For Ottoman Greece, if the houses of the wealthier in towns, and their estate-centers in the countryside, have largely been destroyed and replaced by postOttoman styles, a far greater survival can now be postulated for Ottoman-era peasant houses, either in their original fabric, or retaining their design although rebuilt in the post-Ottoman period. It is well known in Vernacular Architecture studies, that peasant homes show greater stylistic stability than those of the richer classes, a result of lower disposable income and decreased desire to alter houses to suit fashion and the demands of social aspiration. The most prominent Mainland form of rural peasant home, already observed also in towns, is the single-story or one-and-a-half-story longhouse (Stedman 1996, Sigalos 2004) (Color Plate 21.1b: the Agricultural Style). This formerly sheltered both the family and some domestic animals, and is a form that survived widely till very recently in remoter districts of the Mainland countryside (notably in the Skourta Plain, Dimitsantou-Kremezi 1996), and which we have been able to demonstrate reaching back in deserted Boeotian villages to the seventeenth or eighteenth century if not earlier. The social and symbolic meanings of such longhouses have been explored on Cyprus by Sant Cassia (1982).
At the early Ottoman deserted village of Panaya-VM4 there are traces of house outlines which may point to such longhouses being already typical for rural settlements in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Stedman (1996) noted that 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, but were separated by a notable distance from one another.
This recalls our observations from Medieval Greece, where we saw that typical non-elite dwellings possessed an open workspace, rarely enclosed, around them. Life would have been lived very publicly in these settlements. The surviving longhouses often have outside bread ovens and sheds for storage, as well as less commonly a press for oil or wine. It is unclear how elaborate pre-Modern farm complexes of this type were, since deserted Ottoman and early nineteenth-century villages with such houses can both lack and possess ancillary structures to the longhouse. It seems likely that one half of the single-story house was typically occupied by the family, the other by essential domestic animals for transport, milk, and plowing (Figure 21.9). In one-and-a-half-story houses it was possible to separate the stock by level. The creation of two-story houses in rural contexts, the estate owners and managers apart, and excluding “protoindustrial” villages (see below), is considered to be a development almost exclusively within the Early Modern era of changed village economics.
The rise of serf-estates in the Middle Ottoman period, during the seventeenth century, began with small scale yiftliks consisting of a few families, but these were increasingly replaced by large communities which could include towerhouses of the landowner or estate manager. The small hamlet on the acropolis of the ancient city of Tanagra in Boeotia, discovered during our surface survey of the site, is almost certainly a yiftlik, consisting of four long-houses end-to-end associated with a restricted scatter of domestic ceramics of seventeenth - to eighteenth-century age (Bintliff et al. 2004—2005). No controlling
Figure 21.5 Ottoman-period painting of a yiftlik with peasant houses, towerhouse, and church.
E. Sigalos, Housing in Medieval and Post-Medieval Greece. Oxford 2004, Figure 137.
Larger structure was found, suiting the early form of estate.
Another deserted Boeotian village, Mavrommati Harmena, is a “great yiftlik” from an eighteenth-century Ottoman tax record, with several hundred inhabitants (Kiel 1997, Sigalos 2004). At the top of the sloping site we found a small but impressive complex centered on a well-built, multi-story house. Stretching below this focus was a much more extensive, dispersed scatter of unpretentious, single-story longhouses. It is not difficult to compare this housing stratification with the standard layout and style of Ottoman yiftliks discussed in later nineteenth - and early twentieth-century human geography studies of the Balkans (cf. Cvijic 1918, 246) (Figure 21.5). The large number of rather primitive rubble foundation longhouses and one much more pretentious, multi-story (konak) house, must represent peasant families and the estate owner or supervisor respectively.
The wide spaces separating longhouses in sites such as Harmena also allow family expansion to be accommodated, either by extending the longhouse or adding a second house to one end of an existing home. Some of the Harmena longhouses cleared of vegetation for study showed yards with low walls, and one possible external oven. The dominant multi-story structure (konak) at the top of the settlement, close to a threshing-floor, has a group of auxiliary rooms, probably for storage of the estate’s produce. At another deserted Boeotia yiftlik, Guinosati, a likely controlling tower has also been identified amid dispersed long-houses (Vionis 2006, 2008).
A further yiftlik studied archaeologically is the deserted village of Baklaki in North-Central Greece (Haagsma et al. 1993), whose use continued into the Early Modern period. As usual the houses were constructed across the sloping contours, allowing a one-and-a-half-story plan, with the basement for storage and stabling, the upper floor for domestic accommodation. A useful overview of the physical form of rural villages in Thessaly, especially the common yiftliks, is provided by Lawless (1977). In Epirus the pre-Ottoman fortress of Ragion appears to have been resettled as a fiftlik (Preka-Alexandri 1988), with a series of singlestory houses associated with a towerhouse (konak).
The estate-centers of the Middle to Late Ottoman era, whether owned by ethnic Turks or Greeks, generally show Ottoman architectural features. Figure 21.6a shows a towerhouse from Lesbos. Figure 21.6b is the other common rural estate-center, the archontiko, which can include a tower in its more complex forms, and is reminiscent of urban mansions (also termed archontika). This example (Triantaphyllopoulos 1976) was built in the usual style of stone lower and wood-frame upper floors, found also in urban mansions, with three storys around a yard.
On the one hand, it is reasonable to note a possible ancestry for these towers in the Frankish feudal tower, unsurprising since the economic and locational context are very similar. Indeed in Boeotia we have been able to demonstrate that Frankish towers continued in use through Ottoman times in several cases. The sturdy entrance door and grilled lower windows show that protection from robbers and bandits was a requirement, but the front door is on the ground floor, pointing to an absence of serious military threat. Also in contrast is the residential uppermost floor. Here we see a typical Ottoman feature, the use of square room modules (ondas), which radiate around the center of the structure, and may project on cantilevers outwards from the tower (sahnisia).
As befitting a totally different cultural tradition, the Venetian countryside on Crete till the seventeenth century and that of the Ionian Islands and Kythera till the eighteenth saw elaborate rural estate-centers in
Figure 21.6a Ottoman-period rural elite mansion: towerhouse type, Lesbos.
E. Sigalos, Housing in Medieval and Post-Medieval Greece. Oxford 2004, Figure 18.
Figure 21.6b Rural elite mansion: archontiko type, Epiros. Historic photograph.
E. Sigalos, Housing in Medieval and Post-Medieval Greece. Oxford 2004, Figure 58.
Italianate Renaissance-Baroque styles, comparable to contemporary Venetian colonial townhouses (Sigalos 2004, Ince and Ballantyne 2007).
Apart from estate-centers and rural mansions of the wealthy, rural peasant settlement in the Aegean islands
And on the Mainland remains clustered into hamlets or villages for the most part, until the changing political and economic climate of the late nineteenth century. Texts inform us that in many Aegean landscapes the cultivation of distant fields and pastures might involve the use of seasonal dispersed huts and animal-folds, although it was also often the case that large numbers if not the whole community might shift to a seasonal second village for these purposes (kalyvia).
Although traditional Greek villages were till recently dominated by a central square (plateia) and the main church, around which clustered coffeehouses and shops, there is good reason to doubt that this characterized most Ottoman and Medieval rural settlement plans. A more irregular open dispersed pattern linked to agricultural paths, interspersed with churches, fountains, and small open spaces at road junctions, may have been typical. Groups of houses might be tied by kinship into small neighborhoods. The communal public space and a wider street network seem at present to be late nineteenth-century innovations connected to the introduction of more “urban” infrastructure into the countryside (Stedman 1996, Sigalos 2004).
Aalen in a pioneering study of rural architecture on the island of Kephallenia (1984), suggested a chronological development for peasant housing (Figure 21.7). The oldest form was a one-story longhouse shared by the stock and the family. Using slope differences a one-and-a-half-story version could develop, but since this was associated in surviving examples with a more complex division of rooms, he considered this to be a later form, associated with a rising status for small-scale farmers from the mid-nineteenth century. The two-story farmhouse with yet further horizontal and vertical subdivisions he also dated from the midnineteenth century onwards, reflecting for him the accommodation of wealthier farmers as well as rural professions such as lawyers, doctors, and merchants. As we have already noted, the archaeological data from deserted Ottoman villages rather suggests that the one-and-a-half-story longhouses are typical from Medieval times onwards, although the internal divisions in Aalen’s plans are probably later modifications, indeed of nineteenth - to twentieth-century age, when undivided rooms or minimal divisions were replaced by more elaborate internal house divisions.
Figure 21.7 Aalen’s model for rural farm evolution on Kephallenia, developing through phases A to C.
E. Sigalos, Housing in Medieval and Post-Medieval Greece. Oxford 2004, Figure 31.
The spread of two-story houses seems to demonstrate the very belated general diffusion of the styles of ‘town life’ to the countryside.
Interestingly, the general long-term trend for simple peasant houses from Medieval through postMedieval times, till improving social and economic conditions encouraged multi-story, more elaborate rural homes in the twentieth century, is not universal. On Kythera the Medieval peasants lived in simple homes, but in the sixteenth century they could occupy two-story village houses; significantly however the return to single and one-and-a-half-story houses in the eighteenth-century villages may mark downscaling of social aspiration and perhaps wealth (Ince and Ballantyne 2007).
Other exceptions are formed by rural settlements which played a major role in the regional and interregional upsurge of manufacturing and commerce of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In such cases the controlling families may build “urban-style” mansions in rural settlements, or if the whole community is prospering, multi-story expansive residences can become more widespread in a village. Thus in the central Peloponnese in the Gortynia district (Benechtsou 1960) a flourishing pastoral and manufacturing production is associated with Late Ottoman substantial, multi-story houses (up to even five levels), using the steep slopes to assist construction. The domestic accommodation lay in the upper floor(s), whilst the lower were deployed for storage, stabling, and textile production. The well-conserved hillside textile village of Arachova in Central Greece has a similar development in its impressive architecture.
As a result of wider commercial entanglement, many of these elaborate homes exhibit the influence of the International Ottoman style, but also, since Western European partners were actively integrated into such trade, architectural and furnishing styles from Italy and further afield. In general however, the appearance of multi-story houses in Greek villages is a late nineteenth-century phenomenon marking the gradual spread of improved incomes in post-Ottoman Greece (Stedman 1996).
One famous case study is that of the textile villages of the Pelion Peninsula in Thessaly (see Text Box).
A very different case study is that of the largely infertile, remote maritime peninsula of Mani in the Peloponnese (Saitas 1990, 2009). Isolated from easy contact with the wider world and with limited resources, its inhabitants developed specific adaptations to such conditions. Competition for scarce agropastoral land and the threat of pirates encouraged a culture of endemic intercommunity feuding and heavily-fortified settlements and houses. A proliferation of defensive towers marks the skyline of surviving traditional community architecture.
There is growing interest in one of the commonest rural building types recorded in the Travelers for the Ottoman to Early Modern Balkans, the Khans or
Textile Villages of Mount Pelion
The surviving traces of these settlements’ Late Ottoman prosperity are their wonderful multistory, finely decorated houses (Kizis 1994).
Kizis divides the larger houses, belonging to leading families in the textile and other commercial businesses, into three chronological groups. The Early Period has fortified stone towerhouses, with overhanging upper floors which can be partly open loggias or entirely enclosed. The similarity to rural towerhouses is clear (see earlier Lesbos example). The basic module is one square room per floor, appended with externally-projecting wings of modular form (ondas). If the tower with its hierarchical functional spaces (storage to domestic to formal reception and leisure) reflects the older Medieval feudal tower tradition, the overhanging floor and ondas are visibly influenced by Ottoman upper-class fashion. In Kizis’ Middle Period rising wealth brings a further influence from the grander multi-story town-house tradition (Figure 21.8). The multiplication of internal spaces and their increasingly elaborate decoration and furnishings are further signs of “bourgeois” prestige display
Figure 21.8 Middle Period (Late Ottoman) wealthy house in Mount Pelion.
E. Sigalos, Housing in Medieval and Post-Medieval Greece. Oxford 2004, Figure 50.
Culture, although variant arrangements of ondas around a focal communication space are at the base of the design. The third period is final Ottoman to Early Greek state and shows a reorientation to Western architecture in the form of Neoclassicism.
Wayside travelers’ hostels. They have recently been mapped by the Dutch Aetolia Project in the rugged uplands ofAetolia (North-Central Greece) (Bommelje and Doorn 1996) in relation to an historical-geographical analysis of communication systems in the long term within that region. Further structural and functional study of this class of monument should be undertaken to link the sparse surviving traces of these building complexes to their frequent depiction in nineteenth-century Travelers’ books. A case-study architectural recording of a nineteenth-century ruined khan features in the recent Asea Survey in the Peloponnese (Forsen and Forsen 2003). In Ottoman Greece and the wider Balkans, this era also saw a great expansion of cobbled roads (kalderimis) whose construction was promoted by the state with the aid of local communities, along with associated bridges. Western Travelers note their heavy use with long goods caravans of pack-animals, camels, and ox-carts (Reinders and Prummel 2003).
World History
