: the star product was Domenikos Theotokopoulos or El Greco (1541—1614), who combined Byzantine traditions with Western artistic styles (Holton 1991).
Even more Italian is the planning and architecture of the Ionian Islands off the west coast of Greece. They were under Venetian rule between 1363 and 1797, after which French then British administration retained them within a Western political and cultural sphere of influence. Apart from the major public buildings for local administration and the great defense works (such as Corfu Castle), a wide range of housing types represents the long centuries ofWestern rule and all classes of the population living within the towns (Figure 21.4). Zivas (1974) underlines the close links between Italian architecture and the development of local schools of literature and the other arts, but perhaps stresses too much the military element in s uggesting
Figure 21.3 The Venetian-era monastic church at Arcadi, Crete.
Shutterstock Images/Paul Cowan.
Figure 21.4 Seventeenth-century Venetian palace in Corfu (The Nobles’ Lounge).
Author.
That the prevalence of multi-story terraced house-blocks, reminiscent ofmodern apartments, was affected by restrictions of space within town defenses. Such designs were characteristic of non-elite housing in Italian cities from the Middle Ages (Sabelberg 1985).
On Mainland Greece several key port-towns central to Venetian maritime power, although lost to the Ottomans in the sixteenth century, and briefly recaptured during the Venetian occupation of the Peloponnese from 1685 to 1715, contain notable Italian-style public and private architecture, including Methoni, Koroni, and Navplion (cf. Triposkoufi and Tsitouri 2002, with references). On the island of Kythera off the southern Peloponnese, the main Venetian town at Chora follows the Cycladic model of a fortified town of two-story houses, with an inner Kastro for the governor and defense forces, and an outer Bourgo for the elite citizens of the island. In the countryside however the abolition of serfdom by Venice allowed new village foundations for local peasants during the sixteenth century; these follow the Cycladic island model of concentric houses to defend the community from pirate attack. Interestingly their two-story homes show a rise in peasant status, allowing a spatial division between storage and stock, and domestic space (Ince and Ballantyne 2007), and perhaps emulation of colonial town-dwellings.
World History
