The artifactual reflection of the table manners of Ottoman Greece are part of a wider transformation of material culture in the seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries. They seem in many ways to parallel the rise of Ottoman styles of domestic houses and interior furnishings amongst the middle classes. In Frankish times and still in the “Golden Age” of the Early Ottoman sixteenth century, table manners and table vessels show a common culture between Western and Eastern Europe, enhanced by the actual import and export of some wares between the Italian cities and the Ottoman provinces. At some stage in the Middle to Late Ottoman period, most of Greece seems to have shifted toward more Near Eastern forms of tableware and table customs, with the general abandonment of chairs or benches, and high tables, and a proliferation of dishes shared by several people, in favor of low tables, very low stools or floor seating, and single large dishes shared by many diners (Figure 21.9) (Vroom 2003, Vionis 2008). The iconographic evidence is neatly matched by pottery assemblages from later Ottoman-era deserted villages (Vionis 2006).
For the Mainland longhouse societies, illustrations, descriptions, and archaeology stress the poverty of material culture but a balancing concern with cleanliness even of earth floors (Stedman 1996, Vionis 2006). The contrastingly expansive homes of the wealthy recall similar Early Modern class divisions in rural and urban housing elsewhere in Europe (Symonds 2001). On the Ottoman Mainland the wealthy constructed elaborate houses in the Ottoman International style, but their interiors, especially in the eighteenth and nineteen centuries, combined Islamic
Figure 21.9 Interior of a peasant single-story longhouse (makrinari) in early nineteenth-century Attica (by Stackelberg). The house form is a longhouse variant with a central semi-division wall along its length (kamara). Note the limited possessions and the dining mode of low table and central large shared dish, and the absence of high chairs or benches.
A. Dimitsantou-Kremezi, Attiki. Elliniki paradosiaki architektoniki. Athens 1984, Figure 49.
Domestic furnishings (divans, sofas, carpets) withWestern decor (paintings, stucco) (Philippides 1999). Many such houses survive in Northern Greece, whilst transported interiors are well displayed in the Benaki Museum.
In contrast, from the late fifteenth century in Italy, the rise of individualism can be traced in the retention of high tables and chairs and the introduction of personal place-settings, in the context of emergent capitalist society in the North and Center of that country. We can observe imitation of these table manners and equipment in the Italianized Ionian Islands during the eighteenth century: a contemporary icon from mid-eighteenth-century Zakynthos (Mylonas 1998, figure 22), despite a Biblical scene as its theme, shows a meal with high dining chairs, a richly-ornamented marble table, and wall decor, all associated with a fine majolica dish and table-settings for individual diners. In the contemporary Cyclades Athanasios Vionis finds a fascinating opportunistic eclecticism of fashions amongst the leading families (of Italian and Greek origin) regarding table manners and also dress codes, reflecting their international connections (2003, 2009).
World History
