The study of standing buildings, still in use, ruined or preserved in paintings, drawings, and photographs from the last few centuries, offers the student of material culture an immensely insightful resource for understanding the nature and dynamics of past societies. Archaeology is by definition the analysis of past material culture, so it is not necessary to confine our attention to private houses and public buildings excavated by “archaeologists”; we can and should make use of these other rich resources evidencing the built environment. In the Aegean, this is all the more important because Post-Medieval Archaeology does not yet exist as a defined discipline in the region. Till the last few years, most excavations in Greece by Greek and foreign teams did not treat Ottoman and nineteenth - and early twentieth-century AD levels as worthy of detailed recording, so we have precious few dig reports and finds catalogs to draw on for reconstructing domestic life and major pre-Modern monuments. In this and the following chapter I shall make no further excuses for bringing in many forms of material culture which come from much wider contexts than pure archaeology. Most buildings have been studied by architects, whilst movable material culture has been mainly approached through Folklore and
Rural Heritage scholarship. However there is one more vital source of information which can only increase, probably logarithmically, and that is the steady growth of regional survey projects, whose directors are now well aware of the necessity of treating the period 1400—1900 AD as seriously and as carefully as any previous era.
In the development of domestic life, the house plays as central a role to archaeologists as it did for past societies themselves, thus archaeologists can benefit greatly from the mature development of its study (“Vernacular Architecture)” by architects, art historians, anthropologists, and folklorists (Sigalos 2004).
In his famous geographical survey of the Balkans, Cvijic (1918) recognized regional house and settlement types, and tied these mainly to ethno-historic communities or “cultures.” Thus for Greece the “Greek-Mediterranean” settlement predominated, characterized by nucleated villages whose houses consisted of an upper floor for humans above ground floors for farm and transport animals. Pockets of Turkish Muslims were associated with the Turkish-Oriental house, which had a stone foundation and overhanging upper stories of mudbrick and timber (sahnisi). Finally, fiftlik settlements housed Greek laborers on estates, especially on the arable plains of Eastern Greece; here there were simple low peasant houses in a square dominated by the “konak” tower of the landlord (bey). Megas (1951) was a folklorist who
The Complete Archaeology of Greece: From Hunter-Gatherers to the 20th Century AD, First Edition. John Bintliff. © 2012 John Bintliff. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Pioneered the classification of Greek house types, but linked these with a Greek nationalist aim to derive them from ancient times. Moutsopoulos (1982) summarized major Greek house forms, but similarly saw these as indigenous, originating via Byzantine domestic architecture from Classical and prehistoric traditions. Wagstaff (1965) rather emphasized environment; for example, a dominance of limestone creates the typical Greek house, whilst mudbrick logically replaces this on the great plains. Likewise the arid climate favored flat roofs on the Aegean islands and East Greek littoral, contrasted to pitched roofs inland with more rain and snow. Furthermore the inland hilly and mountainous parts of Greece encouraged the rise of two-story houses adapting to sloping settlement surfaces. A cultural element was allowed, so that there could be, as with Cvijic, a Turco-Oriental house, although Wagstaff considered that separate female quarters were confined to Muslims. Towerhouses were seen as ethnic Albanian or Maniot (the Mani is a remote rocky peninsula in the far south of the Peloponnese famous for its feuding clans and independence from outside government). Aalen (1987) also summarized the main vernacular (private house) types, but was innovative in including temporary rural field-huts (kalyves) and sheepfolds (mandres). The greatest contribution has been the multi-authored series of “Greek Traditional Architecture” (Philippides 1983—1990), organized region by region. These volumes give an excellent overview of the typology and plan of homes, and occasionally village plans. One weakness is that the historical development of houses is not researched in depth, and internal fittings are little explored, nor the social arrangements which changing home designs reflected.
However within the Greek vernacular architecture tradition there are other studies which do make up for these omissions, amongst which the fine thesis of Kizis (1994) on the houses of the Pelion peninsula stands out. The pioneer regional archaeological survey of the University of Minnesota in Messenia already included an anthropological study of several villages (notably Karpofora) by Aschenbrenner (1972), and it is one of that team, Fred Cooper, who has led an international project to record the traditional houses of the Western Peloponnese before their heritage is replaced by modern homes (Cooper 2002, Coulton 2009). The archaeologist Guy Sanders has produced important evidence for the settlement plans of the Venetian colonies on the Cyclades (1996), followed by Ince and Ballantyne for Venetian Kythera (2007), whilst Rackham and Moody included traditional homes in their volume on the historical ecology of Crete (1996), where there exists a long tradition of recording elite public and private Venetian architecture (Stallsmith 2007). The Kea Survey produced a fine study of Early Modern “landscape architecture” by Todd Whitelaw (1991), which linked agricultural terracing to field houses and other rural built features of the island. Recently the PRAP survey in the Pylos region of Messenia has been studying traditional villages (Lee 2001) and Venetian-Ottoman military architecture (Davies 2004), and the latter topic with an overview of major Greek sites is well presented in Triposkoufi and Tsitouri (2002). Our own Boeotia Project made early progress with town, village, and house plans (Stedman 1996, Bintliff et al. 1999), which led to large-scale planning of deserted Medieval and post-medieval villages (Sigalos 2004). This work continues with the current Leiden-Ljubljana Boeotia survey (Bintliff et al. 2007, 2009).
In his overview of published pre-Modern domestic housing in Greece, Sigalos (2004) comments on the resultant map of different house types (Color Plate 21.1a) that no simple trend appears. Nonetheless in Northern Greece, incorporated late into the Greek State, the rising commercial wealth of town and country over the period from the eighteenth to early twentieth centuries allowed the Late Ottoman International Style to flourish. In contrast Southern Greece from the early nineteenth century increasingly rejected that Oriental influence in favor of Western architectural styles: Renaissance-Baroque influences and more recent “Neoclassical” forms associated with the “Greek Revival” or rediscovery of Classical Greek architecture. Moreover, much of the urban fabric of Southern towns had been demolished during the War of Independence. On Crete the longVenetian occupation has left a uniquely rich architectural environment (Venetian-Aegean style), notably from the seventeenth century, whilst the Frankish-era conquest of the Cyclades and other Aegean islands was followed by
Only limited intrusions of later building styles, allowing settlement plans and house types to survive on a large scale in former Venetian colonial townships and rural villas (Aegean style).
We earlier noted that many architectural studies of traditional Greek houses focus on the structure of the domestic unit, but do not give equal detail to internal furnishings (mobile or fixed), and the use of space in functional but also social terms. Additionally in the Greek climate, much of daily life, even in the winter months, takes place outdoors, adding workspace, light, air, and often warmth, to everyday activities. Thus courtyards (auli), outside benches, storehouses and stables, ovens, and wine or olive presses, are just as much part of the built environment of traditional Greek home life as the major domestic roofed spaces.
Domestic Housing in the Ottoman Period
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the indigenous elites of the Ottoman provinces such as the Balkans looked to Ottoman house styles, furnishings, and even domestic arrangements for gender, as bearing the cachet of class. 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 desire to emulate the styles of the wider Empire. As Vionis (2003) shows, this applies to some extent even in regions such as the Cyclades where there was a very low Turkish presence. However the survival pattern of buildings occupied by different social groups is very uneven in time and space (Sigalos 2004).
An issue of contemporary interest is that of gender in spatial terms (Sigalos 2004). Although sectors of Aegean society were affected by Islamic culture with its prohibitions on female sociability and dress, practices were variable. Our sources point to areas of the home reserved for women of the house, the haremlik, as well as to the building of small mezzanine (halfstory) levels or expanded cupboards with screens to allow females to listen and observe whilst remaining invisible to non-family male visitors. These also survive in significant numbers in standing buildings. What fits with our earlier observations on the emulation of Ottoman behavior is the fact that such customs were widespread amongst the wealthier Christian urban populations, along with other Oriental customs relating to dress and general house design. On the other hand, the large-scale participation of women in working-class craft, trade, and agriculture, meant that most of the urban and almost all rural households must have practiced everyday mixing of genders in work and leisure. However, as was normal till living memory in Modern Greece, unmarried girls would always have family chaperones with them.
Another general aspect of settlements in the Ottoman Greek landscape is internal organization. Rural villages were often sectored into neighborhood house-clusters on the basis of kinship; our most detailed mapping of this comes from the Mani peninsula in the Peloponnese (Saitas 2009).
World History
