In Boeotia, the two regional urban centers of Livadheia and Thebes expand at the same time as rural villages during the first two centuries after the Ottoman conquest (compare Figures 19.6 and 20.1). At their peak in 1570 they have some 8000 and 4000 occupants respectively, large centers by contemporary provincial standards. Mackenzie’s (1992) portrayal of Ottoman Athens in a short and uncritical book, which does unfortunately continue to circulate in that city today, perpetuates the historical limitations and cultural bias of the Travelers on whom it is based. The only serious account is Machiel Kiel’s (1987) pioneer study of the town and its Attic countryside as recorded in the Ottoman tax archives. Kiel’s access to the contemporary archives shows Athens, at some 18,600 occupants in 1570, as one of the major towns of the Early Ottoman Balkans. Ottoman policy was to repopulate or restore towns, and often populations were transported to Aegean cities from elsewhere in the empire: in 50 years the population ofthe Thessalian centers Trikkala and Larissa jumped by 60 percent for this reason, essentially through Turkish immigration (Lawless 1977).
From archival research, also primarily by Kiel (1990, 1996), we can tell that every town in Greece at this period would have seen the construction of major architectural works: mosques, seminaries, covered markets, bathhouses, as well as water installations (Kiel 1992) and bridges. These seem to have been almost entirely destroyed, or if surviving are only now receiving sporadic protection and conservation. The modern cities of Chalcis and Thessaloniki are notable pioneers in the restoration and display of their Ottoman monumental heritage.
It is salutary to note that Kiel estimates (1996) that only 1 percent of the named major Ottoman buildings mentioned in sources for the city of Larissa in Thessaly, survive today. What is left in most Greek towns are also often fragments of structures which are not protected from decay or destruction, and frequently misinterpreted, since just a few cities have an active policy of conserving Ottoman monuments. Kiel has also introduced us to an even more unimagined world which has become lost to Greek consciousness, the flourishing activity of Ottoman literature, scholarship, and artists which once characterized the major and minor towns of Greece. He has given hints of this in his discussions of the vanished city of Giannisa in Western Macedonia (1990), and also ofThessalian Larissa.
World History
