The Complete Archaeology of Greece
From Hunter-Gatherers to the 20th Century AD John Bintliff
©WILEY-BLACKWELL
A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication
Part III
The Archaeology of Medieval and post-Medieval Greece in its Historical Context
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The Archaeology of Byzantine Greece
Demography, Settlement Patterns, and Everyday Life
Introduction
Timothy Gregory's entry on Byzantine Archaeology in The Oxford Dictionary oj Byzantium (Kazhdan 1991) began by commenting that tins field hardly existed, reinforcing similar comments by Rautman (1990). Crow's latest review (2010) continues the criticism of the slow development of an independent archaeological approach to Byzantine civilization, although in contrast Athanassopoulos's review (2008) suggests that Greek Medieval Archaeology has finally "come of age." The splendid Thessaloniki exhibition of Byzantine everyday life certainly succeeds in embedding museum objects into the wider society that produced and used them (Papamkola-Bakirtzi 2002). Nevertheless whilst the churches and art of the independent Byzantine empire from the later seventh to early thirteenth centuries, and of the divided empire of the subsequent era to 1453 AD (when much of the Aegean had been conquered b\r Crusaders or "Franks"), have been thoroughly studied for many generations, archaeology as the total integrated examination of society has barely begun, by the standards of West European Medieval Archaeology. We refer to the survey and excavation of farms, villages, cemeteries, town quarters, isolated defenses and castles, industrial zones, harbors, monasteries, etc.
Yet a more holistic approach to Byzantine material culture began already a century ago, when
large-scale American excavations uncovering major Classical monuments in the ancient Agora at Athens and in ancient Corinth revealed significant overlying Medieval levels. Very creditably the excavation directors commissioned pioneering studies of the finds (e.g., Frantz 1938, 1942), the most substantial of which, Morgan (1942), remains a major sourcebook for Byzantine and Frankish ceramics in the Aegean. Even earlier, a group of British archaeologists with remarkably wide period-interests were publishing papers on Byzantine and Frankish churches and castles at the beginning of the twentieth century (Wacc, Traquair, and others). Over the last two decades an explosion of new data has emerged from two parallel developments. Firstly, interest has been renewed in post-Roman excavated deposits from urban excavations, especially at Corinth (Sanders 2000). Secondly, widespread evidence for Medieval rural life has emerged from regional surface surveys.
As a result, a better understanding of the ceramic sequence has been called for, not just the fine tablewares which had already been published as art objects, but of the domestic and coarse wares which dominate archaeological assemblages. Notable advances have been made by combining ceramic studies from production sites, excavated town sites, and the often large collections of surface finds from regional survey. Key works for IMcdicval-Postmedieval Aegean ceramics include the
The Complete Archaeology of Greece: From Hunter-Gatherers to the 20th Century AD, First Edition. John BintlitT. © 2012 John Bintliff. Published 2012 by Blackwcll Publishing Ltd.
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Saracane excavation in Constantinople (Hayes 1992); Hayes' contributions to regional rural surveys (Kea: Cherry et at. 1991;Boeotia: Bintliffef al. 2007); Bakirtzis on medieval cooking, storage, and transport wares (1989); Papanikola-Bakirtzi on medieval glazed wares (1992, 1999); Sanders' studies of urban deposits from Corinth (2000); and overviews byVroom (2003,2005) andVionis (2001). Coarse wares and fabric studies now extend the diagnosticity of assemblages beyond traditional reliance on decorated pottery (Lang 2009).
Additionally the Austrian Tabula Byzantina project has since 1976 issued atlases of the Byzantine empire, province (theme) by province (Koder 1996). Alongside excellent maps showing the location of monuments, excavations, and literary topographic references, the texts of these volumes offer historical-geographical reviews, upon which intensive regional surface survey can build up local detail.
Reflecting this broadening of approaches, several significant volumes dealing with Medieval Greece have appeared (Lock and Sanders 1996, Caraher et at. 2008, BintlitT and Stöger 2009). Alongside these are excellent recent studies of Byzantine history, including archaeological information (Foss and Magdalino 1977, Ducelher 1986, Haldon 2000, Gregory 2006).
Chronology
It is first necessary to clarify our terminology when dealing with Byzantium. Once Constantine the Great had created his "New Rome" at the strategic portion of Byzantium (modern Istanbul) in 330 AD, the Roman Empire reoriented itself to a new focus, not only administratively but also in economic and military organization. The association of this change with official tolerance and soon state support for Christianity represents another vital rupture in the Roman way of life as it had developed over the preceding 1000 years. For these reasons many scholars commence the Byzantine era in the early fourth century AD.This "Byzantine" civilization would only last some 300 years in all the Roman provinces which the Empire lost to the advance of Islam from the seventh century AD (North Africa and the Levant), so scholars of the Levant call the last part of this period Late Byzantine. This is confusing, since in the core
regions of the new Roman world which from the fifth century were ruled from Byzantium-Constantinople (the South Balkans and Anatolia). Eastern Roman imperial power is in force till 1204 AD, and, after an interruption between then till 1261 when Crusader Franks occupy the capital, "Roman" power is restored till 1453 when the capture of the city by the Ottoman Turks definitively ends the Eastern Roman Empire. For Greek scholars then, Early Byzantine can begin with Constantine, Middle Byzantine with an important change in the nature of the Empire in the ninth century AD, and Late Byzantine with the Frankish occupation, ending with the Ottomans.
Actually, many archaeologists (including myself) prefer a different scheme to suit the material realities of Eastern Roman life. Till the seventh century AD the Roman Empire remained dominant in its Eastern provinces and its material culture and organization rest on forms and models which had developed in the third and fourth centuries AD. From the mid-sixth to the eighth century, by which time the Western Roman provinces had been lost to Barbarian kingdoms (with brief episodes of recapture and with minor footholds surviving in Southern Italy), a series of crises afflicted the surviving Eastern Empire, almost destroying it on many occasions. However, by the ninth century it re-emetged as a great power in the Mediterranean world.This imperial renewal also coincides with major changes in material culture (especially the emergence of a distinctively "medieval" ceramic assemblage), novel urban forms, church architecture, and art, and is associated with a series of effective emperors (the Macedonian dynasty). Hence we shall define the era ca. 400-650 AD as Late Roman; the transitional era ("Dark Age") 650 to mid-ninth century as Early Byzantine; and the era of greatest flourishing, from then to 1204 AD, as Middle Byzantine; finally 1204-1453 AD forms the Late Byzantine period. The latter includes Frankish-Crusader times when Greece was divided between Byzantines and these hostile colonizers.
"Byzantine" civilization was coined by Early Modern Enlightenment scholars. The inhabitants of that society called themselves "Romans" (Rhomaioi), expressing their sense of continuity as the surviving Eastern Roman Empire. Even modern Greeks, aware
of their rich Medieval heritage, call the essence of Greek identity " Rhomaiosyne" (literally Roman-ness) (Leigh Fermor 1966). Nonetheless this "Eastern Roman Empire" from ca. 650-1453 underwent transformations, so although there was much inherited from the wider Empire before the collapse of the Roman West in the fifth century AD, there was far more change within the following 800 years. Latin, for example, did not survive for long as an official language once Constantinople formed the focus of the Eastern Empire, unsurprising when even in Rome's heyday the Eastern Provinces had remained dominated by Greek and local languages such as Aramaic.
As yet Byzantium is little known outside the Southern Balkans, and is seen as a strange culture with wonderful art but disreputable politics, in any case out of the path Unking the great achievements of the Ancient Greeks and Romans to Modern Western Civilization. Hence the prolonged neglect of its archaeology and history by students and the general public outside of Greece (Gregory 1984, 2006). Historical sources are also surprisingly limited for such a powerful and long-lived civilization, but this is mostly due to their destruction through war. A popular image is of a static, backward society run by corrupt priests and tyrannical emperors or their scheming courts ("byzantine" is a term used today to denote a tortuous and possibly devious administrative organization). The seeming lack of development in its best-known remains, churches and their icons, appears to confirm its stagnant nature. Yet of course no civilization could really survive so long without adaptation. But there is a core of truth in the stereotype of continuity within Byzantine history: the basic notion of the Empire remained the same. It was the Kingdom of God on Earth, a pale reflection of the Kingdom of Heaven, and the emperor was God's earthly ruler. Since the emperor was expected to maintain order on Earth in imitation of that in Heaven, ritual and ceremonial were a central feature of court life (Haldon 2000).
The Early Byzantine (EB) Period (ca. 650-842 AD)
If the period 400-550 AD had seen Greece in a phase of revival and heightened activity in town and country, not least because it had become one of the
near-hinterland regions of a Roman Empire focused on Constantinople at the head of the Aegean, the succeeding centuries saw rising crisis and a constant threat of the complete disappearance of Eastern Roman power. Following immense depopulation occasioned by the first outbreak of the (probably bubonic) Plague in the mid-sixth century (Durliat 1989), continual recurrences till the eighth century ensured that Greece was underpopulated and its economic productivity shrunken. The migration of Slav peoples from the Baltic regions of North Europe had been underway throughout Central-Eastern Europe for some centuries, so that their arrival in the South Balkans in the late sixth century found insufficient resistance from a weakened Byzantine army or local militias to prevent their rapid colonization of the countryside, from Macedonia in the north to the Peloponnese in the south (Malmgoudis 1991). The Empire was preoccupied with prolonged wars in the East against the Persian Sassanian Empire and then, from the seventh century, against the seemingly irresistible Arab armies. The available forces to meet this Slav challenge were only capable (with the help of the imperial fleet), to retain Byzantine control over the capital, major towns, and many coastal strips and islands. Essentially the Mainland Greek countryside left imperial control for much of the period 600-800 AD and came under the dominance of Slav tribes. But evidence on the Aegean islands during the EB era for churches and walled military posts confirms a tenuous grip by the Byzantine fleet on many coastal localities.
The permanent loss of Byzantine control over its Levantine and North African provinces in the seventh century to a new Islamic empire arising in Arabia, although confining the Empire to the South Balkans, Anatolia, and restricted parts of Italy (Figure 17.2), at least allowed it to direct all its energies to reorganizing its rump state and recapturing its core hinterland in Greece. During this phase of crisis a new system of provincial management emerged, where the surviving Empire was divided into a series of small provinces or themes (Haldon 1990), each with an integrated government combining military and socio-economic control. Soldier-farmers ensured the regional productivity needed to make each theme both economically viable and defensible. Steadily between the seventh and early ninth centuries imperial forces defeated the
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Slavs and reincorporated the Aegean countryside into the Empire, as well as stabilizing the frontiers to North and East, respectively against new Slav states and the dynasties of the Islamic Empire (the Umayyads and their Abbasid successors).
Settlement in Early Byzantine town and country
Late Roman ceramics up to the early seventh century can be understood reasonably well, evolving out of forms arising in the earlier Empire (Hayes 1972, 1997). Fine wares, especially from North Africa and in lesser quantities from the East Mediterranean, and transport amphorae from numerous centers in the East Mediterranean and the Aegean, allow collections to be dated with considerable accuracy (Pettegrew 2007). Increasingly, the domestic and coarse wares (generally locally made in each region) are also being classified for many provinces, including the Aegean variants. Field survey, our most significant tool for the history of rural sites between Fate Antiquity and the Middle Byzantine period, demonstrates that despite the accumulating crises, people continued to dwell or exploit rural estates till the end of the LR era. On the Methana Survey for example (Mee and Forbes 1997), 11 LR sites survive into the seventh century AD.The large villa at the abandoned city of Halieis in the Argolid, partly excavated, was deserted after fire destruction in the seventh century (Jameson et al. 1994). Late Antique towns were hit by a succession of catastrophes, not only natural ones such as earthquakes and the Plague, but increasing Barbarian raids from the third through sixth centuries, culminating in the permanent settlement of the Slav tribes in the sixth and seventh century. Nonetheless many small and large Greek urban sites continued to be occupied throughout the sixth even into the early seventh century AD (the last imports of African red-slip tablewares being a primary dating tool), including excavated sites such as Corinth as well as town sites explored by intensive surface survey, such as the several Boeotian cities.
Archaeological research in Greek cities and rural sites focusing on the post-Roman periods remains very rudimentary, further compounded by a severe problem in recognizing assemblages typical for this
period, whether in provincial towns or in the countryside. The archaeological evidence in the Aegean is however, extremely scanty for this period. If we accept that population was brought to a very low level from the sixth century onwards as a result of warfare and recurrent Plague outbreaks, then the amount and dispersal of material culture should be limited for this phase of two hundred years, with the exception of the larger towns. Even there, however, our recovered evidence remains slight, despite historical sources confirming their widespread continued existence through Early Byzantine times.
When the Byzantine Empire recovers its demographic, military, and economic power from the ninth century onwards, there are also radical developments in material culture, one ol which is a new ceramic assemblage of "medieval" character, paralleled around this period in both other Christian lands of Southern Europe and in the Islamic Near East and North Africa. The easily-recognizable feature is glazing on table and other wares, initially perhaps to make them watertight and cleanable, soon however for visual attractiveness (probably imitating expensive metal containers). Such wares spread slowly out of precocious seventh-century production foci such as Egypt, Syria, and the city of Constantinople. It is generally in the tenth to eleventh centuries that they become common in the Byzantine provinces, by which time they had already stimulated imitative local production. Outside major cities and maritime-oriented smaller settlements, a serious gap in recognized ceramics for the crisis phase, the later seventh to later ninth centuries, hinders understanding of everyday Aegean life.
As in Italy (Potter 1987), pushing back regional glazed ware production to meet the last early seventh-century Late Roman forms is unsupported, leaving rare occurrences of glazed white wares exported from Constantinople to the provinces as occasional dating evidence (Sanders 1996). What is beginning to be confirmed is that the "Dark Age" saw derivatives of Late Roman wares, chiefly local domestic and coarse ceramics, but also in lesser amounts red-slip and amphora types, survive until the appearance of the "medieval" assemblages (Armstrong 2009,Vioms et al. 2009). Since we still lack a clear assemblage for EB sites after the mid-seventh and until the tenth century AD in the Greek provinces, only future research will
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create regional tettlement maps for Greece during these centuries, or a plan of occupation zones in a surviving town site. Instead we can at least present case studies from rural settlements and excavated urban sites.
The failure of a distinctive Slav culture in Greece to fill the gap surprises scholars. Slav-occupied areas in East-Central Europe do possess distinctive assemblages, although in the early period of migration it is usually in cemeteries that such wares are most clearly recognized. But in Greece comparable pottery is very-rare and often their forms and decoration merely assign them to either an earlier or later time-period within the seventh to tenth century AD. Our historical sources (Malingoudis 1991) leave no doubt that the Slav colonization of Greece was a large-scale population movement. Thessalomki, second city of the Byzantine Aegean, was besieged by a sea of Slav-settlers from the surrounding countryside, and Slavs exercised genuine control over the Greek rural landscape rather than existing as harmless infillers of land left empty by earlier depopulation. Indeed for this reason we could not accept the apparent emptiness of the EB landscape, since such colonizers undoubtedly revived land use and settlement activity. We can also dismiss the theory that early Slavs lacked tangible houses, pottery or mixed farming: all these features are well-evidenced throughout the remaining Slav world (Malingoudis 1991).
The Greek peasant population which survived the raids and plagues of the LR era we might suspect largely stayed in their landscapes and intermarried with Slav incomers, hence the occurrence of sub-Roman ceramics in the EB period. Our working hypothesis to account for the rarity of "Slav" ceramics is that Roman-derivative wares were preferred by both population groups.This merger was aided by the creation of a minor but widespread local production of hand-made coarse wares in final LR times, perhaps to substitute for declining professional supplies, which look similar to genuine Slav ceramics (Gregory and Kardulias 1990,Rautman 1998, Oikonomou-Laniado 2003). On present knowledge, the colonizers arrived with their own Slav ceramic traditions but rapidly-converted to utilizing regional pottery in a sub-Roman tradition, making their presence almost invisible in the archaeological record. Up till 2005, our Boeotia
project in Central Greece, despite having surveyed many Late Roman villas, villages, and urban sites, and numerous Medieval villages and farms, producing a database of 100,000 sherds, included just one piece of "Slav ware," from ancient Hyettos city. We favor the view that a tmxed Slav-Hellenic peasant population occupied many of our sites during EB times but their ceramic culture lies Largely unrecognized in the innumerable "LR" sherds which lack a distinctive fine-dating. The latest research (Vionis et al. 2009) shows that careful examination of such assemblages and those of "medieval" settlements can reveal new variants of older Roman wares, or distinctive new unglazed wares, as probable type-fossils (recognizable types) for the EB era.
Finding EB settlements may be hindered by a new-preference for surviving local populations to occupy isolated hilltop refuges, little researched in Greece. Such locations, analogous to post-Bronze Age refuge sites, are widely documented historically and archaeologically throughout the rest of the LR Balkans (Dunn 1997,Poultcr 2007),and we discovered one such (Aghios Constantinos) nearTanagra, Central Greece (see Chapter 15). In Italy similar resettlements occur (Francovich and Hodges 2003). But the incoming Slav colonizers were confident militarily, and skillful farmers seeking the best land (Malingoudis 1991); this would surely encourage them rather to reoccupy ancient village and city locations. Surface survey and place-name evidence support this second scenario for the EB era, and if some open locations retained existing peasant occupants there may well have developed a peaceful coexistence with dominant Slav settlers. We do however have one very clear Slav community discovered archaeologically. The ancient sanctuary at Olympia lost its ritual role probably in the fifth century, but was occupied by a domestic Late Roman settlement till perhaps the early seventh century, sheltering behind a fortification (recalling Aghios Constantinos village). It is argued that this community left and was soon replaced by a Slav village, only recorded from a cremation cemetery of at least 35 burials (Vida and Willing 2000). The typology of these burial urns, beginning with early hand-made, undecorated forms and continuing into increasingly more complex wavy-line ornaments and the use of the potter's wheel, suggests a period of use
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Figure 17.1 (Upper) Generalized distribution of major foci of settlement in Byzantine and Frankish Boeotia, from extensive and localized intensive survey, compared with (Lower) the distribution of Greco-Roman cities (triangles) and villages (circles) in Boeotia. A high proportion of settlements are m use in both eras, but their names changed in the intervening period. , ,
J. Bmtliff, "Reconstructing the Byzantine countryside: New approaches from landscape archaeology." In K. Blelke et ill. (eOS-h Byzanz ah Rawm.Wien 2000,37-63, Figures 11 and 12.
of some 200 yeafs over the seventh and eighth centuries, paralleling sequences in the Lower Danube and DnieprValleys in the North Balkans. Other evidence suggests that we are on the right track.
Thus a map of known Byzantine-Frankish settlements in Boeotia (but excluding small farms and hamlets) is strikingly similar to that of Greco-Roman towns and villages (Figure 17.1).We might argue that in EB times some elements of a reduced Greco-Roman population remained on or near former LR foci of settlement from Late Roman times, merging through intermarrying with incoming communities of Slav formers. A subsequent major rise of population and regional prosperity during mature to final Middle Byzantine (MB) times (tenth to twelfth centuries AD), predicted from traditional study of church-building and the historica] sources, is certainly matched by a dramatic increase in rural sites from our intensive survey in Boeotia, generally without LR or possible EB occupation. Yet I would suggest that this later phase of revival builds upon the "survival capsules" of "Sub-Roman" times, which in their turn are a simplified network of the Greco-Roman settlement system. We also suggest that these EB sites are in
two forms: defensible locations used by indigenous communities on or near antique settlements, as widely evidenced in the north Balkans (Licbeschuetz 2007), at least in the most insecure early part of the EB period, and open sites also on or near ancient sites, where Slav farmers settled down with or without local surviving peasant families.
In the Skdlungskammer (settlement-chamber) model of the German Landeskunde (landscape-knowledge) school (see Chapter 8; Lehmann 1939, Bmtliff 2000a-b) diversified landscapes create "constraints and possibilities" for settlement, often in or around certain recurrent places in the landscape (the product of physical topography, soil types, technological and land use regimes, and natural paths of communication). Apparent continuities in the placing of settlements over time can thus result from natural conditions, or recurrent ways of using the landscape, and need not imply genuine continuities of local peoples.
To clarify these contrasted processes we need more precise information. Intensive survey of small districts at the Siedlungskammet scale, combined with historical and archival evidence, can provide major insights in Boeotia (followingText Box).
The Transition from Antiquity to the Middle Ages in Boeotia
ThcVaUey of the Muses is a small, largely enclosed upland valley landscape, which has in the long term normally only seen one nucleated settlement (see Figure 8.4). Intensive survey (Binthff 1996) found some 50 archaeological sites dating from Neolithic to Turkish times. In Greco-Roman antiquity the central nucleation was a large village at Askra, which was particularly flourishing in Late Roman times. Byzantine ceramics from Askra securely dated to the ninth to twelfth centuries AD suggest a smaller village, but are associated with a large church in the south center of the site (Bintliff and Snodgrass 1988). Lock (1995) has argued that this community is "Zaratova," which gained an Orthodox bishop by the twelfth century, one of several new bishoprics established by the bishop of Thebes to serve a rapidly growing rural population
in later MB Boeotia, very much supporting other evidence we have for general revival in the Aegean from the ninth and tenth centuries onwards.
Only hints of possible EB wares at Askra suggest continued use of the site after its LR florescence, but restudy is in progress. Provisionally more help comes from archival sources. The replacement of ancient Askra with Byzantine Zaratova indicates a dominant linguistic presence of Slav-speakers, the place-name "of the mountain" suiting this upland basin enclosed on three sides by imposing Mount Helicon. The topouym points to the settlement of Slavs in an open, non-defensive site surrounded by highly fertile land, exactly at the period where our ceramic evidence is still ambiguous for continuity of site use at Askra. Boeotia was recovered by the Byzantine army by the ninth century. The subsequent Hellenization and Christianization of the Slavs in Greece explains why by the end of the Middle Ages the village had acquired a Greek
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Orthodox name, Panaghia (signifying the Virgin Mary). The precise overlying of the Medieval over the Greco-Roman village might hint at a merger of surviving local peasants and a dominant incoming Slav community, which we hope to test through re-examination of the survey ceramics.
Haliartos, a Greco-Roman city also in Boeotia, offers similar evidence (Bintliff 2000a-b). Destroyed by the Roman army in the second century BC, it never revived as a nucleated settlement during Antiquity. Our total urban survey found scanty Medieval activity, but when we surveyed around and between the houses of the adjacent, modern Haliartos town, we collected plentiful finds of Middle Byzantine, Prankish, and Early Ottoman times. The MB extramural village blossomed into a populous community in the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries AD, with the name Harmena or Charmaina. The reasons for postulating an F.B settlement rest again on that community's name: it appears to be a Slav name
The Boeotian evidence resonates with the wider picture:"most of the cities of the Balkan area ceased to exist in the late sixth and/or the seventh century, and social life changed dramatically" (Gregory 2006, 158), but their village replacements are very common. A relatively small number of larger or more strategically vital towns did survive in Greece through the EB era, and we shall present their evidence later in this chapter in the context of their subsequent MB revival.
The Middle Byzantine Peak: Ninth Century to 1204 AD
Under the vigorous and powerful Macedonian imperial dynasty, lasting 200 years from the late ninth century, the Byzantine Empire strengthened and at times extended its borders (Figure 17.2), which however remained overall in the same lands as previously: the South Balkans with Greece, Anatolia, and a foothold
for a church (P. Soustal pcrs. comm.), associated with earlier rather than later Slav settlements. Indeed toponyms may offer complementary evidence to archaeology elsewhere in Greece: the Slav-languages underwent major changes from the tenth century, but most of the Greek villages with original Slav names belong before this transformation (M. Kiel pro. comm.).
Thespiae offers a further parallel. The Late Roman town is replaced by two villages with the Greek name Erimokastro, in place by MB times on the far eastern periphery of their urban predecessor, according to texts and abundant surface finds. There is now strong reason to support continuity of occupation at the city, if only at village level, during the intervening EB period, both by A. Vionis' recognition of sporadic EB ware amongst the sherd finds from our 1980s city survey, but also by M. Karambinis' discovery that fragments of church architecture from the LR Kastro also belong to the "Dark Age."
in southern Italy and the Crimea. Alongside strong rulers and military power, the final victory of the "iconophiles" in 843 (the supporters of religious representative art and its mystical authority, see Chapter 18) encouraged greater internal coherence around the symbolic power of the Empire as God's kingdom on Earth, and brought a spiritual dimension to the defenses of the Empire against its Slav and Islamic neighbor states.The grandson of the first Macedonian emperor Basil I (acceded in 867) was Constantine VII Porphyrogenitos (acceded 913), from whose reign colorful texts and images survive to illuminate the elaborate ceremonies and politics of the Empire.
Slavs within the revived Empire had been incorporated into the Byzantine state during the eighth and ninth centuries, whilst their Christian conversion followed a policy pursued by the Byzantine church and state, which led ultimately to the "Hellemzation" of the probably large share of the population of Greece which derived from the Slav colonization. One means through which successful Hellemzation was achieved
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Figure 17.2
C. Mango (ed.
The Byzantine Empire in 1025.
, Oxford History of Byzantium. Oxford 2002,178 (unnumbered figure). € Oxford University Press.
was through imperial initiative in appointing tribal leaders as "archons" or regional representatives, tied to recognition of Byzantine authority and the payment of tax or tribute (Megaw 1966). Although we know the names of certain leading families of Slav origin in later times, most not only Christianized but adopted Greek names and kept no roots in their culture of origin. This is of course a sensitive topic even today for a nation like Greece with appropriate pride in its national heritage from Classical Greek times. As a result, the Slav presence in Medieval to Modern Greece has been subject to both academic and popular controversy The provocative thesis of Fallmerayer in the nineteenth century, that Modern Greeks were almost entirely a Slav replacement of the vanished Hellenic stock, no longer stands academic scrutiny, but neither does the nationalistic opposite, sometimes voiced even by Greek academics, that the Slavs made no significant contribution to the population, perhaps even going"home"after a time in Greece.Malingoudis' (1991) measured small volume on this topic is an excellent antidote to nationalists on either side of the debate. Equally important to the integration and sur-
vival of Byzantine civilization was the Christianization of the Slav states surrounding the Empire to its North and West, spearheaded by the monks Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius in the ninth century, which gave the Byzantines a powerful spiritual influence on their often dangerous neighbors.
On the other hand, there were also signs of internal changes of a less positive character in later MB times, particularly when the Comnenoi dynasty assume imperial power in the late eleventh century. In the Aegean Mainland countryside the reduced populations suggested from textual and archaeological evidence up until the tenth and eleventh centuries, following a period under Slav control when imperial authority was largely absent, is associated by Byzantine historians with a strong peasantry and a village-based organization of the landscape. A text called The Farmer's Law (early eighth century AD?) is seen as illustrating this phase of MB peasant life (Gregory 2006).This is contrasted with the dominant model of the Late Roman period, when peasants are considered to have been largely tied (coloni) to the estates of large landowners. By the late MB however the sources
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evidence an increasing conflict between the independent villager and a new class of landowners (secular but also clerical, with the expansion of monastic holdings), intent on absorbing them into their expanding estates, a battle where the emperors regularly intervened on the peasants' side but ultimately without great success. At the time of the Crusader conquest ot Greece and Constantinople from 1204 AD, many historians argue that the Greek peasantry was widely tied to a form of magnate lordship, as tenants, sharecroppers or even serfs, so that the introduction of Western feudalism by the Pranks meant no radical change for many rural communities.
The Macedonian dynasty had achieved a long period of growth and prosperity but from the late eleventh century, when the Comnenoi dynasty (1081— 1185) assumed power, the Empire began to suffer increasing problems from within and without which were inexorably going to cause its decline and demise, even if the last blow was the definitive capture of the capital, Constantinople in 1453 by the Ottoman Turks. The Empire became constantly on the defensive from external aggression, at the same time as increasing indications of internal breakdown became manifest, including the loss of income and authority to a "semi-feudal" provincial landlordism. Normans based from the later eleventh century in their new state in Sicily and South Italy attacked the Byzantine Balkans from the West, whilst the Seljuk dynasty led colonizing Turks at the same time into Anatolia. Although the Normans were rebuffed from the Balkans (not before sacking the second city of Thessaloniki and other major towns such as Thebes), the Turks gradually took over Anatolia except the coasdands.
John Haldon (1992) has suggested a cyclicity in the development of the Byzantine state, paralleled by similar processes in its ultimate replacement, the Ottoman state. The Byzantine Empire initially deployed the "Ancient Mode of Production" whereby free peasants were taxed at low levels to sustain its central state bureaucracy and its regional urban administration, and were also expected to provide recruits for the army. Over time however, a "service" military-bureaucratic class diverted control over the peasantry and tax income into its own hands, aspiring to  a  hereditary  society  of wealthy landowners
dominating a tied peasantry. This weakened the emperor's grip on his people and territories. Armies became increasingly dominated by foreign mercenaries, whose cash demands raised taxes, already reduced by a siphoning-off of state revenue into the pockets of the landowners. An early tight control on trade within the Byzantine world was replaced by concessions to the commercial fleets of the entrepreneurial Italian trading cities such as Venice and Genoa, blocking the rise of a middle class of wealth-creating manufacturers and traders within the state and subverting its entire economy. The early Byzantine Empire had been sustained by tax and peasant army recruits from independent rural communities, largely producing their own food and supplying sufficient small surpluses for the minor demands of the state. In contrast, the mature to late Byzantine state was being cut apart by the scissors of a declining income from its peasantry and an economic peripheralization as its wealth was being drained by the expanding proto-capitalist Italian commercial world. Unsurprisingly, the coinage, hitherto a "gold standard" for Mediterranean trade that had maintained its value tor some seven centuries, now became devalued (Gregory 2006).
Whereas in feudal Western Europe a defined hierarchy of power existed, Byzantium allowed greater mobility, with two avenues to power: the civil elite with administrative roles in Constantinople and the military leadership provided by provincial landed magnates. However intermarriage and success in building up dynastic privilege led by the twelfth century to a concentration of wealth and status in a limited stratum of families, largely responsible for the commissioning of monastic and church foundations and their famous art (Cormack 1985).This meant that a powerful landowner elite dominated social life at all levels and especially in provincial towns, limiting the development of a middle class (trade and manufacture were considered unsuitable career paths for the elite) and causing a widening gulf between relatively poor peasants and the wealthy magnate class (Gregory 2006). The result was a predictable inability of the Byzantine economy to compete with that of the Italian mercantile families who, massively supported by their commercial republics, represented a foreign capitalist elite in the Byzantine homeland.
Developments in the Middle Byzantine Greek countryside
The development of rural life in the Byzantine provinces has traditionally been reconstructed from literary sources: agrarian laws, saints'lives, contemporary chronicles, and monastic archives. In second place has come the study of monuments surviving in the landscape, especially churches and monastic foundations, with much less attention being given to defensive structures such as castles and towers (which generally remain poorly dated and recorded), and the rather sparse record of modern excavation. The atlas for each Byzantine province (Tabula Imperii Byzantim) now helpfully synthesizes this information. However the richest database tor writing the history of the Byzantine countryside lies invisible to all but surface artifact survey teams, ceramic scatters found across provincial landscapes. Although the first intensive surveys were only able to date pottery to very broad periods ("Medieval" or even "Medieval to Turkish"), it is now possible, with the help of a handful of experts, to assign surface finds of tableware to periods of one to two hundred years, whilst advances in establishing fabric and style typologies for domestic and coarse wares often allows their assignation to broader but still useful periods such as Middle Byzantine, Frankish, Early- or Late Ottoman, and Early Modern.
The results of regional surface surveys confirm fundamental changes in Byzantine society during the MB era: a major population growth and the rising productivity of the countryside, which sustained a parallel growth in the number and size of towns (Armstrong 2003) (Figure 17.3). This economic expansion continues into the Frankish thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, forming a steady trend not anticipated by historical sources. It may be objected, as noted earlier, that we have no accurate idea of the settlement patterns for the preceding Early Byzantine era, and indeed we have suggested that most settlements remain invisible archaeologically owing to our inadequate knowledge of the pottery assemblage and the scarcity of coin finds. But several arguments can be deployed to argue that there was a real MB takeoff in rural and urban population.
Firstly, historical sources give clear signs of land intake, deforestation, village foundation,multiplication
of bishoprics, and urban revival (Harvey 1983, 1990). A first peak of such prosperity around the late MB period fits the independent evidence of archaeological survey, where a dramatic rise of nucleated hamlet and village sites can be seen across Greece in the eleventh to twelfth centuries, often without prior occupation in Late Roman times or with any ceramics of the ninth to tenth centuries. There is also growing evidence from rescue excavations in Greece for the flourishing of small Middle Byzantine rural settlements (such as in Attica, Gini-Tsofopoulou 2001). Whereas an absence of datable seventh- to eighth-century finds is unreliable when we are just beginning to characterize contemporary wares, the widespread lack of the typical "medieval assemblage" forms including glazed wares from the ninth and tenth centuries is strikingly consistent. The delayed explosion of rural settlements is partly due to the fact that even though from the ninth century the Empire was growing strong and flourishing again, there were regional difficulties and setbacks.The decline of Aegean piracy was held back till Crete was recaptured in 961 whilst Bulgarian invasions hit Greece severely in the tenth century (Bouras 2006).
At the same time the chronology of church architecture gives a suitable rise in dated monuments: there are just a handful erected outside the major towns in the EB period, a few churches for the early MB, and then a proliferation during the eleventh and twelfth centuries and also during the first century of Frankish power over much of Greece, the thirteenth century. The example of Messenia is shown in Figure 17.4. Boeotia provides another example (Megaw 1966). After the definitive reconquest of the province from the Slavs by the end of the eighth century AD, several major church foundations from the mid-ninth century in the regional capital Thebes coincide with similar examples from Athens, as well as with the building of the famous Boeotian rural monastic church at Skripou (modern Orchomenos). Historic sources indicate that the ancient city of Orchomenos, reduced to a village by Roman times, saw this new monastic church constructed in 872 AD in the open countryside, with much spolia from its ruins, on the estate of a magnate and regional government official from the provincial center at Thebes. The location was very exposed to attack, so  the important new
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(b)
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Tanagrike - Byzantine sites - dated pottery
		
		
		
		
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(10th)-11th 11 th—12th   12th-13th   13th-14th  "Medieval" other/?
Figure 17.3 (a) Deserted medieval villages (black circles) in the region of ancientTanagra city, Boeotia. (b) The chronology of their surface finds.
A.Vionis,"Current archaeological research on settlement and provincial life in the Byzantine and Ottoman Aegean." Medieval Settlement Research 23 (2008), 28-41, Figures 5 and 13.
monastery reflects the establishment of firm imperial control in the region. The revival of the nearby settlement of Orchomenos and other parts of the adjacent countryside seems to occur later in the MB era, further symptom of that sustained wider demographic and economic growth over the period, to judge by the two small churches of eleventh-century date in the modern town and the nearby twelfth- to thirteenth-century rural church of Aghios Nikolaos sta Kampia.This is in keeping with our own intensive survey results from several other districts in Boeotia which indicate that the proliferation of villages associated with parish churches marks the late phase of the MB period, from the tenth and more usually eleventh or twelfth centuries AD, confirming the historic sources for agrarian expansion in contemporary texts such as the cadasters (landholdmg records) from Thebes (Svoronos 1959. Harvey 1983).
Finally we can cite the evidence of coinage. Experts in numismatics suggest that the Early Byzantine era was one which virtually lost the everyday use of money, relying on exchange in kind or services. From the ninth century however, for example at the town of Corinth, coin finds indicate a recovery of coin
circulation, pointing to the revival of marketing and commerce, whilst increased production of small change, the opening of provincial mints, and tax changes confirm a rise in monetarization at the everyday level (Harvey 1990, Sanders 2003, Gregory 2006). Dunn (2007) has contributed an important study on MB peasant productivity (seen as very favorable) and rural markets, whilst an insightful analysis of Byzantine urban market areas can be found in Koder (2006). Dunn (2009) also discusses the existence of entrepots on the Strymon Delta in Macedonia, which serviced the export of surpluses from estates in its fertile hinterland as well as the channeling of imports inland.
The archaeology of Byzantine villages poses one of the greatest areas of research potential in the period. There are clearly many hundreds if not more deserted sites from the EB through LB era awaiting survey and excavation, whilst at least from the tenth century, when, or soon after, the majority were founded, the ceramics are both datable and rich. Moreover since the typical Byzantine town was small, with the revival of imperial control the village became a fiscal unit, rather than as in Classical and Roman times being
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merely a rural suburb of a city district. This indicates that the backbone of Byzantium was its rural population (Haldon 2000). In keeping with this observation, larger villages are known to have stimulated considerable cottage industry to supply their own inhabitants: monastic records for the village of Radolibos in Macedonia for example evidence a population of around 1000 people, with more than 20 shoemakers and two potter's workshops (Laiou-Thomadakis 1977). I airs occurred not only in towns but in villages and the open country, to further expand the reach of products to rural populations in the absence of a dense network of urban centers and the lack of large-scale manufacture and marketing within them. Even the industrial establishments excavated at Corinth are described by the excavators as "cottage industry" (Sanders 2003).
The revival of town life
Although historical sources arc thin for events outside the two gteatest cities of the Byzantine world, Constantinople and Thessaloniki, it is likely that (as with Anatolia and Byzantine Southern Italy), most Aegean towns lost their urban status in the EB era if not already in the final centuries of LR, whilst many suffered destruction and despoiling of their ruins. Just a few cities lasted as real centers in EB, notably when bases for the army and as theme (province) capitals (for example Thessaloniki in Greece and Amorium in Anatolia). But from the ninth century onwards there is clear revival of provincial small towns, with a wave of construction of churches and defense-works and the expansion of domestic quarters. By the tenth century there were some 40 towns above village status in the Peloponnese, although even the largest such as Corinth at its twelfth-century peak may have contained just 10,000 people (Sanders 2003). Some are officially "refounded" as they come back into full imperial control. Argos may be typical of the fate of larger centers: it shows continuity of activity on a very limited scale in the EB, seen as a village by French excavators (Pierart andTouchais 1996), then with the reconquest of the Peloponnese it is reborn as a major provincial center and archbishopric with numerous churches and a kastro (fortified refuge and
military base) above it. At Sparta, whereas the EB population appears to have withdrawn to the acropolis for security, where behind the walls of the LR kastro houses were built inside the abandoned theater, during the tenth to twelfth centuries the town spread out into the former lower town, where rescue excavations have uncovered new public and private buildings, churches, baths, and workshops (Zavvou et al. 2006). At Athens (Camp 2001) the town survives through the EB era but in severe decline, with minimal evidence for occupation until a clear revival in the eleventh to twelfth centuries, when a thriving town re-emerges with numerous small churches marking its parishes. At some former cities however the fortified EB kastro may have been accompanied by small hamlets nearby in parts of the abandoned ancient settlement (Haldon 2000).
The Byzantine town differed, however, in several significant ways from the Greco-Roman cities it replaced as "central-places" in each region (Haldon 2000). Firstly, apart from Constantinople and Thessaloniki, other Aegean towns were very small. Even the great cities lacked a gridded street plan of wide avenues, although they still possessed substantial public squares, but in typical provincial towns the extensive central Greco-Roman fora were replaced by small squares or street widenings. Roads were narrow and winding, and house-blocks irregular. Towns could be fortified, or possess a separate kastro, but the key to their internal organization was a network of parish churches or monasteries, creating local neighborhoods where much welfare and education provision as well as communal activities were focused around the Orthodox Church. In fact in contrast to the ancient city, where aristocrats and wealthy businessmen had frequently invested in public secular amenities and games to attract approval, these groups now primarily displayed their wealth through the construction and decoration of religious institutions (Cormack 1985). The great communal baths of the Roman era, as much social as exercise centers, went out of use in Late Antiquity, to be replaced by much smaller establishments open to the public but run as private ventures or attached to religious complexes, as much victims of economic decline as the underlying disapproval of the Church (Magdalino 1990).
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The functional role of Byzantine towns is controversial. A major debate has been running for over two decades on the fate of towns in former Roman provinces between Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Barnish 1989). One view emphasizes the decline of their industrial and commercial activities during the "Dark Ages" in response to the collapse of markets and trade-routes. An alternative thesis stresses the continuing significance of the social and political role of surviving or re-emergent towns in the Early Medieval era. For the Byzantine Aegean provincial towns, it seems likely that they functioned essentially as regional market centers providing services and craft products, with a solid local agricultural base, as well as acting as foci of provincial military political, and ecclesiastical administration. Long-distance trade and manufacturing for an interregional market appear to be of lesser importance, although we know of clear exceptions where towns had industries producing for a wider consumer zone than just their region. If the various workshops at Corinth, for example, show typical service industries for the townsfolk and surrounding villages   (pottery,  metalworking,  and metalwork), sources tell us of major silk manufactories there and also in Thebes of international importance (Jacoby 1991-1992). However, at Sparta as at these other towns, it was especially a Jewish colony that was prominent in the processing and commerce of textiles and local agricultural surpluses. Moreover the presence of Venetian merchants at provincial towns in our sources also suggests that local entrepreneurs were slow to take advantage of such flourishing populations and regional production (Zawou et al. 2006), although at the same time it does evidence a surplus of wider marketability. A few centers also benefited from holding international fairs, such as Thessaloniki, where merchants from the Christian West, the Islamic Near East, and Southern Russia were active (Gregory 2006).
Schreiner (2001) observes that in Byzantium a broad urban culture, so well known from contemporary Western Europe, is poorly represented, and then chiefly in its final LB two centuries. This reflects the high centralization of the court and the state's policy of limiting the powers of provincial towns. All who could, went to Constantinople to make careers and wealth. With the later decay of the capital and imperial power, however, rival centers emerged, Trebizond
as a second imperial city from the thirteenth century in Northern Anatolia, and Mistra likewise dominating the Peloponnese; but both remained focused on the residence of imperial court personnel. Only Thessaloniki shows signs of the development of a politically-assertive urban bourgeoisie, linked to the importance of its commercial community in Late Byzantine times.
In the later phase of MB it appears that Italian entrepreneurs took advantage of flourishing urban centers in the Byzantine world to dominate their financial and commercial affairs, which restricted their own citizens' ability to participate in wider Mediterranean economic opportunities. Advantages given by the Byzantine state to such Italian businessmen in terms of trading privileges were partly to blame, a combination of a lack of awareness of the negative effects on its own trading communities, and pressure (including military) on Byzantium to perpetuate these inequalities. However the restrictive practices of the Byzantine guild system were also a majot factor in limiting the ability of local producers and merchants to compete with the flexible, state-sponsored commercial families of Northern Italy. The truncated potential of Byzantine commerce can be indicated from an exception, its flourishing entrepots in the Black Sea during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, walled emporia run by magnates paid by the state (Stephenson 1999). Nonetheless, to confound the expectations of historians, who have derived from political history the image of a declining state and economic crisis, the twelfth century sees a flourishing urban network in the Aegean. Although much was being both siphoned off and run by Italian and Jewish businessmen, there was sufficient wealth for rich Byzantines to fill these towns with their endowments to monasteries and churches, paralleling a countryside dense with populous villages.
The Late Byzantine Period (1204-1453 AD)
The decisive shift in the fortunes of Byzantium was unsurprisingly to come from the West, through an unholy alliance between the ruthless maritime, commercial empire of the Republic ofVenice and a mot-
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ley collection oiFrankish (mainly French and Italian) barons. The Fourth Crusade diverted its forces from the increasingly difficult war in the Holy Land, where the Crusader states were losing their territories to Islamic armies, to sack a softer target, the capital of another Christian state, Constantinople, in 1204. The conquest of much of Byzantine Greece followed, which was partitioned between major and minor Western feudal lords. Important pockets of Byzantine power under aristocratic families survived: in Epirus the Despotate ofArta under the Angeloi, an imperial statelet at Nicaea in Northwestern Anatolia under the Lascarids, and another on the Black Sea at Trebizond under the Comnenoi. Although the Byzantines recaptured the capital in 1261, expelling the Frankish emperor and establishing their own, final dynasty, the Palaeologi, and although the Peloponnese saw the creation and steady expansion of a Palaeologan satellite province at Mistra, the disintegration of the Byzantine heartland was now irreversible.
The Western Crusaders and their allies the Venetians occupied large areas of Greece, but Serbia and Bulgaria also extended their realms into Byzantine Greece during the fourteenth century. By this time the Turks had occupied most of Anatolia, providing a launching-pad for one of their constituent statelets, the Ottomans (founded by Osman) in the Northwest of the region, to steadily expand Islamic conquest into Greece and the Balkans. By the beginning of the fifteenth century, Byzantine power was confined to the capital and its hinterland, Thessaloniki its second city, some island pockets, and a portion of the Peloponnese centered on Mistra (Figure 17.5).
The capital itself in this "Late Byzantine" era (contemporary to the "Frankish period" in Crusader-occupied Greece, see Chapter 18), degenerated into a series of villages amid ruins and gardens, with perhaps 50,000 occupants remaining from tenth-century estimates of500,000, and its trade largely in the hands of resident Italians. If anything the provincial city of Mistra near ancient Sparta was more prosperous. Despite or perhaps even because of all this (see Chapter 18), a Late Byzantine florescence in art and architecture is attested, with a distinctive style, strongly influential on the emergent Italian Renaissance. In return, Palaeologan architecture incorporates Western features.
Developments in the Late Byzantine town and country
Our knowledge of rural archaeology from historic sources and regional surface survey shows that, despite disruption caused by the Frankish conquest, the progressive infill of the Greek countryside by a dense network of farming villages from the eleventh century onwards does not cease until the fourteenth century. Moreover, although the official sources for political and social history have suggested worsening conditions for Byzantine society in town and country from a highpoint in the eleventh century, the archaeological picture contradicts this, whilst the latter matches local archives such as monastic records, from which trends concerning village numbers and their populations can be inferred. If the central state became terminally weak and its income minimal, the dense villages and numerous towns of the Aegean indicate a parallel, more flourishing image. Clearly rural productivity was high, allowing provincial magnates to live in some style in towns, import fine ceramics and luxuries, and invest in monastic and church endowments. The balance between those towns which were primarily residences to their rentier class and provided local markets and services, and those which were significantly producing industrial products and agricultural surpluses for interregional trade, remains, as we have seen, disputed, but will emerge from increasing archaeological investigations. The failure of a widespread entrepreneurial middle class or assertive artisan class to emerge in the towns, for example stimulating the rise of a more autonomous "communal" politics, seems at present to argue for the former view of urban society. Only Thessaloniki, with an exceptional international role in trade, produces a short-lived emergence of popular power.
Nonetheless, all our sources confirm a general collapse of settlement in both Byzantine and Frankish areas during the fourteenth century. The impact of the Black Death from the mid-fourteenth century is considered to have reduced European populations by a third to a half, whilst Greece's woes were augmented by constant aggression from Byzantium's enemies over its remaining territories, as well as their own mutual wars (Bulgarians, Serbs, Turks, Venetians, Catalans, Navarrese, Florentines, etc.). A similar demographic collapse occurred not only
ARCHAEOLOGY OF BYZANTINE GREECE
in the two great cities of the Empire but throughout its few other remaining regional towns. This chaos was resolved by the conquest of Constantinople by Ottoman armies under Mehmet the Conqueror in 1453, linked to the absorption of the Greek Mainland and almost all the Aegean islands, as well as virtually all of the Slav states of the Balkans, into the rapidly-expanding Ottoman Empire. The subsequent "Ottoman Peace" (Pax Ottomanica), offered the opportunity for native Greek populations to recover from the military and economic disasters of the preceding 150 years. Despite being now within an Islamic state, this is remarkably what occurred in the following period up till 1600 AD.
Byzantine Everyday Material Culture
The ceramics of the EB era are still being slowly understood and remain largely unrecognized. Amongst forms now assignable are the handmade "Slavic Wares," locally produced and found in many sites in Greece, seemingly both an indigenous replacement for the general disappearance of local industrial products and also produced by genuine Slav settlers from outside the Balkans (Color Plate 17.1).They date from the sixth to seventh centuries for undecorated hand-made varieties, then comes a decorated (incised linear and wavy-lines designs), wheel-made series in the eighth and ninth centuries. These were used both for cooking and as tablewares. Other wares reflect a clearer development as sub-Roman ceramics (Armstrong 2009, Vionis et al. 2009), such as Red-Painted Ware manufactured on Crete during the seventh and eighth centuries, originating out of the LR tradition of Red-Slip Ware of the sixth to the seventh centuries in the Aegean (Color Plate 17.1). Recent research indicates that Red-Slip wares arc also soil being made locally into the 8th century. Constantinople White Ware (named from its fabric), is a yellow-green pioneer glazed ware found rarely m the EB provinces. Pamela Armstrong has argued that aldiough White Wares are already common in the capital from the seventh century, they spread widely in the ninth and tenth centuries, reflecting both the recovery of Byzantine power over the Aegean and also the desire of provincial populations to acquire exotic tableware from the cultural center of their civilization (Armstrong 2001).
Transitional amphorae types of globular form from the seventh to ninth centuries have been identified across the Aegean and the Eastern Mediterranean in recent years, especially the Sarachane 35 amphora. Shapes show continuity from Late Roman forms into the Early Byzantine period in the Eastern Mediterranean, and the wide spread of such transport wares indicates that maritime commerce did not cease during the "Dark Ages."
With the Middle Byzantine era the ceramic assemblage becomes much clearer. In tablewares the commonest types (shown in Color Plate 17.1) are
(1) Green and Brown Painted Ware (maybe Persian-influenced), eleventh to early thirteendi centuries;
(2) Early Sgraffito (incised) Ware (Islamic-influenced), eleventh and twelfth centuries; and (3) Slip-Painted Ware, eleventh century to Modern era.These wares are normally covered with a clear or colored lead-glaze to protect theit surfaces and assist cleaning and impermeability. But even in provincial trading towns such as Corinth, such glazed wares are less than 1 percent of the weight of excavated pottery in the tenth and eleventh centuries, then rise gradually to 20 percent in the thirteenth century (Sanders 2003). Nonetheless, although the vast bulk of glazed tableware was made regionally, the burgeoning commerce of the late MB and LB Aegean, even if increasingly m Italian hands, was moving tableware as well as the more predictable oil and wine amphorae around the coastlands, as the twelfth-century Alonissos shipwreck underlines (Papanikola-Bakirtzi et at. 1999). Byzantine plain wares, for food preparation and serving, and for cooking, have been published by Bakirtzis (1989).
We shall cover LB ceramics in Chapter 19. One other artifact can at times shed important light on Byzantine society, lead seals (Polychronaki 2005).They were used to guarantee the confidentiality of correspondence, authenticating the author and also used to seal merchandise. As official archives are almost all lost, lead seals can shed light on state mechanisms, as its administration required a constant exchange of letters.
Byzantine Burial Traditions
Many traditional forms of interment continue from Antiquity (Rautman 2006).The commonest recorded is a brick-lined tomb scaled with roof tiles or stone
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slabs, the inhumation being accompanied by small gifts such as coins, jewelry, and pottery and the deceased dressed in clothes indicating their status in life. Pots and lamps used in funeral meals by family members may leave surface debris for archaeologists, to add to that from the grave-gifts when a tomb is disturbed by cultivation or later constructions. From the Late Roman era onwards, burials were made not only in older cemeteries extramural to towns and villages, but clustered around the graves and shrines of Christian martyrs both outside and inside settlements (Kourkoutidou-Nicolaidou 1997). By the eighth or ninth century the Church specified that the burials of ordinary citizens should be confined to the precincts of churches and monasteries, by now commonly intramural in both towns and villages. Elite figures from public and ecclesiastical life were permitted to be interred inside churches to emphasize their status. Wealthy families generally invested their wealth in such foundations to increase their chances of divine grace on decease.
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Oxford: BAR Int. Series 2023, 157-165. Lehmann, H. (1939). "Die Siedlungsräume Ostkretas."
Geographische Zeitschrift 45,212-228. Leigh Fermor, P. (1966). Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece.
London:John Murray. Liebeschuetz, J. H. W. G. (2007). 'The Lower Danube
region under pressure: From Valens to Heraclius." In A.
Poulter (ed.), The Transition to Late Antiquity on the Danube
and Beyond. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 101-134. Lock, P. (1995). The Franks in the Aegean 1204-1500.
London: Longman. Lock, P. and G. D. R. Sanders (eds.) (1996). The Archaeology
of Medieval Greece. Oxford: Oxbow. Magdalino, P (1990). "Church, bath and diaconia in
Medieval Constantinople." In R. Morris (ed.), Church and
People in Byzantium. Birmingham: Centre for Byzantine,
Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, Birmingham
University 165-188. Malmgoudis,   P   (1991).   Slavi  sti   Mesaioniki EUada.
Thessaloniki: Ekdoseis Banias. Mee, C. and H. Forbes (eds.) (1997). A Rough and Rocky
Place. 'The Landscape and Settlement History of the Methana
Peninsula, Greece. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Megaw, A. H. S. (1966). "The Skripou Screen," Annual of the
British School at Athens 61, 1-32. Morgan, C. 11. (1942). Corinth, XI: The Byzantine Pottery.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Oikonomou-Laniado, A.   (2003).   Argos Paleochretienne.
Contribution a Vetude du Peloponnese byzantin. Oxford:
BAR Int. Scries 1173. Papanikola-Bakirtzi, D.  (ed.)   (2002).  Everyday Life in
Byzantium. Athens: Ministry of Culture. Fapanikola-Bakirtzis, D., E. D. Maguire, and II. Maguire
(1992). Ceramic Art from Byzantine. Serres. Urbana and
Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Papanikola-Bakirtzi. D., F. N. Mavrikiou, and C. Bakirtzis
(1999). Byzantine Glazed Pottery in the Benaki Museum.
Athens: Benaki Museum. Pettegrew, D. K. (2007). "The busy countryside of Late
Roman Corinth: Interpreting ceramic data produced by
regional archaeological surveys." Hesperia 76, 743-784.
Picrart, M. and G.Touchais (1996). Argos. Une ville grecque de
6000 ans. Paris: CNRS. Polychronaki,M. (2005)."Late Byzantine lead seals from the
Derne trios  Economopoulos  Collection." Museum of
Byzantine Culture 12, 67—80. Potter, T. W. (1987). Roman Italy. London: British Museum
Press.
Poulter, A. (ed.) (2007). The Transition to Late Antiquity on the Danube and Beyond. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rautman, M. L. (1990). "Archaeology and Byzantine Studies." Byzantinische Forschungen 15, 137—165.
Rautman, M. L. (1998). "Handmade pottery and social change: The view from Late Roman Cyprus." Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 11 (1), 81-104.
Rautman, M. L. (2006). Daily Life in the Byzantine Empire. Westport; Greenwood Press.
Sanders, G. D. R. (1996). "Two kastra on Melos and their relations in the Archipelago." In P. Lock and G. D. R. Sanders (eds.), The Archaeology of Medieval Greece. Oxford: Oxbow, 147-177.
Sanders, G. D. R. (2000)."New relative and absolute chronologies for 9th to 13th century glazed wares at Corinth: Methodology and social conclusions." In F. Hild and J. Koder (eds.), Byzanz als Rflwm.Wien: Österreichisches Akademie der Wissenschaften, 153-173.
Sanders, G. D. R. (2003). "Recent developments in the chronology of Byzantine Corinth." In C. K. Williams and N. Bookidis (eds.), Corinth, the Centenary 1896-1996. Athens: American School of Classical Studies, 385-399.
Schreiner, P. (2001). "Drei Kulturen in Byzanz." In C. Stiegemann (ed.), Byzanz, Das Licht aus dem Osten. Mainz: Philipp von Zabcrn, 2-18.
Stephenson, P. (1999). "Byzantine policy towards Paristrion  in   the   mid-clcventh   century: Another
interpretation." Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 23, 43-66.
Svoronos, N. (1959)."Rccherches sur le cadastre byzantin ct
la fiscalite aux Xle et Xlle sieclcs: le cadastre de Thebes."
Bulletin de Correspondance Hellenique 83,1-145. Vida, T. and T.Völling (2000). Das slawische Brandgräberfeld
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Vionis, A. K. (2001). "Post-Roman pottery unearthed:
Medieval ceramics and pottery research in Greece."
Medieval Ceramics 25,84-98. Vionis, A. K-, J. Poblome, and M. Waelkens (2009). "The
hidden material culture of the Dark Ages. Early medieval
ceramics at Sagalassos (Turkey): new evidence (ca. AD
650-800)." Anatolian Studies 59,147-165. Vroom,J. (2003). After Antiquity: Ceramics and Society in the
Aegean from the 7th to the 20th Century A.C. Leiden:
Leiden University Archaeological Studies 10. Vroom, J. (2005). Byzantine to Modern Pottery in the
Aegean. An  Introduction  and Field  Guide. Utrecht:
Parnassus Press. Zavvou, E. et at. (2006). Sparta. An Archaeological and General
Guide. Sparta: Municipality of Sparta.
Further Reading
Dunn, A. (1999). "From polls to kastron in southern Macedonia: Ampbipolis, Khrysoupolis, and the Strymon Delta." In A. Bazzana (ed.), Castmm 5. Archeologie des espaces agraires mediterraneens au Moyen Age. Madrid: Casa de Velazquez, 399-413.
Vionis, A. (2008). "Current archaeological research on settlement and provincial life in the Byzantine and Ottoman Aegean." Medieval Settlement Research 23, 28-41.
18
Symbolic Material Culture, the Built Environment, and Society in the Byzantine Aegean
The Early Byzantine Period (ca. 650-843 AD)
Cormack (1985) has argued that Byzantine civilization was dominated by the Church. It deployed art, for whom it was the chief patron, as a means to reproduce a particular mentality which aimed to discipline everyday public and private life. The Byzantine world was portrayed as aspiring as closely as possible to Heaven on Earth, with the emperor and priesthood God's representatives in this grand design. Art could thus complement military action, strengthening the Byzantines' sense of destiny when the Eastern Roman Empire was threatened with total destruction during the Dark Age centuries.
Cormack uses the example of Saint Demetrius in his great pilgrim church at the city of Thessalomki. Martyred in the fourth century AD, his symbolic role as divine patron of the town was soon a focal point of resistance to enemy attacks. In the late sixth century large Avar and Slav forces besieged the town but the threat was beaten off, not least by the saint himself, whose supernatural embodiment took to the walls to repel the invaders. A celebratory depiction of ca. 620 (Figure 18.1) shows the saint with one arm round the city's religious head, the bishop, the other around the regional military and civil governor, the epatxh. Although the saint's body had not been preserved, a
special shrine (dborium) had been erected. This was a highly-decorated locale with dedications and artworks donated by the poorer faithful and local elites, and it became a focus for bringing the sick for miraculous healing, for prayers of personal intervention, and even for timely manifestations of the saint to assist the city in times of need. These might include, alongside sieges, food shortages and civil unrest. The Church encouraged this local "hero cult" to control and inspire the town's population.
We can also observe that wealthy aristocrats had by now diverted the wealth they had in pagan times spent for public entertainments and civic monuments, into the construction and decoration of churches and monasteries. Here they were often portrayed as pious donors, alongside the saints and even more powerful Christian figures such as Mary or Jesus.
The intimate relationship between Byzantine life and Orthodoxy meant however that crisis in society could be refracted into religion. Since Christian symbolic culture and its associated rituals were the central medium for reproducing Orthodoxy, it becomes less surprising to find that the "Dark Ages" of the seventh to mid-ninth centuries also provoked an Empire-wide assault on icons known as Iconoclasm ("the smashing of images"). From the early seventh century onwards, Islamic armies had swept out of Arabia and in astonishingly rapid conquests had driven Byzantine
The Complete Archaeology of Greece: From Hunter-Gatherers to the 20th Century AD, First lidition.John BintlifF. © 2012 John BintlifF. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
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Figure 18.1 Saint Demetrius mosaic, Thessaloniki (ca. 620 AD).
E. Kourkoutidou-Nicolaidou and A. Tourta, Wandering in Byzantine Thessaloniki. Athens 1997, Figure 191. Photo © Kapon Editions.
power from the Levant and North Africa. They then raided and threatened the surviving rump Eastern Roman territory for the succeeding two centuries. At the same time the Church grew immensely rich and politically influential, encouraging the populace to orient their mentalities to the magical power of icons and the mystical power of the clergy, rather than to the army and the emperor. An influential sector of the Byzantine secular elite, as well as more fundamentalist Eastern church leaders, began to believe that the defeat of the Empire and its threatened imminent demise was due to God's displeasure at the perversion of his commands. Was it not forbidden by Moses' Commandments to create graven images to worship? The cult of icons encouraged embracing and kissing of images, the belief that many were of
supernatural rather than human manufacture, and widely-accepted tales that they could weep or bleed, and that their subjects could step out of the icon to work wonders. Was it not Islam which was more in God's favor, with its stricter adherence to the non-portrayal of human or divine forms in its religious art, and hence the bringer of justified chastisement on Byzantine idolatry?
Between 726 and 780 and again from 813 to 843 AD, the imperial power and a body of favorable church leaders pursued a policy of Iconoclasm throughout the Empire: figurative church images were destroyed or painted over, and replaced by simple crosses and similar aniconic symbols. Con temporary historical sources may exaggerate the scale of destruction (Haldon 2000) and in Greece it may have been weakly implemented (Bouras 2006), but nonetheless this was an attempt to reorient deeply-rooted ways of thought in Byzantium public life. Icons had become a significant personal focus in the home, where women played a role in private worship denied them in public religious affairs, and it seems that iconoclasm was resisted in many domestic circles, not least because icon-worship offered women personal fulfillment, nor was dlis sphere a focus of official persecution. Significantly, it wTas indeed females of the imperial family who were responsible for the revival of icons which ended both periods oflconoclasm.
We must always recall, however, that alongside the well-preserved religious art surviving today in churches, museums, libraries, and private collections, there was also a secular art, of hunting, battle, circus, and erotic scenes, almost all destroyed, just occasionally intruding into Christian contexts (Effenberger 2001,Maguire 2005).
Symbolic Culture of the Middle Byzantine Era (843-1204 AD)
The ninth century marks a turning-point in Byzantine fortunes. Over the preceding century the Greek countryside had been reconquered from Slav tribes, and now the Arab threat was increasingly distanced through successes by the army and fleet. A strong dynasty, the Macedonian, seized powrer in 867 AD
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under Basil I and this inaugurated an era of sustained prosperity for the Byzantine Aegean until the late eleventh century.
This new confidence encouraged the public revival of the icon, as the powerful focus of an empire representing itself as the closest mankind could get to God's Kingdom on Earth, with its saints physically approachable and conceived as regularly active within everyday public and private life. A more confident secular power could allow the Church and its powerful symbolic propaganda machine back into partnership in controlling the Byzantine people and their mentality. This was also made clear in Byzantine coinage (Gregory 2006), the essential way in which the emperor became known to his subjects. From the end of Iconoclasm one face had the emperor with his symbols of power, accompanied by Christ, the real ruler; on the reverse came the imperial family crowned by Christ or Mary. In the representational arts and literature, imperial revival stimulated imitation of Classical forms (Greek and Roman) to remind citizens and Barbarians that what we term the Byzantine world was the unconquered Eastern Roman Empire.
Even more significant was a major transformation in the way that a new form of church corresponded to a novel iconographic program, which together almost universally separates the monuments of the Late Roman and Early Byzantine epochs from those of Middle to Late Byzantine times.Actually the change in design appears to have occurred during the political and iconoclastic crisis of the seventh to eighth centuries AD but the all-important new world of images awaits the end of iconoclasm and the recovery of the Empire's confidence in the ninth century (Mathews 1998). Whereas the earlier church design, dominated by longitudinal basilicas, created open, public areas, decorated with flexible narrative scenes, the majority of later monuments are compressed, multiple-enclosure areas, usually variations on a domed cross-in-square plan (Color Plates 18.1 and 18.2), and with a more controlled program of symbolic forms, that are also formally blocked into specific interior spaces. The new church concept, the commonest (but far from exclusive) design till the present day, envisaged it as a container for a particular religious experience in which the separate elements of its iconography are actively participating. At the
same time, the shift from early to later church design reflects a redirection of ceremonial from longitudinal processions in which the congregation had participated, suited to the basilica, to rituals centering on the frontal appearance and special acts of the clergy, with the congregation boxed into a focal central space and as largely passive observers (see following Text Box).
It has been observed that typical public Middle Byzantine (MB) churches are normally smaller than their predecessors, attributed to smaller populations (hence smaller congregations), and less surplus wealth, as the Empire slowly recovered from its Dark Ages. The comparison is certainly overdrawn since MB rural parish and monastic churches are ubiquitous. Moreover many large urban EB basilican churches were still in use and thus covered the needs of considerable congregations. In addition, smaller size is somewhat illusory, as traditionally Orthodox services have spilled out into the areas around the church, with doors open so that large bodies of worshippers can swell the numbers present inside and still participate in the service. Worship also emerges into the open air for processions and outdoor ceremonies.
In rural districts the simpler basilica construction continued to be built as a minority (and cheaper) alternative to the new centralized domed form (Bouras 2006). Indeed in many, perhaps most Greek provincial landscapes, there exist innumerable small churches of a different and so simple a plan that they are so far very hard, or even impossible, to date (Bouras 2006, Nixon et al. 2009). Still what is clear about the new, dominant church design is the marshahng of the inner congregation into an almost spotlighted central space beneath the main dome, where participants receive spiritual power from the religious activities directly before them at the apse screen, and from the all-surrounding sacred beings who line the walls up to and including the roof itself.
Outside of the great cities such as Constantinople or Thessaloniki, where multi-story apartment blocks competed with religious domes for the townscape skyline, the larger class of the new churches dominated the typically low-elevation ordinary houses and the occasional larger town house or palace of the upper classes. This accentuated the "monumental time" which they represented, in contrast to the more perishable secular buildings (Cormack 1985).The individual quarters of
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The Cross-in-square Church Design
The key to the new church design that emerged from the EB era was a cross shape, whose arms were enclosed into corners to make a square, then roofed correspondingly by four barrel vaults or subsidiary domes over the arms, and a central dome over the crossing. The dome's thrust was transferred to its corner piers and the secondary vaults, as well as the enclosing corners between the arms.The design created a large, high auditorium, the center of the cross, where the congregation stood to receive spiritual power from all sides. Before them lay the apse(s), where the clergy conducted the key Orthodox rituals. The apse initially was set apart by a low screen with marble panels, but increasingly this rose higher to become a total barrier to vision onto which more and more icons accumulated, and behind which the priests gathered invisibly and prepared for dramatic appearances before the worshippers. With larger churches, the cross-in-square was preceded by one or two entrance-chambers (narthex, exonarthex).
The likeliest origins of the new plan are firstly, a small number of Justinian-era and subsequent EB churches, including Aghia Sophia in Constantinople, of basilica plan but enhanced by a dome above the space before the apse, and secondly, the I Ioly Apostles imperial mausoleum in the capital, a cross-form basilica with domes over sanctuary and arms (begun by Constantine the Great and rebuilt by Justinian). The MB design would thus combine the two main Early-Christian monument forms (Bouras 2006, Papacostas 2010). So far the earliest examples of the full cross-in-square church are eighth- to early ninth-century monuments at Arta in Epirus, on the Cycladic island of Naxos, in the Propontis near the capital, and in Constantinople itself (Bouras 2006).
Outside, the new churches were ornamented with brickwork, mosaics, and inset glazed ceramics. The exterior tile and brick patterns can reflect cultural borrowing from the aniconic
(non-representational) Islamic mosque, and include stylized Koranic script, such as the pseudo-Kufic designs at Osios Loukas in Central Greece. The interior of the MB church was a single vast icon with a relatively fixed program, relating particular themes to specific locations within the building.The inner frescoes and mosaics surrounded the congregation on all sides and also from above at increasing heights. According to the new programmatic placing of images (Mathews 1998), the ground level directly confronting the worshipper comprised "everyday" saints, including clergy (nearest the altar), the military, women, and healers. Ir became traditional to visit these individually, offering the proskynesis (a triple bow), the apasmos (kissing the image), then a personal address which might include a request. Intimacy with the lesser saints made worshippers aware of their real presence in the sacred space and inspired hopes to share in their eternal world, enhanced by their usual representation as standing figures, seemingly populating the same space as the worshipper.
The theme of physical and spiritual merging with the divine is continued at the next height level, the vaults beneath the dome, where the Body of Christ dominated narrative compositions. In contrast to Western Christianity, Christ was portrayed as muscular and sensuous, his body symbolizing transformation into eternal life in scenes of his baptism, crucifixion, burial, and transfiguration. In the apse there was often a Virgin and Child, a prominent but notably inferior placing; this recalls again the "embodiment" of God in Jesus, but also celebrates the remarkable religiosity and silent witness of women in Orthodox Christianity. Before the apse lay the screen, a decorated barrier to vision, with doorways sealed from sight by curtains. Behind the screen only clergy were active, and the steps of the screen, the doorways and the hidden rear space were used to create ritual dramas.The Bible readings, the sermons, the preparation and display of the elements of the mass, all became choreographed to the unaccompanied chanting of the
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priests and congregation, so as to create a striking effect on the worshippers. Once again the theme of God's body is central, with the mass being the climax, when the faithful consume the body and blood of Christ, and are thus physically and spiritually assimilated in turn into him.
At the next level up in the church iconography, in the various domes, we see Heaven, whilst the Evangelists, the Prophets, and Mary are shown as mediators between humans and God. Cut the central dome, high and directly above the congregation, is totally dominated by the image of Christ offering a blessing with his right hand. He embraces the worshippers below in his benediction and in his remote elevation symbolizes transforming strength, hence the naming ot this image the Pantocrator (all-powerful).
The church's entrance gallery, the north ex, being naturally well-lit, could be used for daily prayers but also commonly served for burial rites, and hence is frequently painted with scenes of the Day of Judgment and Resurrection, focusing the worshippers' attention, on entering and leaving, on their eternal hopes as well as mortality.
As a visual unity, the Middle Byzantine church, the model for the commonest large Orthodox church plan up to the present day in Greece, not only portrayed in "surround-image" the community of the saints, apostles, and great divinities, but materialized the belief that during the sacred
Byzantine towns were focused on churches and especially monasteries, not merely due to the rituals drawing in local inhabitants (services in and around them, processions emanating from or coming to them), but also because they were community welfare centers, their complexes including schools, hospitals, old people's homes, and soup-kitchens.
Whereas the official Church was close to the imperial court, monastic institutions were not and were in fact commonly hostile to the secular authorities and hence closer and more influential to the people (Schreiner 2001). Monks traveled and spoke demotic
rituals this other world becomes alive and joins with the congregation in the ceremonies taking place. Middle Byzantine representational art of this period is thus austere and powerfully confrontational, well illustrated by the mosaic of Holy Luke in the Katholikon church of his monastery (Color Plate 18.3a).
Holy Luke is a monastic church complex, and indeed although most other new MB church buildings are small, many of the larger, such as this double church, are the result of the endowment of churches and monasteries by the rich and powerful, not only the royal family and top administrators, but also provincial elites. Such foundations allowed the ostentatious display of status and piety before the community, but could also include the mausolea of donor families and ensure continual prayers for their departed members. The imperial family regularly deployed church iconography to boost its secular image. Conquering emperors would be surrounded by military saints, whilst imperial families and other church donors appear, unselfconsciously, carrying bags of money for a church donation. "[I]n the 9th and 10th century [church] building activity was becoming one of the political activities of the Byzantine empire, the objective being to strengthen its authority in remote regions, where it had been weak or ignored for many years" (Bouras 2006, 70).
(everyday) Greek, as opposed to the almost incomprehensible classicizing use of language in court life. The popular influence of monks was also enhanced by the ubiquitous dispersion of small monasteries and the power and pilgrimage attraction of major monastic centers such as Mount Athos.
By the end of the MB era monasteries owned vast swathes of the landscape, forming small semi-urban foci of agricultural production, craftwork, and art. Their usual plan (Gregory 2006) was a walled rectangle, around whose periphery lay the abbot's or abbess s residence and the monks' or nuns' cells and a formal
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reception-room. Central to the complex was a church or even two, one for visitors and the other for the monastic community. There were also service buildings and rooms for study and art production. Apart from market- and kitchen-gardens within and around the monastery, its extensive agricultural estates might be so distant that satellite estate-centers (metochia) were set up to manage them. The greatest center of monastic life in Greece, and the richest landowner collectively, was the multiple monastery peninsula of Mount Athos in coastal Macedonia, where the earliest communities settled in the ninth century and the first major monastic complexes date from the late tenth century (Cormack 1985).
The artists
We can truly marvel at the power and beauty of Byzantine art and architecture. Its craftsmen were not surprisingly in demand ill neighboring societies, either sent from within the Empire or working from surviving schools of Christian art within the Islamic world. The Early Islamic Dome of the Rock Mosque in Jerusalem and the Great Mosque in Damascus employed Christian mosaicists for their decoration, whilst the spectacular Great Mosque in Cordoba culminates in a prayer-niche (mihrab) which glows with mosaics made by craftsmen sent on request from the Byzantine emperor. Likewise in Italy, the revival of mosaic art in Rome from the ninth century, in the mosaic decoration of Saint Mark's Cathedral in Venice between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, and in the great churches in the Norman kingdom of Sicily in the twelfth century, all betray the inspiration of MB church art and at times the hands of Greek craftsmen (Runciman 1975).
Nonetheless Middle Byzantine artists were not the high-profile, named individuals we are familiar with from Renaissance Italy. Instead their status was as skilled craftsmen, who at their highest level were an imperial "civil service team."Their goal in Church art was the reproduction of the essential concepts of belief on which Byzantine mentalities were rooted. Inevitably, the representation of eternal truths, and the close links between artist and ecclesiastical patron, encouraged the enforcement of conventions in religious art: how particular saints or secular figures
should be shown, appropriate gestures and colors, tended toward a formal pattern, limiting experimentation.We may find this constricting, and indeed it has resulted in lesser works, to be found in most Orthodox churches today, unadventurous copies of standard images, still made in styles developed 1000 years ago. Yet Orthodox believers rightly challenge "Western" expectations of artistic individuality. Byzantine art is deliberately "traditional," ultimately connected with Neoplatonic ideas emphasizing the unchanging qualities of the sacred world and its divinities, which lie "beyond time." In the essential element, the icon, a saintly face is characteristically frontal to the viewer, with little background to distract attention, its large staring eyes opening a direct avenue of communication to the divine (Cormack 1985). It is deliberately two-dimensional, formalized, and symbolic rather than realistic (Gregory 2006). Moreover, the higher-quality products of Byzantine art did witness changing styles, even within the confines imposed by a commitment to numerous traditional conventions.
The material culture of status and ceremonial
Byzantine secular and religious life were manifestly integrated through ritual processions: through communities, and into, out of, and between churches and monasteries. Elites were prominent in such events, which could occur on a weekly basis. In Modern Greece, important Orthodox ceremonies retain this character.
Secular power was also supported by a gradual elaboration of court and provincial ceremonial, culminating in instructions within the Book of Ceremonies compiled by the tenth-century emperor Constantine Porphyrogemtus. The imperial bureaucracy was extremely hierarchical and this was expressed in rules of precedence, complex dress codes (forms and color), and set modes of address. On the most formal occasions the place and movements of officials or representatives of the people could be choreographed and even set to music.
Embassies from the medieval West were surprised by the lavish ornamentation of the body for both sexes in elite Byzantium, including precious metal jewelry, gemstones, and enamel. Silk production was
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an imperial monopoly. If we add to this the fact that particular colors and a special cut to clothes were used to define official status, we can see that control over prestige dress formed a source of power (Jacoby 1991-1992). Gifts of Byzantine silk were diplomatic items in external relations, hence their survival in royal and cathedral treasuries in Western Europe and not in the plundered Empire itself (Fulghum 2001-2002).
Dress codes allows us a brief comment on attitudes to gender in Byzantine society. As with Classical Greece, our sources suggest that wealthy women were expected to cultivate modesty and seclusion in the presence of male strangers in the home, deploying veils or retiring to a women's quarter. Some Orientalists have even suggested that Islamic veiling may have arisen under Byzantine influence. But as with the ancient parallels, working women moved freely and without veiling whether in urban trades or assisting with agricultural tasks in the country. Ibn Battuta noted for fourteenth-century Constantinople that women were omnipresent in retail occupations and craftwork (Sigalos 2004b). In fact Byzantine women appear to have enjoyed greater freedom to work in a range of jobs, and engage in business management and legal affairs, than their antique predecessors (Herrin 1983). At the highest level, several empresses ran the Empire for under-age male heirs or arranged their own marriages to retain power.
Symbolic culture during the Comnenoi dynasty, 1081-1185
It is widely accepted that the shift in public mentality from confidence in the eternal order of the Byzantine world, symbolized in the Macedonian era (867-1081) by a strong, if not severe, art style, to the contrasted experience of political turmoil and imperial decline under the Comnenoi dynasty and in the subsequent Late Byzantine eras, stimulated new and remarkable artistic achievements. These can be characterized as experiments in surrealism and emotional expressionism, with more depth and dynamism to the images. The embattled state, under regular attack from the medieval West and the Seljuk East, as well as undermined by the growth of rapacious landlordism in its own countryside, nourished a change in mentality
THE BYZANTINE AEGEAN
which finds expression in a more sensitive, humanistic religious art (Cormack 2000).
The imperial family and powerful state officials still commanded sufficient wealth to endow churches and monasteries with buildings and artworks, where this new more personal view of the world can be seen. Especially popular was the image of Mary as the compassionate Mother, loving of her Son but also grieving in anticipation of His fate (the Eleousa). The most famous example is an icon (the "Virgin ofVladimir") gifted to the Duke of Kiev by the Patriarch of Constantinople. This art style was highly influential in Italy, for example in the twelfth-century churches of the Norman kingdom of Sicily and the mosaics of the Byzantine-style cathedral in Venice. Mosaics were increasingly replaced by frescoes, cheaper in a declining state economy, but also, with their stronger outlines, more suited to the new intimate humanistic style, compared to the remoter glow of ideal forms in earlier glittering mosaics.
Symbolic Culture of the Late Byzantine Era
The Peloponnesian town of Mistra, center of a flourishing but isolated Byzantine province, by this period surrounded by Prankish territory, provides another "gallery" of church art in the new late style of Byzantium (closely paralleled in the wonderful Late Byzantine churches of Constantinople such as the Chora monastery, Color Plate 18.3b). Fantastic colors and expressionist composition join with emotional humanity to create a last flowering of independent Byzantine art hi the final centuries of the fragmented and besieged Empire, especially in the fourteenth-century churches of the Aphentiko and Peribleptos. Also exceptional is the art in a series of churches in the empire's second city Thessaloniki, founded by the city's ecclesiastical hierarchy rather dian the imperial family and regional aristocracy, reflecting the town's more socially diverse commercial culture (Rautman 1989).
This Late Byzantine humanist style was clearly the basis for the earliest art of the Italian Renaissance, where Duccio and Giotto elaborated their masterpieces from a thorough grounding in the "Greek
CULTURE AND SOCIETY I
Style" (mamem great).Yet here is a difference: whereas the Byzantine anonymous masters still strove to present realistic images of eternal figures, the Italian pioneers transformed designs copied from imported icons by rooting their subjects in a precise time and place and person (Mathews 1998), commencing a very different concern with the world here-and-now, and with the individual. However, Byzantine art itself reflects the mutual entanglement between its society and that of the West, created through commerce, warfare, and the Prankish colonization of the Aegean. It can be seen to develop new aspects from this era onwards which reflect artistic trends in Italy: for example in the twelfth century some Byzantine artists sign their name (Cormack 1985), something that becomes common in post-Medieval Orthodox churches.
The Urban Built Environment
Byzantine power recovered from the ninth century onwards, encouraging prosperity and expansion in both the capital and regional towns. Although the higher Byzantine elite considered life outside Constantinople as a form of banishment, and provincial towns (Thessaloniki excepted) were far less grandiose and cosmopolitan, literary sources make clear that in Middle Byzantine times tegional towns accumulated wealth from commerce and manufacturing, as well as from their mainstay of income from surrounding agricultural estates. Nonetheless sources report that even Constantinople had very few streets wide enough for carriages, and off these one entered a rabbit-warren of winding alleys navigable on foot or with pack-animals. Unsurprisingly, limited excavations reveal that provincial towns were unplanned mosaics of meandering streets around irregular house-plots (Gregory 2006), which developed organically rather than to a set geometric plan. Nonetheless, in Corinth (Figure 18.2) within the old forum, by at least the eleventh century, the town center was flourishing, eventually comprising a wide street flanked by shops, including temporary affairs marked by post-holes, and with multiple workshops for bronzesmiths and for ceramic and glass production (Sigalos 2004a). Mistra also had a great open square before the Palace
THE BY'ZANTINE AEGEAN 409
for public gatherings. However major exchanges between town and country and at the interregional level often took place in extramural markets and fairs. Apart from the capital and Thessaloniki, with their large quarters for foreign merchants, another exception to the typical urban design of the town-plus-castle (essentially a market and service center for an agricultural region), was the coastal port-town of Monemvasia in the Peloponnese, which specialized in trade and piracy: the Upper Town was reserved for the governor, the elite, and major churches, the Lower for sailors and merchants (Avramca 2001).
The commonest Byzantine town plan (Avramea 2001) was a fortified settlement with separate citadel and lower town, the latter organized round parish churches and monasteries (see Mistra Text Box). Much of the population owned farmland and many commuted out to work in their fields, whilst usually a household owned a vegetable plot by the house or within the walls for kitchen-produce. The town was run by the governor, the bishop, and the local elite of officials and landowners ("the powerful" or dynatoi), the latter two possessing multi-story mansions contrasted with the simpler, single- or two-story rectangular homes for ordinary citizens. The elite founded monasteries and small churches within the urban fabric, further embellished by founders' inscriptions and paintings, as well as burial chapels reserved for them.
The archaeology of the Byzantine house is still in its infancy and just hints emerge from published plans and textual comments (Sigalos 20()4a-b). For the first stage, the Early Byzantine centuries of crisis, we might expect limited new construction and patch-ing-up of those buildings still in use from Late Roman times, amidst much abandoned space due to depopulation in towns. Certainly written sources agree, offering a semi-rural picture even for Thessaloniki in this phase. Excavations in Athens, Corinth, Thebes, and Thessaloniki show continued use of Late Roman houses with some internal modifications. This practice continues into MB times, where we have excavated house areas from Corinth andAthens for example.These courtyard houses continue ancient forms, mostly reusing existing Roman structures of this design, but in Corinth it seems that this type clusters near the center of the town, has
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Figure 18.2   The center of the town of Corinth in the eleventh to twelfth centuries.
C. Mango (ed), Oxford History of Byzantium. Oxford 2002,200 (unnumbered figure). C Oxford University Press.
much storage space, and is associated with signs of urban commerce and artisan production. Probably it belongs to a wealthier class of resident, prosperous from the economic revival of this period. Although dating from the subsequent Frankish period, one good example is a domestic-cum-manufacturing complex located in a large courtyard house. Within this, the small, one-roomed ground floor units were probably workshops and shops, with bronze-working the chief activity. It is likely that domestic accommodation existed above on the first floor. The entire house might have been the property of a wealthy citizen, for which parallels exist in texts. Such elaborate houses have some half dozen rooms and areas 200-300 m2 or more.
A more typical middle-class two-story courtyard house seems to have located animals and stores on the ground floor and domestic accommodation above (Gregory 2006). One central aspect of the Greek traditional two-story house is the elevated open balcony (hagiati), offering an intermediate working and living space between indoor and outdoor space. An enclosed projecting upper story (pndas) can also increase living space and the circulation of light and air into living-rooms. Although the precise form and functions of the hagiati and ondas in traditional Greek houses are closely associated with Oriental house influences, there is evidence that the basic habit of allowing the upper story of a house to encroach over the street below, projecting out from the ground floor, whether
fully walled-in or open in parts as a balcony, also existed in Byzantine urban settlements. Some larger houses at Mistra for instance show enlarged balconies, although there are Italian architectural influences in this late town which may also be a design source for this feature.
A second excavated house type is usually single-story, has two or more rooms, and lines the street and/ or borders a yard. At Chalcis for example, larger numbers of such simpler homes have been found further out near the edges of the town, interpreted as working-class or urban-farmer accommodation, and when they occur in direct association with workshops might be homes for a lower artisan class (Sigalos 2004a-b). Such simpler linear houses often have just one or two, occasionally three to four rooms and may have no yard areas, and average 50-100 m2. A busy neighborhood in Chalcis gives a picture of this poorer end of the urban environment.
Contemporary sources have led to suggestions that Byzantine women were secluded within the home, in agynaikonitis (female apartment).We lack house details to confirm this image, but might be suspicious of the applicability of the custom outside the mansions of the rich.
At Athens, Corinth and elsewhere, the growth of the city is marked by MB expansion from Late Antique and Dark Age limits. In general the evidence from texts and archaeology reinforces the view of Alan Harvey (1990) that links demographic upturn in country and town with the rise of towns, both servicing, and supported by, increasing rural populations.The market for the expanding commerce and manufacturing seen in excavated town quarters would rest on a flourishing agrarian surplus and rising rural demand, and a modest interregional trade.
Rural Settlement Design and House Culture
If Byzantine towns created opportunities for a range of social classes to occupy houses from small dwellings, comparable to rural homes, to palatial multi-story mansions, it seems likely that villages and hamlets remained simple in their layout and the variety of their housing. It is suggested that Greek peasants in
general occupied houses of limited size and internal complexity till the late nineteenth century, often on the Mainland just single-story (except in steep terrain where a basement was both necessary and easier to construct). The Mainland Agricultural Style (Sigalos 2004b) of rural settlement, consisting of a loose dispersal of longhouses with a broad facade, allowing much space between homes for open-air activities, appears already in MB times, and seems typical for a mixed-farming economy right up to living memory in many regions. One to two rooms, and animals under the same roof as the extended family, can reasonably be inferred from more recent use of such houses (see Color Plate 21.1b).
As for rural estate-centers of the rich, we are very poorly informed both from texts and archaeology. Some sources suggest that rural towers are not merely a Crusader introduction but were in use in Byzantine areas both to mark status and as protection for estate staff. A rare excavated example of an isolated complex estate-center from Pylos (in the province of Elis) dates from the twelfth century and has a square, two-story plan a little reminiscent of a tower house from later centuries, but is on a much smaller scale (Coleman 1969,1986). Perhaps we can use the description provided by the fourteenth-century statesman Michael Choniates of his semi-rural palace in the outermost suburb of Constantinople as a guide to rural villas of the elite (Magdalino 2002): set within farmland the estate-center was vast, including domestic structures with upper galleries surrounding a paved courtyard, a church, gardens, cisterns, and aqueducts.
An Annales Perspective
The long-term perspective for Byzantium clearly challenges us to set this civilization as it saw itself, as a thousand-year empire which was "Part II" of the preceding thousand-year Roman Empire. In many respects there were important continuities. The emperor aspired to absolute power over remodeled provinces in the Eastern Mediterranean; the economy was of "ancient economy" type, resting at least initially on the tax of free town and village populations, which in turn relied essentially on agricultural surpluses primarily consumed regionally; at least initially, the
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The Town of Mistra (Figure 18.3)
After 1204, Greece was divided into Frankish feudal realms, with just three major pockets of Byzantine resistance in Epirus and Anatolia. But by 1261 the Byzantines had driven the Crusaders out of the capital, and over the following two centuries they nibbled away at the Frankish dukedoms and baronies with considerable success. Mistra (Runciman 1 980, Avramea ct at. 2001, Chatzidakis 2003, Sigalos 2004a, Gregory 2006) had been founded in 1248 as a castle dominating the Vale of Sparta in the Southeastern Peloponnese, by the Frankish Prince of Achaia William II Villehardouin, but had to be surrendered to the revived Byzantine state in 1262. The citizens of the nearby regional town of Sparta migrated to this safer walled town, which became the seat of a semi-independent statelet or Despotate ruled by junior members of the imperial family, whose wealth and importance grew continually to the fifteenth century, as Mistra expanded its power over most of the Peloponnese. The enlightened patronage of the city's secular and ecclesiastical elite encouraged a circle of philosophers, wTriters, and artists to reside there, making it a vibrant center for a late flourishing of Byzantine culture.
The town has four parts (Figure 18.3). Initially the Frankish settlement focused on the uppermost, walled citadel (16), and below it the UpperTown (Kastro) with the first stages of the Palace (17) and some of the oldest houses. After the Byzantine takeover important monasteries developed below the walled Upper Town and these were subsequently incorporated inside a Lower Town (Mesokhorion) wall, within which gradually many additional houses were built, especially mansions of the leading families, as well as the Cathedral. Finally an extramural settlement developed beyond the Lower Town (Katochonon).
A series of impressive churches and monasteries scattered amongst the often expansive private mansions of the wealthy and powerful document a town that seems more prosperous than the capital itself, despite its far smaller scale. Nonetheless the impact of Frankish and especially Italian architecture is visible, in the foreign introduction of bell-towers, and design aspects in the homes of the elite and the Palace of the Despots (17). Second-story balconies supported with arcades, Gothic windows, towers, and large reception-halls seem to reflect Western influences in the town's mansions.
The houses, smaller and larger, follow however typical provincial town plans elsewhere on the Mainland, with a basic rectangle aligned across the slope, which is here steep enough usually to allow an extra story downslope (usually for stores), onto which additional units can be added longwise or at a right-angle, and in grander mansions also upwards.The austere stonework is relieved by large windows and doors, and the decorative use of brick and tile. Houses are often separated by open space and do not form coherent planned geometric blocks. Grander mansions have towers and many houses have a first-floor veranda with a view over the Sparta Valley (Figure 18.4). A large room on the first or second floor was the main domestic space, used for eating, socializing, and sleeping (triklimon), and can have spacious windows; wooden partitions may have offered privacy- The Palace of the Despots possesses a giant throne room on its second floor with Gothic features.
The streets were steep and narrow and not suited for carriages, thus used for foot, horse, and mule transport. Before the Palace was a large square for administrative and economic activities, although much marketing took place outside the Upper Town gate. Exceptionally a new aqueduct was built for import of clean water into the city, probably linked to cisterns and terracotta distribution-pipes.
±V±l$lYU  1 Marmara, 2 Church of St Christopher, 3 Lascaris mansion, 4 well, 5 passage,
6 fortification, 7 Metropolitan Church, 8 Church of the Evanghelistria, 9 Church of the Sts Theodore, 10 Hodeghetria Church, 11 Monemvasia Gate, 12 Palace of the Despots, 13 Chapel, 14 Nauplia Gate, 15 Church of St Sophia, 16 Castle, 17 Palataki, 18 Church of St Nicholas, 19 Pantanassa, 20 Phrangopoulos mansion, 21 Church of the Peribleptos, 22 Church of St George
Figure 18.3 Mistra: general town plan. Citadel = 16, UpperTown = Kastro, LowcrTown = Mesokhorion,Extramural Settlement = Katochorion.
S. Runciman, Mistra: Byzantine Capital of the Peloponnese. London: Thames and Hudson Led 1980, 94. Drawn by Hanni Bailey.
414
CULTURE AND SOCIETY IN THE BYZANTINE AEGEAN
CULTURE AND SOCIETY' IN THE BYZANTINE AEGEAN
415
«H*»#|f"ío,cnÍTi:>
Figure 18.4   The "Laskaris House",in aristocratic mansion at Mistra.
N. V. Georgiades, Mistra, 2nd edn. Athens 1973, Figure b. Drawn by A. K. Orkuidos.The Archaeological Society at Athens.
army rested on peasant conscripts; art and ceremonial show strong continuities with the Roman world, especially the former in periods of conscious "Classical revival." But the differences are as great: the total dominance of Christian belief being the chief novelty, not only in the balance between Church and State, but at times in open rivalry with the State. If we note the changes over time toward a dependent peasantry and mercenary armies, these were also features of the Late Roman Empire, but the lack of a strong regional urban identity with powerful, largely self-governing elites to whom provincial rule could be delegated strikes one as a fundamental contrast to the city-based world of Greek and Roman antiquity. Indeed apart from Thessaloniki, Byzantine towns were small and irregular.
In the medium term the rise and fall of Byzantium appears to follow many other cultural examples, and as so often internal decay and external aggressors can be invoked, although the novelty here in a World
History perspective is the aggressive intrusion of the North Italian capitalist economy into that of the Byzantine world. For the short term both the success and failure of individual emperors or dynasties are relevant, as are certain events: such as the defeat of the imperial army by the Seljuk Turks at Manzikert in 1071 (leading to the loss of most of Anatolia), and the temporary destruction of the latter's successor, the rising Ottoman state, by the Mongol Khan, Tamerlane the Great, in 1402 (giving the Byzantine Empire another half century of life).
The overall mentality of the Byzantine world shows powerful strands of a central continuity, giving its citizens and elites a confidence in their superiority over other cultures and the will to survive. The focal belief in the state and the emperor as Gods representatives on Earth further assisted in the reproduction of a significant military and cultural power in the Old World.
A Personal View
Byzantium has had a "bad press" since scholars of the European Enlightenment consigned it to a deviant, non-progressive path on their models for the gradual improvement of civilization. It remains a neglected area in the study of European and World History and archaeologically we are, if one excepts the rich tradition of studies in ecclesiastical art and architecture, in the formative stage of a genuine discipline for Byzantine Archaeology where everyday life and settlement analysis are concerned. Closer examination of this impressive culture however makes clear that for many centuries the ruling classes in the rest of Medieval Europe and Russia saw Byzantium as a splendid civilization which they sought to emulate. Furthermore, the abundant remains of Byzantine life to be found in abandoned villages and small fortified towns throughout Greece, and indeed in other parts of the former Empire (Southern Italy, the Black Sea, Anatolia, and the wider Southern Balkans), would be an ideal focus for attracting the interest of young archaeologists looking for new research areas to colonize, away from the overpopulatcd discipline of Classical Archaeology.
References
Avramea, A. (2001). "Byzantine towns." In A. Avramea,
D. Eugenidou, and J. Albani (eds.). The City of Mystms.
Athens: Ministry of Culture, 23-31. Avramea, A., D. Eugenidou, and J. Albani (eds.) (2001). The
City of Mystms. Athens: Ministry of Culture. Bouras, C. (2006). Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Architecture
in Greece. Athens: Melissa. Chatzidakis, M. (2003). Mystms.Athens: Ekdotike Athenon. Coleman, J. E. (1969). "Ileia: Excavation of a site (Elean
Pylos) near Agraphidochori.".4iri!«ofog[jtMH Deltion 24B1,
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Coleman, J. E. (1986). Excavations at Pylos in lilis. Athens:
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Its Icons. London: George Philip. Cormack, R.  (2000).  Byzantine Art.  Oxford: Oxford
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Ualdon.J. F. (2000). Byzantium. A History. Stroud:Tempus. Harvey, A. (1990). Economic Expansion in the Byzantine
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Hcrrm, j. (1983). "In search of Byzantine women: Three avenues of approach." In A. Cameron and A. Kuhrt (eds.), Images of Women in Antiquity. London: Croom Helm, 167-189.
Jacoby.D. (1991-1992)."Silk in Western Byzantium before the Fourth Crusade." Byzantinische Zeitschrift 84-85, 452-500.
Magdaliiio,P.(2002)."ReviewofJ.EFeatherstone'Thcodore Metochitess Poems'." Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 26,339-345.
Maguire, H. (2005)." 'A fruit store and an aviary': Images of food in house, palace, and church." In D. Papanikola-Bakirtzi (ed.). Food and Cooking in Byzantium. Athens: Ministry of Culture, 133-146.
Mathews, T. F. (1998). Tile Art of Byzantium. London: Wcidenfeld & Nicolson.
Nixon, L., S. Price, and J. Moody (2009). "Settlement patterns in Medieval and post-Medieval Sphakia." In J. Bintliffand H. Stöger (eds.), Medieval and Post-Medieval Greece. The Corfu Papers. Oxford: BAR Int. Series 2023, 43-54.
Papacostas,T. C. (2010)."The medieval progeny of the Holy
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19
The Archaeology of Frankish-Crusader Society in Greece
Introduction
The main era of Frankish-Crusader rule in Greece lasted from 1204 AD till the early fifteenth century. In a wider context, its image is rather unfavorable. Compared with Byzantine civilization, which it helped to destroy, Prankish Greece appears as an episode with restricted geographic scope and even less cultural significance, and no lasting heritage. This phase ofWestern intrusion into the Aegean is moreover unknown to all but a few educated visitors to Greece and plays no significant role in the traditional "History of Greece." As for archaeology, it will be no surprise that a research focus on Frankish Greece hardly existed, apart from an obscure corner within the specialist field of "Castle Studies," until it was formally created in 1996, with the publication by Lock and Sanders of The Archaeology of Medieval Greece.
I was myself long mystified by the curious title "Duke of Athens" given to Theseus in Shakespeare's play A Midsummer Night's Dream. The Dukes of Athens and Thebes were in fact major players in the remarkable history of the Frankish adventurers who, in the wake of the Crusader conquest of Constantinople, carved out small states from the Mainland and Aegean islands (sec Figure 17.5). Their story is available through contemporary chronicles in various Frankish languages, reflecting not only the diverse source of the
conquerors of 1204, but also several waves of subsequent West European adventurers. After the initial dominance of French, Genoese, and Venetian colonizers, came the Catalans, Navarrese, and Florentines. The Venetians were always present and their possessions grew over time as the other Frankish states weakened; their avarice was indeed the prime force behind the diversion of the Fourth Crusade from recovery of the Holy Land to the easier prey of the terminally-weakened Byzantine Empire. These contemporary chronicles, and obscurer archives of secular and papal authorities, have long attracted medieval historians, producing most notably Millers highly entertaining yet scholarly Latins in the Levant (1908), and a scries of studies by Bon (e.g., 1969) and Setton (e.g., 1975). As noted previously, windows into rural life during these Frankish-Late Byzantine centuries appear in great detail from monastic records (Laiou-Thomadakis 1977, Lefort 1986). From the latter part of the Frankish era onwards there are also maritime charts and early maps of the Aegean to illustrate contemporary texts (Avramea 1985,Tolias 1999).
Historical sources, from political chronicles to monastic records and the earliest Ottoman imperial tax archives after their takeover of the Aegean, suggest a flourishing society in the Frankish sphere during the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, followed by a catastrophic decline in the late fourteenth to mid-fifteenth centuries, as the Crusader possessions
The Complete Archaeology of Greece: Prom Hunter-Gatherers to the 20ih Century AD, First Edition.John BintlifF. e 2012 John Bintliff. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
are afflicted by large-scale depopulation resulting from the great plague know as the Black Death, and constant warfare between the Franks, the Byzantines, and the Ottomans. In an effort to repopulate largely deserted agricultural lands, the last generation of Frankish lords and subsequently the earliest Ottoman administration encouraged a major rural resettlement by farmers and herders from Albania. Only a minority of Greek villages now survived, refuge communities lying in upland or otherwise remote locations where they had escaped pillage and enslavement; the Albanian colonizers spread like a tidal wave around them to dominate the Southern Mainland rural landscape (BintlifF 2000b, Kiel 1987).
Those striking landmarks ofWestern feudal power in Greece, the castles, had also inspired pioneer papers (e.g., Traquair 1905-1906), then classic publications by Bon (1937, 1969) and Andrews (2006 [1953]). Other aspects had attracted the interest of early archaeologists who had not yet learnt to confine themselves to particular periods of the Greek past, such as Waces (1904-1905) study of Frankish sculpture in the Peloponnesc. Additionally, major excavations on Classical sites such as the Athenian Agora and the center of ancient Corinth by American teams throughout the twentieth century revealed, and took appropriately seriously, significant overlying layers of Frankish occupation (when both towns were major feudal centers). Indeed today it is continuing work on Frankish Corinth (Sanders 2000, 2003, MacKay 2003, Williams 2003), which is providing the key sequence for Frankish-era ceramics and trade, as well as knowledge of Mainland urban planning. Corinth's Frankish town, with the adjacent massively-fortified acropolis mountain of Acrocorinth, was a significant possession of the Princes of Achaia, one of the most powerful baronies of Crusader Greece, whose residence was however closer to Western shipping at the still-imposing castle of Chlemoursi and its nearby towns of Glarenza and Andravida, in Elis (Northwest Peloponnese).
For the wider landscape, the Austrian 'Tabula Imperii Byzantini (Koder 1996) provides for all relevant Byzantine provinces a gazetteer and map for all published Frankish-era monuments and excavations, together with places mentioned in historical sources. But it has been the rapid rise of regional surface
survey from the late 1970s which has provided a third pillar in the revival of Frankish Greece as a major focus of academic research. Intensive, multi-period surface survey, with its impartial interest in ail periods of occupation of the Greek landscape, has found ample evidence of the Frankish era, and here our own experience on the Boeotia Project in Central Greece is indicative.
When Anthony Snodgrass and 1 commenced this regional surface survey in 1978, our interest was in reconstructing the prehistoric and Greco-Roman history of the landscape. We did not consider that the survey might reveal significant evidence for Medieval or post-Medieval Greece, and there was no serious published work to suggest this was feasible, given the sparse literature on monuments and ceramics for those eras. This rapidly changed when our ceramic assemblages from a series of farms and villages were dated by John Hayes, utilizing his immense experience in processing excavated post-Roman pottery from many countries of the Mediterranean. What previous survey projects had largely been confined to, assigning sites merely as "post-Roman" or "Medieval," shifted to dating them far more precisely. The possibility of a detailed phase by phase reconstruction of landscape developments within the lengthy interval 700—1900 AD immediately became apparent, and we seized this opportunity (Bintliff and Snodgrass 1985, Bintliff 1996b, 2000a).
Our expectations of the potential of surviving Frankish monuments also changed rapidly. In the early 1980s, as our survey teams walked large areas, we became ever more aware of a striking series of isolated towers which punctuated the Boeotian landscape, clearly of post-Roman age and adapted to pre-cannon warfare from their rudimentary defenses and arrow-slits (Figure 19. l).We invited a medieval historian and architectural expert, Peter Lock, to research the Boeotian towers. He later studied comparable structures in adjacent Attica and Euboea, including a giant medieval tower on the Acropolis in Athens which had been demolished in 1875. The implications of Lock's researches (1986, 1996, 1997) were considerable for the future development of Frankish Archaeology, since he concluded that most towers were probably built as rural control points for their village fiefs (land assigned to them) by the incoming thirteenth-century
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Crusaders. With our new confidence in the datability of Medieval village surface ceramics, the opportunity opened of linking peasant villages to Frankish feudal towers, which proved itself almost immediately with the ideal example in site VM4 in the Valley of the Muses (see below). Meanwhile Lock updated older histories of the period with a new synthesis, The Franks in the Aegean 1204-1500 (1995).The Frankish era was also well integrated into contemporary Late Byzantine history in the historical overview of Byzantium edited by Ducellier (1986). But archaeological survey teams still need to be more sensitive to the potential and pitfalls of using historical sources without experts on their project staff (Tsougarakis and Angelomatis-Tsougarakis 2009).
In the later 1980s and 1990s further survey projects followed our example in mapping the Frankish era in other regions of Greece: in the Pelopoimese at Nemea (Athanassopoulos 1997), Asea (Forscn and Forsen 2003), the Corinthia (Kardulias 1997), and on the Pylos Project (Davis and Bennet 2009); on Crete the Mesara Survey (Watrous et al. 2004) and the Sfakia Survey (website http://sphakia.classics.ox.ac.uk/); and in the Cyclades on Kca (Cherry et al. 1990) and other island groups (Sanders 1996,Vionis 2001b, 2005).
In contrast to Boeotia and the Peloponnesc, where barons and knights from France were initially in control, the dominant Frankish power in Crete and the Aegean Islands was the Venetian maritime empire. Significantly, whereas the first group of Frankish principalities was based locally and we lost almost all their records with their fall, except for narrative chronicles preserved in Western Europe, the "Serenissima" or "sublime" power of Venice kept a very close eye on its colonial empire from the city itself, where far richer archival sources still survive.
Frankish control in the Aegean did not completely disappear with the Ottoman conquests of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Whilst the other Frankish powers were wiped out by the Ottoman conquest, the Venetians hung on to fragments of their Aegean Empire (Crete and some smaller Aegean islands and Mainland coastal dependencies), and made a serious attempt at reconquest of large sectors of Southern Greece as late as the end of the seventeenth century. ForVenetian dependencies from the thirteenth to seventeenth centuries in Greece, plentiful archives
exist (cf. McKee 1995), and a plethora of largely unpublished monuments (to modern standards that is). Although the Frankish principalities in the Peloponnese were largely non-Venetian until the Ottoman conquest, in the seventeenth century Venice briefly seized the peninsula from the Ottomans, leaving highly detailed landscape records now being exploited by regional survey teams (Davies and Davis 2007, Davis and Bennet 2009). The first results of combining regional survey and individual site survey with the Venetian archives are now appearing. This later Venetian archaeology will be covered with the archaeology of its contemporary Ottoman era in the Aegean in the following chapters.
Frankish Society
Western medieval society was relatively open for the free, non-serf population, in terms of marriage and landholding rights across the whole of Christendom, provided that the individuals concerned paid their allegiance, taxes, and if necessary military obligations, to higher authorities, whether kings, barons, or city councils. Given the small scale of the Frankish emigration to Greece during and after the Fourth Crusade, many local Greek notables could thus be conveniently and usefully incorporated into the Frankish power and landholding structure, although they retained their Orthodox faith. In fact the Catholic Church made little headway in converting Greeks to the Latin rite, except for the heavily Italianized Cyclades where a more significant immigrant population existed. As we have observed in previous chapters, later Byzantine society had been moving inexorably toward a semi-feudal structure, making intercultural cooperation that much easier. The elite families from both local and colonizing groups intermarried and we can see mutual influences in dress, ceremony, art and architecture, and ceramics.
The serious undermanning of Frankish fiefs in Greece was a more general problem with Crusader states in the Eastern Mediterranean, since large numbers of Westerners participated through allegiance to their overlords for the duration of specific campaigns of conquest, and having obtained, they hoped, some
wealth from gifts oflaiid and a share of booty, would leave for home (Phillips 1997). However a distinction needs to be made between this picture, typical for the Mainland landed Frankish elite, and that in the capitalist-minded regions dominated by Venice, such as the Cyclades, Crete, the Ionian Islands, and key fortified ports on the Mainland, where larger colonial populations resided and a more intense link between commercial estates, industry, and trade were encouraged by the highly interventionist Republic of Venice.
In terms of economy, Italian merchants were already a dominant force in the Aegean before the conquest of Constantinople, and were even more significant in the mature Frankish era and beyond. There is widespread evidence that the concurrent expansion of Italian commercial networks and Frankish colonization stimulated new levels of international trade and cultural exchange throughout the Mediterranean. Craftsmen may also have settled in the major centers, such as the Italian glassworkers suggested by Whitehouse (1991) to have set up production in Corinth.
Stone Centers of Power
Appropriately for a colonial expansion into an alien environment, increasingly detailed studies have appeared of the fortified centers of Frankish power, even if we still await modern archaeological and architectural study of the castles to match meticulous holistic monographs such as that for the contemporary Crusader castle of Belmont in the Kingdom of Jerusalem (Harper and Pringle 2000; cf. also Kennedy 1994). But there is a growing body of castle studies, building on older summaries by Bon (1937, 1969) and Andrews (2006 f 1953]) .This includes a Minnesota University team (Brenningmeyer et al. 1998, Cooper 2002, Coulton 2009), case studies by Burridge (1996), Gregory (1996), Vionis (2006), and the Archi-Med Venetian fortification project (Triposkoufi and Tsitouri 2002). The elaboration of Byzantine strongholds which were contemporary to Frankish states can best be seen in the remarkable ruins of the town and castle of Mistra (the latter originally constructed by the Franks) studied by several Greek scholars since Orlandos in the 1950s (Avramea et al. 2001).
Pringle's (1989) remarks for the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem serve equally well for Frankish Greece: the fortified centers of power were alien features in the landscape, representing both physically and symbolically the imposition of a foreign military elite upon a largely peasant native population. Frankish strongholds either mark the residences of the major barons (such as Chlemoutsi, the Athenian Acropolis, the Kadmeia at Thebes), or key strategic strongholds for movement by land or sea (such as Acrocorinth or Monemvasia). Contemporary texts allow distinctions between landscapes controlled directly by aristocrats from castles or fortified towns, and those where a few castles of the great lords were surrounded by innumerable towers where their dependent knights or soldiers dominated Greek villages. Attica, centered on Athens, and Boeotia, with its twin towns of Thebes and Livadheia, seem to be typical for the latter, whilst much of the Peloponnese seems organized in the first fashion with many striking castles.
It was formerly assumed that the Attic-Boeotian towers were built to police routes, but careful analysis (Lock 1986, 1996, Langdon 1995) shows otherwise (Figure 19.1). Firstly they are, in contrast to the isolated military watchtowers of Classical-Hellenistic Greece, rarely in very high locations permitting inter-visibility with each other, or even commanding wide views in varied directions. Secondly, they are usually associated with an indigenous contemporary village. Their typical design is a two- to three-story rectangular structure with access via a door only at the first or even second floor, reached by a wooden stairway. The ground floor, accessible purely from within through an opening from the first floor, for defensive reasons, is a barrel-vaulted storeroom, whilst the upper floors form the public rooms and private living quarters of the permanent inhabitants. A fighting platform appears at roof level, and in well-preserved cases this is crenellated.
Sources and parallels from Western Europe whence the occupants and the design originated, indicate that these towers housed knights and even men-at-arms (milites), who administered Byzantine villages as fiefs within the lordship of regional barons. The ground-floor stores housed provisions against attack, hut more normally contained the tax-dues in various agricultural products from dependent Greek villages. The
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• Medieval tower sice (3 Prankish centre
Land above 200 meters
15   20  25 km
(For key to the numbering of the ntei see the inventory on pages 111-123)
Figure 19.1 Distribution of Frankish-era feudal towers and urban centers in Boeotia. The now destroyed tower on the Athens' Acropolis is also marked.
P. Lock, "The Frankish towers of Central Greece." Annual of the British Sehaol at Athens HI (1986), 101-123, Figure 1.
public rooms were necessary for administration, including judicial procedures, since the feudal elite had wide-ranging legal powers over their peasantry. Much grander versions, but with similar plans, appear as strongpoint-keeps and symbols of power built into the castles of the regional barons (such as that formerly at the entrance to the Athens Acropolis, demolished in 1875, and a survivor lying within the Museum at Thebes).
The intimate ties to local villages can be illustrated by the tower on the approaches to the modern town of Haliartos, in Boeotta. Although lying on the former main road linking the Pelopormcsc to Northern Greece, its location on a small rise is poorly suited to spot cnemyr movements, and is invisible to other local towers. Our surface survey around the houses of modern Haliartos revealed a Byzantine, Frankish, and
Early Ottoman village underlying the present town, which the feudal tower looked down onto.
The number of surviving towers in Attica-Boeotia is impressive, despite the destruction of many noted in Early Modern Travelers' accounts. Our freldwork argues that Frankish towers control existing Byzantine villages which either survived as settlements from Late Antiquity, or reflect the ninth- to eleventh-century recolonization of the countryside. The major Frankish centers were usually ancient towns, such as Thebes and Livadheia for Boeotia, and elsewhere Corinth and Athens.
The immigrant colonizing power was insecure, not only through the antagonism of the surviving Byzantine forces, but from other potential conquerors in Greece, who proved successful in the case of the Catalan mercenary Grand Company of the early
The Village of VM4 Zaratova-Panaya
In the micro-landscape of the Valley of the Muses (see Figure 8.4), the Frankish impact is dramatic (Bintliff 1996a,Vroom 1999). Early in the thirteenth century, a feudal tower is erected 500 meters from the low-lying Byzantine village of Askra-Zaratova, on a high crag, and concurrently the majority of the villagers were displaced to a hillside immediately below the tower. Papal letters show that the new Catholic bishop, imported by the Franks, remained at Askra, and became the object of predation by
the minor feudal occupier of the tower, a mere "soldier" (miles) rather than a proper knight (Lock 1995). Symptomatic of a class of unscrupulous adventurers who headed East to make their fortunes by exploiting local populations and other colonizers, this tower-holder beat the bishop up and burnt his crops, then calmly proceeded to Thebes to receive mass from the superior bishop! The new village (site VM4) shows a more extensive area than Middle Byzantine Askra, reflecting that continuous expansion of population seen elsewhere, despite increased feudal pressure on villagers.
fourteenth century, and the Ottoman Turks of the fifteenth century. The towers from which dependent villages were controlled were thus necessarily constructed against raids rather than for comfort. Finding the best location for a tower could mean moving the dependent village a kilometer or more, as happened in the case of Askra-Zaratova, relocated to our siteVM4 but still within its definable settlement-chamber (see Box), or at Mount Tsalika in the Peloponnese (Gregory 1996). Where an ancient city site shrank to a Byzantine village, an interval tower of the Classical fortifications could be remodeled into a Frankish tower, seen in Boeotia at Thisbe and Chaeroneia. Near ancient Tanagra in Boeotia, a series of Middle Byzantine villages remain flourishing, from our surface ceramic study, in their Frankish phase. At two at least, a tower was constructed, one through remodeling its existing church.
A more spectacular example of Frankish rural settlement appeared during a severe drought in 1989, which lowered the surface of Boeotian LakeYlike to levels rarely seen since the nineteenth century. Old reports of a submerged Frankish tower led us to visit the Klimmataria location, where we discovered not only the tower but a contemporary surrounding farm-complex (rather than an indigenous older village), its walls washed clean by the lake and the similarly washed ceramics lying in each room and open space. We were able to make a detailed plan of
the site and collect the ceramics in each architectural context (Color Plate 19.1). Parallels can be found for such rural estates from the contemporary Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem (Ellenblum el al. 1996, Ellenbhim 1998) and with an excavated example from the Mesogaia rescue excavations in Attica (Gini-Tsofopoulou 2001). The medieval phase architecture of the site is highlighted in the colors red, light brown, and purple (the last-named is the feudal tower). It consists of a rectangular courtyard, with the small (at least two-story) feudal tower in its western edge. Rectangular rooms, probably only single-story, range the four sides of the court, with an exit to the northeast leading to an outer sector in which a range of three very long rooms, also single-story, project away from the court (stables?). West of the tower there are additional structures, in part built onto Greco-Roman buildings. Following Western feudal custom, the lord's own share of the land (demesne), separate from the villagers under his control whose surpluses came to him by right, was farmed separately, and perhaps the Klimmataria estate center, far from any known village, represents such a rural focus.
In contrast to the Latin Kingdom ofjerusalem, where large numbers of Frankish peasant villages were established, on the Greek Mainland Byzantine villages provided the base level of the feudal pyramid. Most appear to have stayed in their location, with the parasitical Westerners locating their controlling towers nearbyj
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Geraki
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Figure 19.2   Castle settlement at Geraki, Peloponnese.
E. Sigalos, Homing in Medieval and Post-Medieval Greece. Oxford 2004, 202.
We already observed in the preceding, Byzantine chapters that indigenous Greek Medieval rural settlements are currently hypothesized for the Mainland to be weakly-structured nucleated villages or hamlets, with dispersed longhouses the norm, rarely more than one story, emphasizing the agricultural activities associated with the house, or sometimes craft production for the community.We are better informed for Frankish-controlled settlement plans, although published examples are mostly settlements associated with feudal fortifications of the small castle or tower variety. In these sites, there may also be a
defensive enclosure around the whole settlement, reminiscent of the Italian practice of incastellamento, where die lord walled in the dependent villagers, both to protect and to control them. The Frankish tower settlement at Panakton in Boeotia, perhaps only occupied for a few generations in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (Gerstel et al. 2003) possesses an inner enceinte around the feudal lords cower, then a larger outer defense enclosing a dispersed collection of irregularly-aligned longhouses and small rectangular buildings. In the center of the outer settlement is an East-West single-aisle church.
The rugged FraiTkish-Late Byzantine castle-village of Geraki (Figure 19.2) (Simatou and Christo-doulopoulou 1989-1990, Sigalos 2004) in Lacoma in the Peloponnese possesses a more elaborate plan. The lords castle dominates with its elevated enceinte, centering on the Aghios Georgios church, with the complex building to its north probably the lord's residence. Other houses are more typically scattered irregularly around the upper enclosure. In the lower settlement houses are of longhouse or smaller rectangular type, the majority being aligned along the contours of this steep slope. Some longhouses lie across the contours, and on sloping sites this usually indicates that they took advantage of the elevation difference to construct a cellar-floor on the downslope end of the building, creating a "one-and-a-half-story" house. It would be normally suggested that the feudal elite, their retainers, and craft specialists dwelt in the upper setdement, the dependent peasantry in the lower. However it has been suggested that in the outer settlement those houses with extra floors may mark status or wealth divisions within the non-lordly class.
Additional studies of Peloponnesian fortified castle-villages have been published by Burridge (1996: Vardounia), Gregory (1996: Mount Tsalika), and [nee and Ballantyne (2007: Paliochora), the former two constructed by the early Franks, the last-named largely under the control ofVcnetian feudal lords. In these examples a feudal keep and/or mansions for the elite contrast with simple homes for the dependent peasantry, and site locations are highly defensible. Multiple churches of simple plan seem to be chiefly donated by the elite members of such settlements. An inner, foreign elite enclosure, and external Greek peasant enclosure, recall sites already mentioned and also the castle-village of Kephalos on the Cycladic island of Paros (Vioms 2006).
Although we lack rural open settlement plans for this period, we can probably see their character from those of the lower, indigenous peasant classes attached to feudal strongpoints, since as we have seen, almost all Frankish towers or small castles exploited nearby or immediately adjacent peasant communities. Similar peasant settlement- and house-plans continue to be the norm throughout the Ottoman and Early Modern period. In general,Aegean rural settlement is typically nucleated from Early Byzantine  to  the  end of
Ottoman times, with isolated farms becoming common only in the later nineteenth century AD. Independent rural estate-centers of feudal lords and the wealthy Ottoman landowners were the major exception to this tendency, and perhaps Klimmataria (above) represents an example.The Frankish conquest generally appears to have stimulated even denser rural settlement than previously and also growth in earlier villages. On Crete, survey also indicates that the Venetian impact is associated with a notable increase in population density over Middle Byzantine levels (Nixon et al 2009).
Frankish Towns
On the Cyclades, Crete, and the Ionian Islands, Venetian maritime power came to dominate, although the Genoese and other Italian states colonized Greek islands on a lesser scale. The Cycladic islands were taken over by aristocrat families and their followers, creating genuine colonial urban enclaves within a wider and denser rural landscape of Greek villages. The favored locations for these foundations were visible and defensible locations, and here a highly nucleated town plan was introduced from Italian urban experience (Sanders 1996, Vionis 2001b, 2005, Sigalos 2004).The edges of the colonial settlement were either provided with a wall, or an outer ring of multi-story houses created a defense barrier. The residence of the dominant lord of the island was a central tower or small castle within this nucleation. Regular planning was preferred, for example on Antipatos (Figure 19.3b), but where the terrain was very hilly the rows of domestic houses and the narrow streets run along the contours, as on Siphnos or Astypalaia (Figure 19.3a). Some of these Italian planned towns were new foundations, others redeveloped sites used in earlier eras, but they begin in their planned form from the thirteenth-century Latin conquest of Greece, and most still preserve the main lines of their urban plan and individual house design.
The design scheme seems to echo not surprisingly the built environment of Medieval towns in Italy, with prominent residences for the ruling elite (fortified palaces for dukes and bishops, towers for leading landed
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Figure 19.3a Astypalaia town with its fbcalVenetian castle. E. Sigalos, Housing in Medieval and Post-Medieval Greece. Oxford 2004, Figure 7.
Figure 19.3b Plan of the old town on Antiparos centering on the lord's castle or tower.
E. Sigalos, Housing in Medieval and Post-Medieval Greece. Oxford 2004, Figure 12.
families), and street-lining rows of terraced multi-story houses for the rest of the population (comparable to "Borgo" habitations in Renaissance Italy, Sabelberg
1985). There is a significant difference however. In Italv both wealthy and poor citizens of the town lived in the same streets, regardless of class, except for the uppermost stratum of aristocracy. In the colonial towns established on the Aegean islands, the colonial settlers, traders, manufacturers, and landowners occupied the new planned settlements, whilst the Greek peasantry, working for the incomers, occupied rural villages or the irregularly-developing fringes of the colonial town.The colony was centered on the local lord's keep and an adjacent public square, which represented a spatial and social focus for the community.This echoes on a far larger scale the same concept as the courtyard which accompanied many private family residences.
Within these towns the ordinary colonist house (Vionis 2001b, 2005) was of two storys, terraced with similar neighbors along the street front.The adoption of flat roofs was a reflection of the dry Aegean climate, and it is interesting that also in the Crusader states of the Levant, colonial settlements made the same adaptation (Boas 1999). Often the ground floor was used for animals, storage of agricultural produce, craft production or shops, but sometimes different families occupied the lower and upper floors. Generally however the house was for one household with domestic accommodation in one or more rooms on the upper floor. A simple division in these homes in their Early Modern occupation of less public, more private space toward the interior, could well be applicable to their Medieval use. In recent times the public outer half of the domestic space was ornamented with textiles and ceramics. There could also be a courtyard for work and leisure, although the flat roofs and the streets would also have been in use for various purposes as house extension spaces. It is usually argued that increasing elaboration in the number of built spaces, with associated separation of room functions, including conceptual divisions between animals and humans, is a mark of increasing social complexity (Kent 1990). However the vertical layering of domestic housing in the island colonial towns was just as much a consequence of the compression of large numbers of citizens in Italian towns with high prices for land plots and the constraints of an urban defense wall, as symptomatic of a bourgeois mentality of domestic life.
What is unique in the Aegean is the remarkable conservation till today of what are largely thirtcenth-
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century AD settlement and house designs.The Aegean islands certainly suffered from regular pirate raids, but were little transformed by Ottoman rule, or the devastations of the War of Independence and later industrial developments. Only Syros saw major rebuilding in the nineteenth century, when it briefly formed a national center of commercial shipping wealth and became a focus of Neo-Classical architecture (Kartas 1982). At the beginning of the twentieth century, with the rise of Modernism in Western European architecture, the replicated Medieval whitewashed box-agglomerations of the Aegean island towns had survived to stimulate architects such as Le Corbusier (Michaelides 1972).
On Crete and the Ionian Islands, direct rule from Venice as opposed to the indirect rule on the Cyclades through dominant Venetian families, led to a series of port-towns where characteristic features of North Italian andVenetian Adriatic urban planning and architecture are found: urban defense works which grow increasingly massive over time (Triposkoufi and Tsitouri 2002), major squares associated with state offices, warehouses and fleet facilities, stylish mansions renewed at intervals in fashionable styles for the wealthy elite, and Italianate churches. In the countryside villas accompanied extensive commercial estates, also in imported styles.The physical presence ofVenice, in particular m Cretan Rethymnon, has both inspired a pride in the historic role of the town but also modern resentment at restrictions its citizens now endure when wishing to modernize it (Herzfeld 1 991).
Mainland towns tinder both Frankish and Byzantine control benefited from the rise, beginning in later Middle Byzantine times, of a wealthy residential class, combining extensive landowmmg with investment in regional trade and manufacture. This class of archontes was very significant to the flourishing of provincial towns, some of which received formal privileges in the Late Byzaiitine-Frankish era as "communes." With the political fragmentation of power due to the multiple competing states and duchies, towns could gain more autonomy and economic initiative, which was also stimulated by the general penetration throughout the Aegean of the boats and merchants of the highly commercial Italian states such as Genoa and Venice. The Latin Conquest, in enhancing the inroads ofWestern commerce, had
at least one positive effect in increasing urban exchanges and a greater commercialization of rural markets. In the major commercial towns there were quarters for merchant families of different statchoods, including warehouses, offices, and residences for traveling traders. However, we should not overestimate the urban scale of Frankish towms. MacKay comments: "Corinth was no city, and in the Frankish period probably never much of anything but a fortress town and ecclesiastic center, but it did harbor foreign merchant enclaves" (2003, 419).
At Athens the successive dukes dwelt on the Acropolis, where massive fortifications wTere erected (Figure 19.4). They converted the ancient entrance-complex or Propylaea into a palace dominated by an immense tower. The Parthenon of the goddess Athena was appropriately rededicated as a church to the Virgin Mary (Camp 2001).
The rather grander Mainland houses in larger villages, castle-settlements, and towns, which could represent ruling elites, are two or more storys high, with separate access to a domestic first floor from the ground floor. The latter was often barrel-vaulted and in use for storage, stabling, and workshops and could enclose a cistern fed by rainwater. An open yard spread before the house, which in some cases could be fortified, with loopholes for archery, although the yards are not normally walled. At the first-floor domestic access point, open balconies can be found of a hagiati type, which thus allowed house occupants to vary their activities flexibly between indoors, outdoors or in an intermediate climate. Rarely a tower is incorporated into such larger houses, of two or three storys in height. The main reception room on the first floor {triklinos in the Byzantine sources) was a long chamber combining, as in the smaller colonial houses on the Cyclades, public social as well as private living space. The display side of wealthier homes and also feudal towers can be seen in architectural refinements on the main reception floor (first or second), such as Gothic tracery windows and vaulting. The lack of genuine private space remains the case for all but three-story mansions, where the extra floor was free of public access. In the case of feudal towers, as noted earlier, the main reception floor could be used for public affairs of the district such as judicial proceedings and the reception of serfs and tenants.
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Figure 19.4 The Frankish Athenian Acropolis. Lower right, the Propylaea converted into an impressive palace for the Dukes of Athens. The Parthenon, already a Byzantine church, was rededicated as a Catholic cathedral to the Virgin Mary. The entire hill was massively refortified. On the left are the ruins of the older temple ofAthena and next to them the Erechtheum. © Dimitris Tsalkanis, www.ancientathens3d.com.
In summary, if we except the built colonial towns of foreign aspect implanted in the Aegean and Ionian islands and on some colonial outposts on the Mainland, we might characterize the remaining Medieval Greek settlements as articulated by a small number of narrow and winding streets flanked by freestanding houses with attached open yards in a generally dispersed pattern. Numerous churches would mark distinct neighborhoods and might reflect building and furnishing dedications by the wealthier families.
Frankish Churches and Monasteries
The Pope and Frankish lords encouraged the settlement of Western clergy, but Catholicism never gained a major foothold in the Aegean area outside of some Cycladic islands (Lock 1995). Despite gifts of land and other support, the Latin Church was a small, dispersed community with limited wealth compared to its
Western counterparts. The monastic orders invited to settle in the countryside were also typically those with an austere lifestyle, so that the few surviving ecclesiastical complexes are simple rectangular basilicas with Gothic ornament applied sparingly, notably in the sanctuary (Panagopoulos 1979). Pitched wooden roofs accompany a vaulted sanctuary apse. In the few major towns there were also parish churches and monasteries, such as the excavated Saint John's monastery in Corinth.The focus of Frankish power in the Peloponnese was in Elis, close to contacts westwards by sea. Here the Villehardouin dynasty used the town of Andravida as their capital, and nearby built the giant stronghold of Claremont (Chlemoutsi), and three Gothic churches for various Latin monastic orders.That of Saint Sophia has been studied (Cooper 1996, Coulson 1996, Bouras 2006) and originally had a large central nave suitable for convening the court, and a smaller aisle for ceremonies of the monks (Figure 19.5a-b). Like most of the few surviving, and
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Figure 19.5a The Frankish dynastic church of Saint Sophia, Andravida, Elis, Western Pelopo Photo Tasos II. Z.ichariou.
THE CHURCH OF 5TA 50PH'^S AT ANDRAVIDA IN EUS GREECE
Figure 19.5b   Plan from R. Traquair, "Frankish Architecture in Greece." Journal of the RIBA 31 (1923), 34-48 and 73-83 (also monograph, London 1923).
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in any case originally rare, Latin churches on the Crusader Mainland, the plan is an apsed basilica with limited Gothic ornament. Such churches also preserve a fortified appearance, reflecting the insecurity of their founders in a hostile landscape.
In keeping with both Byzantine and Frankish practice, the Frankish elite were buried within churches, for which sadly only fragmentary inscriptions and architectural embellishments survive (Ivison 1996). Near Andravida the now-destroyed mortuary church of the Villehardouins of Saint James has yielded the thirteenth-century tombstone of Princess Agnes in a mixed Frankish-Byzantine style. The Byzantine church at Daphm in Attica became a Cistercian monastery and the burial-place of the Frankish Dukes of Athens: representing this elite are several recycled ancient sarcophagi found in the floor and the crypt, again combining elements of both Frankish and Byzantine art. The Athens Parthenon was also used for the burial of higher clergy and the Florentine Dukes of Athens; fragments of Gothic tomb architecture mixed with Byzantine styles survive as well as epitaphs on the columns. Ivison argues that Mainland Franks were more integrated into indigenous society and hence funerary art was hybrid, whereas on the islands of Chios and Cyprus a more exclusively Western society produced purely Gothic and Italian stvles.
Ceramics and Frankish-Late Byzantine Society
Already from the MB era onwards, cultural interactions between Italy, the Aegean, and the Islamic Near East had given rise to shared technologies and styles in fine-ware production, although the initiative until the Italian Renaissance remained with Islamic manufacturers, who in turn were often inspired by Persian and Chinese ceramics. The lively trade around the Fast Mediterranean encouraged by the establishment of the Frankish principalities, and especially stimulated by Italian merchants, was enhanced by the close political links forged between them, which included the new Frankish-Crusader polities throughout the Aegean. Nonetheless because this stylistic network-
Table 19.1 Better-quality tableware on typical Italian rural sites (after Blake), for comparison with the Greek evidence.
1050-1350       Exotica and nn-glazcd types absent 1350-1500        Tin-glazed (majolica) present 1500-1700        Slip-coated types replace majolicas 1750-1900       Peak in cheap (increasingly factory-made) glazed wares
ing around the Eastern Mediterranean had already been shared from preceding centuries, in many respects the early Frankish levels at the town of Corinth show much similarity in pottery to the underlying MB ones (Williams and Zervos 1993). Although functional analysis of Frankish period rural sites is still in its infancy, most studied so far show access to wider interregional trade in ceramics, although the bulk of pots were locally made. Suiting Hugo Blake's (1980) generalizations for Italian rural life (Table 19.1) during the same High Medieval period, so also the Greek rural world possessed good but not highest-quality table wares. The latter are found in numbers in major towns with significant international trade connections, such as Thebes, Corinth, and tticVcnctian colonies.
However a different aspect of social history relates to the story of dining habits in Europe. Our medieval assemblages are comparable to those not only of the preceding Middle Byzantine era, but also to other South European countries such as Italy and Spain during the period 1000-1400 AD. People of all classes ate seated on chairs or benches, and consumed their various dishes from wide, open serving dishes shared by several adjacent diners. Only at the very end of the Middle Ages, during the fifteenth century, did it become common in Italy to introduce individual bowls and plates for each diner. Whilst however this tendency in Western Europe was to develop further in association with the rise of Capitalism and individualism, resulting in a full suite of personal ceramics, glasses, and table cutlery (Gaimster 1994), Greece shifted during Ottoman times into Oriental eating (both in culinary terms and in table manners), as we shall see, and still focused on central shared dishes. Nonetheless some changes are visible in the ceramics of the Frankish period in the Aegean (Vionis 2001a,
2009). Dishes become deeper, which in Western Europe has been linked with a growing tendency to stew main meals in their juices, rather than rely on roasted meat. More dishes seem to appear on some scenes of dining in this period, which might be the first signs of catering to some extent to the individual diner, but could equally mark a wider range of side-dishes to supplement the main item on the menu, placed centrally m the largest dish on the table. Contemporary sources tell us that the Byzantines disapproved of Frankish cuisine, where greasy spitted or stewed meat dishes were the most desired, themselves favoring a more varied diet including salads and vegetables. Could the occasional scenes of mixed dishes mark a merger ofWestern and Eastern tastes?
In the LB-Frankish period glazed wares rise in their share of assemblages (Sanders 2000) and spread wider from tableware and into domestic shapes (see Color Plate 19.2a-b for tableware variants). The thirteenth-century innovation of tripod-stilts (to allow easier stacking in the kiln) and other improvements to production seem to have increased the supply to markets. But social dining seems to have been very important even in rural hamlets, to judge by the remarkably high levels of decorated tableware on Boeotian deserted villages (Vionis 2008). Sgraffito (incision-decorated) wares continue to be very popular (Vionis 2001a), some of them traded around the Eastern Mediterranean, such as the finely-made Zeuxippos Ware (Color Plate 19.2a) and a thicker version called Aegean Ware (both primarily thirteenth-century). A common difference to MB Sgraffito is a rise in deeply grooved designs (gouged), including wares where large areas of the surface have been cut away to leave designs in relief (champln-e). But most pots were locally made, especially in the style called Brown and Green, or Late, Sgraffito, which continues from the late thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries (Color Plate 19.2a). This tends to be rather carelessly decorated with incised squiggles, wavy lines, and rarer flowers or animals, with added random splashes of green and brown paint. For details and fine illustrations of Frankish-era Sgraffito products see Ministry of Culture (1995), Papanikola-Bakirtzi (1999), and Papanikola-Bakirtzi et til. (1999).
Especially in the towns with good commercial links to the West, such as Corinth, more exotic imports are common (Vionis 2001a, MacKay 2003,
Sanders 2003, Ince and Ballantyne 2007). These include the polychrome RMR ware from Southern Italy (thirteenth to fifteenth centuries), the early tin-glazed wares such as South Italian Proto-Majolica (late twelfth to fifteenth centuries) (Color Plate 19.2b), and North Italian Archaic Majolica (thirteenth to seventeenth centuries). The taste of the Frankish colonizers will often have been met by their Western merchants in this way, although some of these wares are met occasionally on indigenous settlements too. Nonetheless case studies suggest that the Italian imports are generally found on colonial sites, and inside these are associated with the foreign elite quarters, while local wares typify the Greek domestic zones (Vionis 2006, Ince and Ballantyne 2007). Athens seems to have little of such Western wares and is more provincial (MacKay 2003).
The Fourteenth-Century Collapse
As we have noted earlier, despite the recorded shrinkage of the Byzantine capital during the Late Byzantine era, and the catastrophic contraction of the Empire due to the settlement of the Franks and the Ottoman Turks, those villages which we have studied m Boeotia and which came under Frankish rule from the early thirteenth century, show no clear decline from the archaeological evidence. If we consider their size and external trade contacts as evidenced in pottery finds, if anything there may be continued growth in rural settlements during the Frankish thirteenth century.As noted by Gregory (2006) here archaeological realities appear to contradict the historical sources, which emphasize warfare and disruption to life in the Aegean of this era. But all this changes drastically during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries AD.
Although most surface ceramic finds can only be generally dated to a transitional period termed "Late Prankish-Early Turkish," which covers the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, it is notable that on Greek village sites studied from surface survey in Boeotia, distinctive fourteenth- to fifteenth-century pieces are usually absent, in contrast to those of the thirteenth or sixteenth centuries. This archaeological evidence now goes well with official history of this era, with incessant warfare between the Franks and the Bvzantines, both
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against the marauding TuTks, and fighting too between different Frankish armies. In 131 I for example, a mercenary army of Catalans wiped out the majority of the established French nobility of Central Greece and assumed their fiefs. Even more destructive was the European-wide eruption of the Great Plague from the 1340s onwards, which may have killed up to one half of urban and rural population in its recurrent outbreaks. Meanwhile, Ottoman Turkish raids on the coastlands were enslaving rural populations and driving others into more remote upland refuge sites. The famous cliff-top monasteries at Meteora in Thessaly begin in the fourteenth century in a remote environment (Gregory 2006). Excavations at Frankish Corinth also show a total decline in the town during the fourteenth century (MacKay 2003).
Late Byzantine monastery estate-records support fourteenth-century decline (see Chapter 17). Uniquely detailed records of the demographic devastation of this era also come from an unexpected source, the Ottoman Imperial Tax archives (Kiel 1997). One of the earliest of these "defters" comes from 1466, not long after the Ottoman conquest of Greece, and the full effects of the cumulative catastrophic events can he seen in this first preserved Ottoman tax register for the province of Boeotia (Figure 19.6), a kind of "Domesday Book" of Final Medieval Boeotia. The population described as "Orthodox Greek" is confined to the two towns of the province, Thebes and Livadheia, and to a handful of large villages around the Mount Helicon massif (including the tower-site VM4 ["Panaya"] discussed earlier). Elsewhere it is apparent that the landscape has been largely deserted by its Byzantine inhabitants.The nominal authority in Boeotia in the final century before the Ottomans,the Dukes ofAthens and Thebes, fully aware of the disastrous consequences of depopulation both on agricultural production and the ability of the Duchy to withstand the threat of Ottoman conquest, invited large-scale immigration into the region by semi-nomadic Albanian clans, who were in any case migrating by force into Southern Greece (Jochalas 1971).
In the 1466 defter the "newly-settled" Albanian (Arnavaudan) clans (as they are usually described, since the process continued under Ottoman encouragement), can be seen as a wide scatter of small semi-
mobile hamlets (kattms). Careful work on the location of these Albanian villages shows that there must have been a deliberate policy to direct the newcomers to locations close to deserted Byzantine-Frankish village sites. Thus in the region in the north-center of the map above Lake Copais, just one tiny Greek village survives in 1466 (Topolya), but we see four small new-Albanian hamlets. In the preceding Byzantine-Frankish era our field survey located several Byzantine villages and hamlets near these new colonies. One of the new Albanian foundations, GjinVendre, replaces a now-abandoned large Byzantine and Frankish village we termed site CN3, which in turn is a possible replacement for the adjacent ancient city of Hyettos (all three settlements are just a few hundred meters apart) .We can assume that the inhabitants of CN3 and nearby Frankish-period hamlets, who may have been descendants of the ancient Hyettos city population, were either enslaved or killed by the natural or human threats of the fourteenth century, or had fled to one of the 1466 refuge "Greek" villages (shown in black). This required almost complete repopulation of the district by immigrants.
At another ancient Boeotian city, Thisbe, the case for a continuity of population on the ancient site, through Byzantine and Frankish times, together with a possible Slav admixture, is also strong (located in the southwest of the map, at the 1466 settlements Kakosi and Dobrena). Here depopulation during final Frankish times was severe but not complete, creating a fascinating settlement scenario. In 1466, next to the now inadequately small "Orthodox Greek" hamlet of Kakosi-Kastorya, which had formerly been a large, long-established and important Byzantine settlement, we find a new Albanian village, Dobrena (a name which may point to an abandoned Slav settlement selected for Albanian colonization). Here it seems the regional authorities, final Franks or the first Ottoman administration, deemed it advisable to boost the shrunken Greek community with new population.
In contrast, at the site of the ancient city ofThespiae, which continued as a village throughout the Byzantine and Frankish era, and where the Frankish lords were an Italian monastic order housed in a prominent tower, neither of the Frankish-period villages located by our survey survived the fourteenth-century crisis. This led to a sponsored recolomzation, but onto a hill
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above the ancient and medieval settlements, by Albanian colonizers, founding the modern village till recendy called Zogra Kobili (west of Thebes in the center of the map).
In the available series of villages studied by surface survey in Boeotia, despite the close spacing of Middle Byzantine and Prankish (Late Byzantine) villages, they are mostly small during the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. Nearly all are then abandoned during the crisis fourteenth century (cf. Figure 17.3b). But if the later fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries are a period of generalized indigenous depopulation, they are clearly also one of a concentration of Greek survivors into large refuge villages, all within the context of disruptive warfare and piracy.
Moreover, if the policy of Albanian repopulation failed to prevent Ottoman conquest of the Southern Mainland during the fifteenth century, both events succeeded in providing a strong basis for the agricultural and demographic recovery once the privations of the Conquest had passed, in which the small number of large Greek refuge villages would prosper exceptionally well, as we shall see.
An Annales Perspective
The expansion of military and commercial populations from Western Europe is the product of a medium-term cycle of recovery and growth there from the ninth to thirteenth centuries AD, after the traumas associated with the collapse of the Western Roman Empire.The eruption into Greece was anticipated by Norman colonization of Southern Italy, whilst Germanic and Scandinavian warriors and traders were active in settling and trading into Slavic Central and Eastern Europe. A particular extra element for the Aegean was the early capitalist commercial impact on the region from neighboring Italy. Climatic improvements in the same period ("The Early Medieval Warm Era") arc also linked to demographic growth in Western Europe. The fourteenth-century population decline is a general European phenomenon too, combining a phase of climatic deterioration, ecological problems due to over-exploitation of land, and increasing civil and foreign warfare. In the long term, the Byzantine-Frankish rise and
decline is part of an agrarian demographic and economic cycle seen as characteristic for pre-industrial European mixed-farming populations (Ladurie and Gov 1982). Only one clear element sets this evele apart, and that is the first development of Italian commercial states, which begin to create new mentalities and conditions of life in the Aegean during this period, and lastingly in the regions where Venice maintains control into the post-Medieval era. For the short term, the temporary capture of Constantinople by the Franks and their conquest of large areas of Greece appear less significant in the framework of the already advanced domination of the Byzantine economy by Itahan commercial interests. Cultural mergers make a similar point, as does the convergence of Byzantine semi-feudahsm with the full Frankish form for Greek peasantries. A clearer historical disruption is formed by the relentless rise of Turkish states in Anatolia.The weakness of the hinge region of Greece and the Balkans between powerful Islamic states and similarly strong Christian states further west meant that the fate of this area was unpredictable. In fact the decisive division of power was to be set in the Adriatic, so that only the Ionian Islands remained beyond Islamic control.
A Personal View
The Crusaders remain in Western (but certainly not Eastern) eyes a romantic community of fearless adventurers in picturesque costumes, notably restored to attention by the recent film The Kingdom of Heaven. Modern scholarship more soberly, and with an eye to "post-colonial" critiques, has reminded us of a ruthless, avaricious streak that ran through all the Crusades. The sacking of Christian Constantinople and the conquest of the Byzantine Aegean become unsurprising in this more negative perspective.Yet to be honest, one's sense of adventure can still be stirred by the description of Frankish life in Greece, as accessibly told by Miller (1908), and all of us involved with Prankish Archaeology in Greece are rather enthralled by detecting the material culture associated with the Villchardouin, the de la Roche, the de Brienne, and other great houses. More positively, the cultural exchanges and indeed intermarriages between Franks and Byzantines have long-term impacts, such as the
stimulus given to early Renaissance art in Italy by-exposure to Late Byzantine painting, and the never-broken commercial links between Western capitalist commerce and some Greek communities (especially on the Aegean islands), which will increasingly encourage the development during the Ottoman period of a wealthy, internationalizing Balkan merchant class.
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20
The Archaeology of Ottoman and Venetian Greece
Population, Settlement Dynamics, and Socio-economic Developments
Introduction
The Ottoman state was one of several Islamic Turkic polities which arose in thirteenth-century Anatolia. Its location in the Northwest as the closest to uncon-quercd Byzantine and Frankish lands encouraged a remarkably successful imperial expansion in that direction through conquest of the Balkans, only subsequently advancing back through Anatolia to incorporate almost all the Middle East during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (Lawless 1977).
It remains a commonplace of popular histories of Greece, that after the Ottoman Turkish conquest of Constantinople in 1453 AD, the Aegean succumbed to an unrelieved era of wicked Turkish oppression lasting till 1830 or longer. This view is also surprisingly common even in some academic publications. The stereotypical features of this disastrous four centuries generally include: a population nadir which stays low throughout the period, associated with the flight of the ethnic Greek population to the hills to plan their eighteenth- and nineteenth-century commercial rise and then the Revolution which led to Greek Independence. Then we learn that the Ottomans were a barbarous people with little cultural achievement in Greece, and worse still, they were prone to exercise a negative effect on the gifted Greeks by banning the construction of churches and
converting most existing examples to mosques. Finally, we read that no notable changes occurred within the Ottoman period of rule, except due to the initiatives of their subjects.
What should strike us immediately as strange, is that the Ottomans' own perception of themselves was one of a cultivated society. Any modern visitor to the Old City in Istanbul needs no convincing of the undoubted artistic and architectural achievements of Ottoman civilization. Just a brief visit to the remarkable religious, educational, and welfare complex (kulliye) called the Sulcymaniye will do (see Goodwin (1971) for an authoritative overview of the splendors of Ottoman architecture).
We can begin our deconstruction of the above stereotype history by noting that both the traditional Greek, and customary West European, view of the Ottoman Empire stem from the final era of its decline. Then there was indeed widespread arbitrary violence and corruption, and a lack of economic, technological, and political progress compared to the West. However, in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries Westerners had a very different, and frequently admiring view of the Ottoman world, which was plainly undergoing a great flourishing of population and productivity. The popularity of products of that world, such as its prestigious carpets and tapestries, like those shown on paintings such as Holbein's
The Complete Archaeology of Greece: From Hunter-Gatherers to the 20th Century AD, First Edition. John Dintliff. © 2012 John Bintliff. Published 2012 by Blackwdl Publishing Ltd.
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Tiie Ambassadors ^Jardine 1996), matches the healthy respect shown to Ottoman military prowess abroad.
By its sixteenth-century climax, the Ottoman empire (Color Plate 20.1) covered all the Balkans apart from Slovenia and coastal Croatia, the Middle East excluding Persia, and North Africa from Egypt through to tributary states in Tunisia and Algeria. As a matter of policy the empire was multinational and consciously drew its high officials and much of its elite army officers from non-Muslims (reaya).
In its early phase, to the late sixteenth century, taxes were low and the countryside was dominated by independent villages, with the state intervening to restrict rural lands being dominated by a particular family (Keydar 1983), but over the middle (late sixteenth to early eighteenth century) to late (late eighteenth to early twentieth century) phases internal breakdown and external military and commercial pressures led to rising taxation, insecurity, and the increasing conversion of rural peasants into estate-serfs of rich landowners.The empire became dependent on West European merchants and bankers, but this also had the positive effect of stimulating the growth of a class of Balkan entrepreneurs, traders, and shipowners, who were fundamental to the creation of national identity in Greece and other Balkan countries, and thus prepared the path for national independence as the empire fell apart piecemeal over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Lawless 1977, Inalcik 1972, Inalcik et al. 1997). However there are some Aegean regions where later Ottoman times saw continuing prosperity, such as the Cyclades (Vionis 2005a), and upland communities exploiting new opportunities in textile manufacture or longdistance commerce (Thessaly and other areas in Central-Northern Greece for example).
In the early empire manufacturing was widespread but not generally large-scale or primarily designed for long-distance trade, but significant textile production is already noted in Thcssaloniki and the towns of Thessaly. Significant exports from a region of a wide range of products, even to other Ottoman provinces as well as internationally, were subject to special authorization and generally discouraged, in order to ensure local needs and prevent their shortfall through private profiteering. The quality of craft products and access to membership of craft communities was
managed by the state through a guild system, which whilst protecting skilled workers, would gradually prevent innovation and entrepreneurial competition, necessary to combat a steady rise in the proportion of goods and their shipping within the empire controlled by Western Europeans. With a weak urban hierarchy, fairs often met the need for rural populations to get goods to cover a year or more (shoes, ceramics, cloth) (Sigalos 2004). The immense needs of the capital Istanbul-Constantinople naturally affected production in a wide radius, so that a large part of the surplus grain from Thessaly, Macedonia, and Thrace was demanded as tax-in-kind from the state.
Our available resources for Ottoman and Venetian Greece are rich if little-known and only gradually being used for archaeological research programs (Bintliff 1995, Kiel 1997, Zarmebaf et al 2005, Davies and Davis 2007 (Introduction), Stailsmith 2007). They include: the imperial tax records and local Ottoman and Greek archives (Davis 1991, Kasdagli 2007); travelers'reports (Tsigakou 1981,Angelomatis-Tsougarakis 1990); maps and naval charts (Sphiroeras et al. 1985,Tolias 1999); then material remains such as public religious and secular buildings, urban and rural domestic-houses, water-management systems, furniture, dress and other textiles, and finally ceramics and additional everyday portable artifacts (Kiel 1990, Vionis 2005a-b, 2009, Bintliff 2007). A model study of texts, buildings, and settlement geography is already available for the island of Lesbos (Karidis and Kiel 2002).
The Venetians kept control of Crete till 1669, and lost their Cycladic dependencies in a gradual progression of Ottoman power between the mid-sixteenth century and the early eighteenth, whilst the Ionian Islands were effectively under Venice from the thirteenth century till 1797.AVenetian archaeology of the Aegean has not fared any better than the Ottoman (Davies and Davis 2007, Introduction), but is likewise now taking off through a major initiative by the PRAP project in the province of Messenia (cf. Davies 2004). As with the Ottoman case, however, there were already well-studied aspects, such as the remarkably detailed Venetian land registers (in contrast to the Ottoman, provided with detailed maps of landhold-ings) (cf. Dokos and Panagopoulos 1993), personal archives (McKcc 2000), and early studies of elite
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architecture and Venetian fortifications (for example by the Italian scholar Gerola in a series of papers in the 1920s and 1930s). Renewed interest inVenetian fortifications is signaled in Triposkoufi and Tsitouri (2002). Ceramic studies are so rare that their authors make a point of mentioning this (MacKay 1996).
In contrast to early Ottoman policy,Venetian land-holding, as befitted a capitalist and commercial state, was very much focused on the accumulation of estates by wealthy individuals, either Italian colonial settlers or local elites, who were utilized by Venice as managers of peasant populations (for detailed study of land use on Venetian Crete see Stallsmith 2007). In the Cyclades, their gradual absorption into the Ottoman empire and low interference or settlement by Turks subsequently, left local Venetian-Creek magnates in control of the bulk of the land into late Ottoman times (Vionis 2005a). Comparison of rural life under successive Venetian and Ottoman control in the same districts is a fascinating insight into historical processes at spatial levels appropriate to regional archaeological survey investigation (Zarinebaf tt ah 2005, Malliaris 2007, Stallsmith 2007). A similar comparison between Late Byzantine and Ottoman life can be explored in Bryer and Lowry (1986).
Ottoman-era ceramics (ColorPlate 20.3a-b)
One major tool assisting a deconstruction of past biases is advances in our knowledge of the material culture of the Ottoman era. In the Aegean our ability to recognize Ottoman-era ceramics has leapt forward over the last two decades. Whilst still in the 1980s most field projects did not systematically collect post-Medieval finds, and if they did had to be content to classify them as Turkish/Venetian to Modern (or even just Medieval to Modern), we are now in a situation where most pottery sherds found even in the damaged condition of surface finds on regional surveys, whether coarse, domestic or fine ware, can be phased not merely into broad chronological divisions such as Byzantine, Frankish, Ottoman, and Early Modern, but through assemblage reconstruction into subdivisions such as Early, Middle or Late Ottoman (as for example with the recent analyses of deserted village assemblages on the 'Lanagra Project: Vionis 2004—2005,
2006b).This means that we can approach an Ottoman farm or village with the aim of using its surface ceramic finds to inform us of that community's relative wealth, economic behavior, and mentalities.
Rural Villages in the Early Ottoman Period
The Ottomans found a generally depopulated Greek countryside and shrunken towns, whilst even the capital Constantinople was more a collection of villages than a great city.The earliest Ottoman census and tax records from several regions of Greece, studied by several Greek and foreign experts, fit well with the gradually emerging archaeological evidence for settlement decline in the final Frankish-Byzantine era of the fourteenth to early fifteenth century. Thus for example the great plains ofThessaly (Kiel 1996), were virtually empty in 1388 when the Ottomans took over, requiring planned resettlement by population displacement from Western Anatolia, and the encouragement of Greek communities who had retreated to the hilly fringes to descend to the lowlands. By the mid-sixteenth century this policy had proved highly successful. An identical story is given by the archives for Attica (Kiel 1987) and Boeotia (Kiel 1997) (where Albanian colonists were encouraged), for the Peloponnese (Zarinebaf et al. 2005), and indeed for the Balkans in general.Turkish populations were predominantly urban in the Balkans, with only local pockets of planned Turkish rural colonization (for example in Thrace), so that farmers were Christians of various indigenous backgrounds (Braudc 1985).
Some of the factors responsible for the fourteenth-century nadir were common to Europe as a whole, such as the recurrent devastations of the Black Death and high levels of warfare. Likewise the great demographic and economic recovery of the sixteenth century is not confined to the regions sharing in the benefits of the Pax Ottomanica (the two centuries of relative peace and prosperity of Early Ottoman rule), since the period is widely prosperous in many regions of Europe. In the Peloponnese in the Southern Mainland the reconstruction by Barkan of sixteenth-century population levels indicates some quarter of a million inhabitants,
an observation fitting well with a peak of church construction (Sigalos 2004, see Figure 17.4).
The regime of landholding under which most Greek farmers were to operate in the first period of Ottoman rule, conceived of the land as belonging to the state.The non-Islamic population, or reaya, always the vast majority in the Aegean, paid tax for their freehold right to cultivate, whilst land plots were treated as contributory tax units for the sum needed (timar) to support the permanent army, in particular a sipahi or cavalryman. The other main use of such taxes was to pay the limited imperial bureaucracy, the elite foot regiments or Janissaries, and to contribute to the financial support of the main cities. The arriving Ottoman population was freed from most taxes, and conversion to Islam brought similar privileges, which accounts for a not-inconsiderable level of conversion from Christianity in many Balkan countries. Greece in general was not one of them, the Orthodox Church having already easily weathered the attempted imposition of Catholicism under the Franks. In any case, Ottoman policy followed the general norm amongst Islamic empires, allowing a high degree of freedom to indigenous faiths, especially those of the other'Teople of the Book"— the Jews and Christians. Its constituent populations were allowed a considerable degree of management of local affairs under their own secular and religious leaders, and this, combined with freedom of worship, led to a major influx of Jewish communities fleeing from persecution in Christian states.
If local populations paid their taxes regularly, they were given a remarkable amount of freedom, including selling their produce for profit. These favorable conditions, not least a great increase in security (the "Pax Ottomanica"), help to explain the general flourishing of societies throughout the Ottoman Empire in its first and greatest phase, from the later fourteenth to late sixteenth century. Although the vast lands of the Orthodox churches were reduced to smaller proportions, their estates and incomes were treated as those of mosques (vakf) and subject to minimal tax, which together with the overall favorable demographic and economic conditions of the early Empire, helps to explain why so many monasteries and churches were built, repaired, and lavishly decorated in this era.
On our own project in Boeotia, Central Greece, we have been exceptionally fortunate to have had already
since the 1980s the involvement of John Hayes for fine-dating our post-Roman surface survey finds, followed by younger scholars such as Joanita Vroom and Athanassios Vionis. In addition, the services of a renowned expert in Ottoman archives, as well as Ottoman-era architecture, the Dutch scholar Machiel Kiel, has provided us with detailed breakdowns of the Ottoman imperial tax archives for the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries AD. In particular the collaboration between Kiel and my own work on locating and surveying deserted villages has provided a very detailed illustration of the historical processes at work on a regional landscape in the long period from early Frankish rule to the post-Ottoman period (Bintliff 1995, Kiel 1997).
If the first preserved defter of 1466 (Figure 19.6) reflects, in its restricted spread of Greek villages, the devastating collapse of Greek populations, it already points to planned recovery with invited Albanian communities. If we take away these new colonists we see that over two-thirds of the Byzantinc-Frankish settlements must have been abandoned. On many deserted Frankish-era villages in Boeotia, we have now been able to demonstrate this chronology from surface finds (see Figure 17.3b).The large size of the few survivor indigenous villages, such as Panaya, must reflect their status as refuge communities for wider areas.
The subsequent tax records show that the small Albanian hamlets (initially some 30 families or less), multiplied and grew larger.and the larger Greek villages also grew even further. The seasonal Albanian "katuns" became permanent villages with tree crops and other products comparable to the Greek settlements. The effects of the new stability in increasing population levels and promoting economic prosperity are seen in the successive tax defters of 1506, 1522, 1540, and finally 1570, generally the defter with the liighest figures for population, crop, and stock (Figure 20.1). Intensive archaeological survey at villages such as Panaya in the Valley of the Muses (see Text Box below) gives closer detailed connrmanon of the tax records.
Blake's (1980) use of survey ceramics in Italy to highlight the degree of access to expensive fine wares for rural farming communities, indicated a relatively poor peasant society in High Medieval times, wealthier rural proto-capitalist communities
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in the Renaissance era of the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (wide access to Majolica products), then rural impoverishment for the sixteenth to early eighteenth centuries (cheaper slip-coated earthenwares being the best quality obtained), followed by rural improvement in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (renewed penetration in quantity of exotic glazed wares, increasingly factory-produced).
If we set this alongside the Greek evidence, the High Medieval period (Frankish-Latc Byzantine), may be comparable, not too surprising considering the incorporation of Mainland Greece into Western feudal politics and economics in this era. Blake's second, "Majolica" phase is a century later for Greece. Its framework in Greece, however, is pre-capitalist, communal village farming, along the Medieval model. Despite this, it is apparent that economic conditions for the villagers became very favorable. Imported tin-glazed wares from Italy, white-paste wares of comparable appearance with a high-quality body including clay, quartz, and glass (fritware) from Anatolia (Iznik) (Color Plate 20.2a), and locally produced tin-glaze or pseudo-tin-glaze wares, arc common on our village sites for this period, indicative of rural prosperity.
Although the Greek Ottoman rural highpomt is later than that in rural Italy, both arc marked amongst other indicators by widespread access to relatively more expensive tin-glaze dishes and jugs (Majolica), and it is notable that Greece produced its local versions of these Italian wares. Likewise in Italy the remarkable Anatolian Ottoman glazed pottery made chiefly at Iznik (Atasoy el al. 1994) was both a status imported tableware and locally imitated, as well as being found in surface collections at contemporary village sites in Greece.We do have some evidence for tableware production of less costly, standard lead-glaze types at the large village of Panaya in Boeotia, but more exotic wares such as the Italian and Anatolian imports and Aegean tin-glazed products would probably have been bought at provincial market towns, in this case Thebes or Livadheia, and also at a well-recorded feature of the Ottoman Balkans — district fairs. As already in Medieval Europe, it was convenient for traders to circulate around country districts utilizing periodic rural
fairs, where goods for a whole year and not locally produced could be purchased. The Ottoman tax records note for example, halfway between the two market towns noted above, a fair at the large village of Rastamites.Traditionally in Early Modern Greece, and this must also have been the case in Ottoman times, peddlers toured villages selling small-scale products, and it may be that some ceramic pieces reached rural settlements this way too. Their place today is taken by the truly exotic sight of sub-Saharan Africans, whom one finds in the remotest villages, passing from cafe table to table, offering small African art objects as well as the normal fare of cheap watches and pirated CDs.
In the Attic region immediately southeast of Boeotia centered on the city of Athens, exactly as in Boeotia, after serious depopulation in final Frankish times the number and size of settlements in the countryside grows in the early Ottoman period to 1570 AD, as study of the early Ottoman tax records makes clear (Kiel 1987). Here again, the countryside is largely made up of recently-arrived invited Albanian settlers, who kept their language, as in Boeotia, into the opening decades of the twentieth ccntury.A similar picture of rural growth appears in the settlement analysis for the mountainous province of Aetolia in North-Central Greece for the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (Doom 1989), also based on the archival research of Machiel Kiel.
Intriguingly, the match of tax records with archaeological survey allows us to compare a reliable-estimate of rural population levels to those of other periods in the same landscape. For Boeotia (Bintliff 2005) the Ottoman peak is only a quarter of that for the late Classical era, if well above any estimates for Medieval times. As Dertilis (1992) comments significantly, in post-Roman Greece labor was effectively scarcer than land till the Modern era, which forced state and wealthier landowners to rely on direct cultivation by peasant families rather than create vast estates with waged or slave labor. This dependence on family plots served to sustain the family farm, whether freehold, or as part of, in later Ottoman times, the estate of a magnate, into becoming a building-block of traditional post-Ottoman Greek agriculture.
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Panaya Ottoman-era Village
Intensive archaeological survey at Ottoman villages such as Panaya in the Valley of the Muses (BintlifF 1996) gives closer detailed confirmation of the tax records, when we observe the dramatic expansion of the site, between its modest scale in the Frankish thirteenth and fourteenth century, then a village called Zaratova (see Chapter 19), and its heyday at some 12 ha and hence some 1100 inhabitants in the sixteenth century, based on the dispersal of dated surface ceramics across the gridded site area (Figure 20.2). Its size is remarkably close to diat of its forerunner, ancient Askra, nearby in theValley floor,at its Classical or Late Roman peak, which we had already estimated
at over 1000 inhabitants.The defters for the sixteenth century AD give siteVM4, listed as "Panaya" village, approximately the same population.
The detailed economic breakdown of Panaya s production shows a steady rise in agricultural and pastoral yields with some interesting changes in the balance of products (Table 20.1). Moreover further details enrich tills impression of prosperity: imports of fine, highly decorated tablewares from both Italy and Anatolia at this and other contemporary early Ottoman villages (Vroom 1999) go with our archaeological mapping of several of the 10 watermills listed in the village's tax records, as well as our work at the two monasteries in the Valley founded by the village itself at this time.
100     200     300     400     500     600 Meters
N
A
Grab sample = 34 Sherds
Figure 20.2   Maximum expansion of the deserted village of Zaratova (Frankish era)/Panaya (Ottoman era), occurs in the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries AD or Early Ottoman phase. The spread of dated finds covers some 11 ha. j. L. BintlifF, "Reconstructing the Byzantine countryside: New approaches from landscape archaeology." In K. Blelke et at. (eds.), Byzanz ah Rdwm.Wien 2000,37—63, Figure 16.Table source: ibid., Figure 17.
Table 20.1   Economic and demographic records from the Ottoman defters for the village of Panaya (siteVM4). THE DEMOGRAPHIC AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT OFTHE VILLAGE OF PANAYA 1466-1570
Unmarried
	Households		young men				
1466		79	18				
1506		213	9	(in 1 466 and 1 506 explicitly mentioned as			
1521		190	20	a	GREEK Village)		
1540		189	56				
1570		220	59				
	SOURCE DATA				INTERPRETATION		
		Tithe expressed					
		in load (himl)	value of	Total			value in
Name of product and year		1 load = 166,	1 load	production    total value		kg. per	akce per
of registration		764 kilogr.	in akce	in kilogr	in akce	household	household
WHEAT	1506	200	35	256560	53846	1204	253
	1540	153	36	196268	42369	1117	224
	1 570	250	46	320700	88 462	1458	402
BARLEY	1506	135	15	173178	15577	813	73
	1540	59	16	75685	7262	392	38
	1570	80	25	102 624	15385	466	70
					Total	number of	
					value in	sheep per	akce per
SHEEP	tax amount	price per head in	ak^e	total sheep	akve	household	household
1506	15	18		30	540	0.14	2
1540	124	22		248	5 456	1.31	29
1570	1900	28		3 800			
	tithe in medre				total value in	liters per	ak^e per
WINE	(lm. 71 liter)	price per medre	total prod, in liters		akce	household	household
1506	700	10	497000		70000	2333	329
1540	325	20	230750		65000	1221	344
1570	222	23	157620		51060	716	232
							akce per
COTTON	tithe in bales	price per bale	total pre	duction in bales     total value		in ak^e	household
1 506	250	2	1 923		3 846		18
1540	173	5	1331		6 654		35
1570	160	6	1 231		7 386		34
Source: M. Kiel, "The rise and decline of Turkish Boeotia, 15 th— 19th century." In J. L. BintlifF (ed.), Recent Developments in the History and Archaeology of Central Greece. Oxford 1997, 315—358.
TheValley of the Muses is a good example of a "settlement-chamber," where (as we have observed several times already) there seems always to have been just one central village from early farming times onwards. The coincidence of a maximal village population of similar scale in Greco-h\oman times in Askra, in theValley floor,
and atVM4-Zaratova-Panaya above it on a defensive ridge, raises interesting questions about the close links between demographic cKmaxes and the capacity of a confined landscape to support them (its"carrying capacity") (13intlitT2005).The majority Albanian villages remain far below ancient population levels for their districts.
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Other Monuments of the Early Ottoman Era
Islamic societies wherever they expanded brought a wider range of crops and great skill in water management (Watson 1974). When the Aegean entered this sphere of agricultural innovation through incorporation into the Ottoman Empire, it is clear that a remarkable expansion of such practices occurred. Sadly very little has been done to explore the Ottoman impact on agriculture, although the Aegean countryside is littered with ruined watermills and overgrown irrigation channels. Once again Kiel has been a pioneer, this time on urban water management (1992). Mouzakis (2008) illustrates the potential of water- and wind-power studies in the post-Medieval era. In the Valley of the Muses (see Box) the Ottoman defters list 10 watermills belonging to the village of Panaya in the sixteenth century, yet another symptom of flourishing local community investment in land management.
Urban Life in Early Ottoman Times
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 1.S70, 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 of theThessalian 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 andThessaloniki 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 uni-magined 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.
The Crisis of the Middle Ottoman Era
From the late sixteenth century, and more markedly during the seventeenth, the Ottoman Empire suffered a series of crises, during which its nature changed fundamentally. It remained a large state, even till the end of the seventeenth century not to be taken lightly militarily by its Christian enemies in Western Europe, but it was weakened by demographic decline, loss of power at the center in favor of regional elites, and an impoverishment of the peasantry who should have provided a firm basis in tax surpluses and manpower. Additionally, the rising financial and commercial power ofWestern European states began to subvert the traditional economic svstem within the Ottoman world,
whilst a flood of cheap Spanish silver caused devaluation of the currencies ofEurope. Finally, climatic conditions during the same period, the "Little Ice Age," affected Europe as a whole through reducing crop predictability and yields, and in die Aegean may well have encouraged the expansion of marshland in the lowlands. This negative environmental development was assisted by a weakened state unable to keep such areas dry. Apart from declining crop yields, worsening drainage encouraged marsh sicknesses and malaria.
As with the flourishing sixteenth century, some of these symptoms are common to the European Christian world, where the "Seventeenth Century Crisis" has long been under active discussion (Rabb 1975). Factors which might be shared are firstly of course the climatic downturn, but secondly the theory of the French historian Le Roy Ladurie of neo-Malthusian cycles. In studies of France and the wider European scene (Ladurie 1966, Ladurie and Gov 1982), he has suggested that pre-industrial populations tended to expand beyond sustainable levels for agriculture, falling victim to crises, from which only depopulation (whether directly driven by food deficits or wars and revolts tied to food shortages) could save them. Indeed for the Ottoman world it has also been argued by historians (Kiel 1997) that agricultural production did not keep pace with population and thus food prices rose, this being one of the causes of the stagnation and then decline widely visible from the late sixteenth century. As we have seen, however, although this may well apply to the larger villages such as Panaya, it does not to the commoner Albanian foundations and the overall level of population.
A more specific symptom of decay was the inexorable shift of ownership from the hands of free peasant communities paying low taxes to the central authorities, toward a class of provincial landowning elite (the ayan), who milked the peasant surpluses for themselves, as well as taking over much of the tax formerly boosting state finances, The tied estates resulting from this shift in tljfe countryside became known as pftliks, although the" term literally refers to a farm or plot. Especially ih the eighteenth century, ciftliks expanded, with the aim of producing cash crops in wheat, maize, cotton, wool, and tobacco for urban markets within the empire and for exchange with Western merchants beyond it (Sigalos 2004).
Currently there is much discussion on the increased development of ciftliks during the troubled seventeenth century, stimulated by the thoroughly negative judgment on them passed by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western Travelers. More recently they have played a prominent role in historical debates about the wider context for some of the economic and social changes observed in the middle to later Ottoman Empire. Immanuel Wallerstein pioneered the concept that the Empire was increasingly drawn into a dependent relationship with the West European states, deploying terms such as core—periphery or world system (for these ideas see earlier, Chapter 5) (Wallerstein 1974, 1979). The subservience of formerly free peasants as a result of increasingly commercial agriculture has, as also for contemporary countries of Central and Eastern Europe, been described as a "secondary feudalism," with the ciftliks as a symptom.
However, some Ottoman historians (such as C^izakfa 1985), suggest that the impact ofWestern commercialism and capitalism, and industrial incursions, on Ottoman society, was marked from the seventeenth century but not terminally crippling till the end of the eighteenth and in the nineteenth centuries. But in any case, from the latter sixteenth century, more and more state lands became privatized and this trend increased in the following centuries, tied to new forms of production. On the one hand, peasant payments did not alter significantly, heading to a higher authority for the rights of land use, and on the other hand, the rise of plantation production was very rare at first. Indeed with population decline, the state was encouraging privatization of its untilled lands to recover production shortfalls. Nonetheless, although the initial scale of ciftliks was small, just two to three households each, by the late seventeenth century large estates had become common and magnate rights grown hereditary. The great Ottoman scholar Inalcik (1972) drew attention to this as a central symptom of the increasing loss of control over the provinces by central government, as land surpluses and tax-raising were becoming die family right of the class of ayan, provincial landed elites. Before the end of the eighteenth century, a member of each regional ayan was chosen to represent the area politically. The most powerful provincial magnates maintained
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mercenary militias, ostensibly to combat the rising fotces of banditry, but as often to oppress the peasantry.
The significance of ciftliks goes beyond the incorporation of formerly free peasant plots into large estates. Increasingly these bigger estates were specializing in cash crops for an international market, including the demands for raw materials by the West European commercial powers. Cheap food but also cotton and animal fibers were in great demand in the West, and this would only increase in the eighteenth century with the rise of industrialized production there. The weakness of the Ottoman state in not encouraging an independent entrepreneurial merchant class laid the Ottoman Empire open to Western traders. The ayan class saw increasing advantages in reorienting production on their larger and more market-effective specialist estates toward agents of Western countries. The growth of such a core-periphery economics can be seen as at least one of the elements disempowering the Ottoman state from its former military and economic strength.
We noted in Chapter 17 John Haldon's (1992) pertinent parallel between the cyclical rise and fall of the Byzantine and the Ottoman Empires: both Empires began with a traditional tax extraction to support a rigidly centralized fiscal and military system, run by a new service elite. But the latter developed rather into a service aristocracy and diverted state resources to its personal fortunes. The rise of the seventeenth-century ayan is paralleled by the tenth-century expansion of the Byzantine regional landed elite, occupying land of the peasants who should have been the free backbone for the army and its economic support. Further parallels involve the tax advantages (capitulations) offered to Western merchants by both Empires, which subverted the strength of the state's economy. Haldon mtriguingly suggests an additional partial parallel, that is attested in the Byzantine case, and seems likely to agree with aspects of the Early Ottoman-era rural community, where the early phase sees a free peasantry in villages only partially integrated into the market, cultivating land offered by the state.
A further element in the Ottoman decline was the rising cost of warfare. Competing with the Christian armies required a larger standing army and rifle regiments. The manpower was increasingly that of mercenaries, owing to  the  declining status and
treedorn of the peasantry, whilst the professional Janissary regiments were allowed to supplement their income, becoming a hereditary elite of city traders and artisans (Lawless 1977). At the same time, from the late sixteenth century the Empire's expansion was stalled by powerful states on various sides, so that it had to invest heavily in profitless wars to maintain its borders to both East and West. The necessary tax rises compounded the state's losses to provincial magnates in surpluses and tax.
The seventeenth-century Ottoman tax records show all too clearly the swift reversal of the prosperity and dense populations of the preceding century. In the Peloponnese for example, when the Venetians briefly reconquered the region from the Ottomans in 1685, they recorded a mere 125,000 people. Although we must allow for deaths and emigration consequent on the war itself, this may well represent the loss of one half of the sixteenth-century Ottoman census figure, and we can reasonably argue that most of the loss was due to long-term demographic decline over the preceding century. For comparison, the 1687 Ottoman tax record for the province of Boeotia (Figute 20.3) serves as a good parallel, when we match it to the map shown earlier for 1570. In a map highly reminiscent of the inferred settlement pattern produced by the fourteenth-century collapse, we see many settlements abandoned, and those which survive reduced dramatically in size, whilst the tax census informs us that most have been converted from semi-autonomous communities paying taxes to support the Ottoman military elite, into ciftliks.The great village of Panaya-VM4, for example, loses two-thirds of its population and is fragmented into a dozen serf-estates.The surface survey of the village appears even more startling: only a handful of sherds were collected in our large sample which were datable to the laterTurkish era.
A contemporary Western Traveler, however, Wheler, writes that by the later seventeenth century the main focus of the Panaya village had been transferred a mere kilometer away to the east, to where its direct successor the modern village of Askra-Panaghia is to be found. The timespan of "Late Turkish" VM4 is thus likely to be very short, as befits its scanty surface record. Nonetheless, as the tax record for this village makes clear, a population collapse and reduction to serfdom are associated with the abandonment of thcVM4 site.
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Tn any case we are fortunate to have for archaeological study three clear examples of deserted Boeotian ciftliks: at the settlement site of Harmena; a much smaller example of just lour longhouscs, end-to-end. within the ancient city of Tanagra; and the nearby deserted village of Guinosati. Most remarkable was the chance discovery by Kiel of a rare late tax record for the Harmena community, an eighteenth-century assessment. Here it is described as a "great ciftlik," and indeed its population is considerable for its era, some 200-300 inhabitants.Wc were interested to see exactly what material conditions were like in such a serf-estate.The ceramic finds from the surface of Harmena are very common and mostly well-made bright glazed wares, rather than cheap homemade coarseware which one might have expected from such a community. On the other hand, none of the more expensive Anatolian or Italian fine wares were found, agreeing with Blake's theory on the declining wealth of the South European peasantry in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (see earlier). On the positive side, however, is the mention in the eighteenth-century tax record of a group of people living in the ciftlik who were there voluntarily, as additional workers, which might hint at conditions which were not entirely unprofitable to the workforce. Even in Boeotia, where the stereotype seventeenth-century decline does appear to be the rule, there were still major achievements, symbolized by the joint discovery by myself and Kiel of a lost great mosque in Thebes (see Chapter 21). Nonetheless, Thebes had shrunk from 8000 to 4000 inhabitants between 1570 and 1642.
The picture we have been building up so far for trends in the Middle Ottoman Mainland should not, nonetheless, be seen as a simple reflection of the rest of the Ottoman Aegean, let alone all the imperial provinces. As both Ottoman history and the beginnings of a regional Ottoman archaeology grow in data and sophistication, we can see that although the general picture portrayed so far holds for large swathes of the Empire, there is significant local variation.Thus in the Near East, some areas had only a limited Early Ottoman florescence, whilst in contrast, in Thessaly Kiel has shown (1996) that in the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries the towns and some village areas remained prosperous and populous.
Vionis' research on the Cyclades in Frankish and Ottoman times, focusing on settlement history, vernacular architecture, and material culture, has also argued that there was an equally flourishing period for most islands in the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries (2005a—b, 2009). Ottoman rule had remained at a distance and Venetian-origin aristocrats and their Greek archontes equivalents retained control over the island peasantry from nucleated towns. The rise of European commerce, chiefly with the West but also with parts of the Ottoman world beyond Greece, stimulated the emergence of a flourishing upper and middle class of merchants and businessmen, drawn both from traditional landed elites and mixed-marriage middle-class townsmen. Cycladic trade and shipping ranged increasingly widely from the seventeenth into the nineteenth centuries and brought prosperity and demographic buoyancy. Davis' (1991) pioneer linking of field survey and late Ottoman-era sources has shown interesting economic and other differences between the inhabitants of nucleated and dispersed settlements in this and the subsequent Early Modern period on the Cyclades.
Venice's control over Crete till the late seventeenth century and of the Ionian Islands till the end of the eighteenth saw a rather similar regime: land control was dominated by major landowners ofVenetian and Greek stock. But here the Venetian state took a far greater interest in its colonies through regular interference in the economy, at times to the advantage or disadvantage of its Greek possessions (Stallsmith 2007). Greek merchants however benefited from theVenetian empire to expand their networks from Crete and the Ionian Islands into the Western world (Braude 1985). The strong state control and meticulous management ofVenetian conquests can also be seen, with its archaeological and landscape evidence, in the recent analysis of the administration of the Navarino district of Messenia during the short-lived Venetian occupation (ca. 1685-1715) of the Peloponnese (Davies 2004).
The Late Turkish Era
Despite these many symptoms of crisis, the Ottoman Empire was weakened but not broken by these successive problems, experiencing a modest recovery
during the eighteenth century. Thus there are signs in tile Ottoman world of a revival of population and economy, together with evidence of some new-directions. In the Peloponnese, for example, the demographic low point of 125,000 inhabitants after the Venetian conquest was made up progressively during the subsequent Ottoman reoccupation, reaching by the Greek War of Independence in 1821 an impressive figure of 400,000 people. Once again, though, the general trend is shared with the rest of Europe, and indeed some of the economic developments are a response to Western stimuli. A famous Mainland Greek example of regional prosperity in this period is presented by the cotton and silk textile villages of the 1 hessalian hill and mountain periphery (Lawless 1977, Petmezas 1990, Kizis 1994), which showed remarkable growth between 1750 and 1815 (see Chapter 21).To avoid the general temptation to attribute this solely to inbuilt ethnic Greek talent we can note that similar foci of productivity are also active in Anatolia and other Ottoman provinces at the same time. These are symptoms of wider growth and investment. Moreover, as Petmezas shows, the decline and collapse of the Thessalian textile centers and other foci elsewhere in the Empire owe most to the growing effectiveness of Western European competition, and the lack of technological development within these industries themselves in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, rather than to the dead hand of Ottoman control. Elsewhere however, it has been argued that Ottoman trade and industry could adapt to encroaching globalization through modifications to their existing practices, with positive long-term effects, as in Syria.
The development of later Ottoman industry has been discussed in the framework of proto-industrialization. This is a concept characterizing the expansion of domestic industries producing goods for non-local markets which took place in many European regions between rhe sixteenth and nineteenth centuries (Ogilvie 1993), was often rural, and lacked advanced technology or centralized factories. Although some see this phenomenon as laying the basis for widespread true industrialization, critics comment that most such experiments rarely succeeded in competing with dominant Western industrial towns. The Greek version appears to fit this scenario.
The long-term effects of such negative internal developments laid the seeds of the ultimate break-up and then demise of the Ottoman Empire. The weakness of the central government increased, in parallel to the rising dominance of the local provincial elites — the regional governors (pashas) and the landowning elite (ayan). These regional magnates, who dominated provincial administration and controlled most of the surplus production, exercised increasingly arbitrary power. By the mid-eighteenth century the ayans were formally charged by the state with regional administration and security, town-provisioning, tax-collection, and the dispatch of troops (Sigalos 2004). Feeding the lucrative demand from Western Europe for agricultural products and raw material for textile production, the larger landowners exported major amounts of regional surpluses illegally, weakening internal supplies and industry. Stimulated by the growing importance of international trade, Balkan merchants likewise sidestepped the moribund and non-entrepreneurial control systems of guilds maintained by the Ottoman state. They obtained rights to deal with foreigners through berats or official permits: these were issued to consuls and ambassadors of foreign powers and then distributed to clients amongst indigenous Christian communities. In any case scholars suggest that a considerable amount of production eluded taxation altogether.
This increase in the "core—periphery" economy, in which the Ottoman world supplied cheap materials in return for expensive manufactures and luxuries from the West, was partly encouraged by the state in order to appease Western Christian nations, who now had the military advantage over their Islamic neighbor. Yet there were some positive signs during this period. Local manufactures could sometimes compete with Western factory products, at least within the Empire, due to cheaper labor and traditional quality skills, as well as through meeting specific local cultural needs. The arrival of maize from the New World during the seventeenth century boosted crop production, being a hardy and flexible plant which expanded the food base. Other novel crops such as cotton, tobacco, and sugar were now being grown widely in the Ottoman provinces and were in high demand in more temperate countries unsuitable for their growth. A vigorous land trade developed between the Balkans
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and Western and Central Europe in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, primarily for wool and cotton, and it was communities in the upland regions of North and Central Greece who came to control much of this (Lawless 1977).The historic mountain-town of Arachova near Delphi, a popular tourist venue today, preserves something of the character of these boom-towns and villages.
The positive picture which is emerging for this era has a downside, because it raised new challenges to the previously beneficial, official mentality of tolerant multiculturalism in the Ottoman world. The Early Empire produced a widely prosperous and satisfied sociery in town and country over most of Greece.The undoing of this system in almost every respect began to encourage two developments of historical importance, but which must be kept separate.
On the one hand, the rising economic and political power of regional elites encouraged them to demand and take a greater political role versus the central government, using the official support of the agents of foreign powers as protection.This led to the development of a prosperous middle and upper class throughout the Aegean region (Lawless 1977). For others, the entire Ottoman system was brought into question, especially as it was magnates and traders within ethnic networks who were asserting their new power and wealth, encouraging them toward concepts of nationalism, inspired by the model of Western nation-state formation. In the case of Greece, the very limited inroads of Islam and a selective adoption of Ottoman culture, taken with the never-extinguished continuity of Greek language and the Orthodox Faith, created a natural stimulus for a revival of Hellenism ("Greek-ness"), as a focus for a potential struggle for ethnic independence. This Hellenic concept was especially cultivated abroad, amongst emigres and Greek commercial networks, where foreign intellectuals and politicians with a Classical education were receptive to the concept of a great nation from Antiquity, now held in chains by an alien and non-Christian power.
Yet the situation on the ground was much more complicated: in the area oi the modern state of Greece a bewildering mix oi populations existed well into the nineteenth century, with major survivals even today. Orthodox Greeks were matched in most regions by
other communities: not just by a minority of genuine Turkish immigrants, but other groups such as the Albanians who had colonized vast areas of the countryside in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, the Slav communities of the north of the country both resident and immigrating from the sixth century through Ottoman times, and the Romanian-speaking Vlachs.There were also other more specialized groups, for example Armenian and Jewish commercial settlers, the latter forming the dominant community in the great city ofThessaloniki. One virtue of the Ottoman system was the deliberate cultivation of multicultural coexistence. European nationalism brought with it many advantages, but with it came an intolerance of groups seen as not belonging to "the nation," a recipe for oppression, expulsion, and even ethnic cleansing. Both Greece and the Balkans, as well as Anatolia, were to experience these forces when the Ottoman Empire eventually broke up into competing and aggressive nationalisms fighting for a share of its territory.
The implications of these historical trends at the local and regional level, would be that we might expect signs of demographic and economic recovery in the eighteenth-century tax records for Boeotia and other Greek provinces, and in the archaeological record. However, as a result of the decay of administrative structures, later Ottoman tax archives are less plentiful and more summary, with correction factors required for inadequate recording and tax evasion. Nonetheless the limited records for Boeotia, supplemented by Ottoman figures reported by Western Travelers, do indeed suggest a rise in village populations above the seventeenth-century nadir. A clearer sign of a growing prosperity amongst the middle and upper class comes from the study of domestic housing in Aegean towns, and to a lesser extent in the country, as Sigalos' recent overview (2004) reveals.
Inexorable outside forces were nonetheless undermining the Ottoman Empire's capability of holding together as the Modern World began to form: the long rise of capitalism and global trade, industrialization and commercial farming, radical changes in the administration of states,in educationand citizenship,all were impacting into the provinces and major cities of the Empire out of its ever-increasing interactions with Western European countries. A state-within-a-state had already
developed with themexus of magnates and merchants in close contact with this wider world, economically, socially, and often politically. The constraints of Ottoman regulations and its obviously declining competitiveness in every sphere forced government programs of internal reform, with varying degrees of success.
Modernizing the army, experiments in parliamentary democracy, radical overhauling of the education system, and increased opening-up of markets to global trade, were carried out by the Ottoman Empire, but the results were imbalanced (McCarthy 1997). The wide support for Westernization in sociopolitical and economic affairs was contrasted with a related feeling oi growing nationalism amongst the ethnic and religious communities whose continued existence and self-awareness had formerly been one of the sustaining strengths holding the Empire together. Would the Ottoman State modernize to its citizens' satisfaction, before the alternative road to self-improvement offered by its fragmentation into independent nations won through? Western powers were likewise in two minds about these options. A pliant, weak Ottoman state provided optimal conditions for profitable exploitation by Western traders, bankers, and factory-owners, whilst a mosaic of struggling new nation-states might provoke wars amongst themselves and between the Great Powers.The Napoleonic conquests with their superficial yet effective promotion of freedom from tyranny, and the wide appeal amongst European Enlightenment and then Romantic writers and intellectuals for human rights and ethnic traditions, had energized large sectors of Aegean and Balkan society into a desire to attain greater freedoms. For most, it seems, change was certainly long-needed and desirable, but to be sought through radical reform of the Ottoman state. It was probably still only a minority who envisaged change through revolutionary uprising and the creation of new nation-states.
The Greek Revolution ofT821-1830 was a victory for the nationalists, followed through the rest of that century and into the first two decades of the twentieth by the break-up into new nation-states of the rest of the Ottoman world. Even the Turkish populations in the heartlands of Anatolia and the hinterland regions of the capital Istanbul were led to turn their backs on everything Ottoman political and social culture had
stood for, being refocused by their charismatic leader Kemal Ataturk into a newly-createdTurkish nationalist and secular state. However it was merely Southern Greece (without Crete and the Ionian Islands) which formed the new Greek state in 1832: other parts of the country only gradually left Ottoman control (Color Plate 22.1) over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Late Ottoman Rural Life
The increasingly detailed reports of Western Travelers, from the late seventeenth century onwards, matched by maps and pictures appended to their travelogues, and enhanced from the late nineteenth century through photographic records (such as those preserved in the "phototheques" of the French and German Schools in Athens), can be combined with the Ottoman archives to build up an overall picture of town and village life during the Late Ottoman era and the first few generations of the independent Greek state. In fact the quality of historical geographical information reaches an unsurpassed peak during the early to late nineteenth century, when teams such as the French scientific expeditions to South and Central Greece record not only the characteristics of contemporary settlement, but also document deserted village locations. The latter are extremely valuable for locating settlements mentioned in Ottoman tax records and the Travelers.
Machiel Kiel's rich presentation (1996) of the detailed archival evidence forThessaly finds no support for the idea that the lowlands were largely abandoned m later Ottoman times by Greek peasants fleeing oppression; instead he suggests that there is rather a trend for Greek upland inhabitants to migrate to the lowlands, where Muslim villages had low birth rates compared to neighboring Christian villages. The new-archival and topographical researches in Messema by the PPvAP Project, coordinated by Jack Davis, are also beginning to document the rural realities behind the rather black and white picture offered by Western Travelers, providing already significant corrections to the scenario they indicate (Bennet ct at 2000, Zarinebaf et al. 2005). Boeotia, after the significant population
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decline and relocation phase of the seventeenth century, discussed earlier, sees stability in surviving inland villages till the next phase of disruption caused by the early nineteenth-century War of Independence. But in coastal areas piracy appears to have led villages to adopt inland locations or more hidden, defensive plans (Forbes 2000), and certainly Eastern Boeotia becomes noticeably depopulated due to piracy and banditry in Late Ottoman into Early Modern times. However it appears that a more important change occurred in the later nineteenth century, when rural insecurity in the early Greek state caused nucleation of many villages and a final phase of abandonments. Finally, as already noted, the often oppressive ciftlik estates of this era were concentrated in the major plains of Greece, contrasted with more prosperous independent village societies in the uplands (particularly where textile industries were focused), and with commercial communities on the coasts and on key communication routes inland where a new economic boom was visible (Sigalos 2004,Vionis 2005a).
I have elsewhere argued (Bintliff 1995, 2000) that for South-Central Mainland Greece we can now identify at least three major transitions in rural village dynamics. The first is that great decline and recoloni-zadon documented for Late Frankish and Early Ottoman times, which leads into a flourishing period of very numerous and populous rural settlements during the sixteenth-century Pax Ottomanica. The second is a more drawn-out process in which village numbers and village size generally decline, over the seventeenth to later nineteenth centuries (with localized recovery in the eighteenth century), the result of military and socio-economic problems (probably also climatic), resulting in a thinner spread of villages. But villages then blossom into substantial size in the last third of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. We do know that other regions of Greece and indeed of the wider Ottoman Empire vary considerably in the timing of their cycles of growth, stagnation or decline, and although many do follow this broad pattern, many clearly have out-of-phase cycles to this scheme. Such variability offers essential material for clarifying the historical processes at work in regional trajectories, as I have suggested for regional diversity in the Greco-Roman Aegean (Bmtliff 1997). Comparisons and contrasts with parts
of the Aegean under Venetian rule, especially those passing from Ottoman to Venetian rule and vice-versa given the often fine detail given by Venetian archival sources, are already revealing fascinating insights into such processes (Davies and Davis 2007).
Nonetheless the archaeological evidence for lowland Mainland Greece matches the evidence of Western Travelers and sporadic archival sources, to offer a picture of a poor and downtrodden peasantry largely trapped within a tied-tenant or share-cropping system, contrasted to wealthy landowners and merchants exploiting their labor (Lawless 1977).
Late Ottoman Town Life
We have seen the evidence for localized urban growth in the coastal towns and upland regions of Greece for this era. Noting the rise of a more independent, indigenous species of middle-class merchants, shippers, financiers, and proto-industrialists in such towns and large villages, we can add that the decentralization of power and wealth from the capital to the provinces further stimulated the flourishing of such lesser centers. The proliferation of urban mansions, imitating Ottoman styles inside and out, as well as Western fashions in interior house design and personal dress, merged together to emphasize the internationalization of the rising Greek bourgeoisie (Sigalos 2004, Vionis 2005a, 2009). Owing to the early rise in the Southern Mainland of the independent Greek state and its understandable rejection of all things Ottoman in the aftermath of the bloody Revolutionary War, little remains there to reflect this phase of Greek town life, whereas in the North of the Mainland the later incorporation into the Greek state allowed much more to survive till today (Sigalos 2004).
Nonetheless Athens, the goal of numerous Travelers and Western artists during this period, is sufficiently recorded to allow us a view of the later Ottoman town (Camp 2001). Increasing insecurity from both pirates and foreign invaders led the governor to rewall the lower town in 1778, Hadrian's Arch becoming one of its gates. Hadrian's Library was used as the basis for the governor's residence. The Acropolis had a garrison and an associated upper town covered its surface (see this book's cover). The Parthenon's mosque was
Figure 20.4 Eighteenth-century Ottoman complex behind the Tower of the Winds, Athens, in the early nineteenth century.
Painting from Theodore de Moncel, Vues pittoresques des monuments d'A tlwies. Paris 1845. © 2011 The British Library Board. All rights reserved. 648.a.28.
rebuilt after its predecessor had been destroyed with much of the ancient temple during the seventeenth-century Venetian bombardment. A sad reflection of the modern city's continuing failure to come to terms with all its rich past is the following encounter made by the author in 2010: if you visit the fine Hellenistic Tower of the Winds in the Roman Agora, a solid fence: and an entrance ticket lead you to a well-conserved and presented ancient monument. But stand outside that fence and turn around 180 degrees and across the road stands a fragmentary ruined eighteenth-century Ottoman gateway of considerable refinement, and associated ruins: bushes grow from it. it is unfenced and unmarked and its days are surely numbered. It has long been identified as an Islamic religious school (medrese) from 1721 (Travlos 1993) (Figures 20.4 and 20.5).
A much more sensitive attitude appears in an article by Pallis (2006) on the Athenian rural suburb Kifisia and its Ottoman monuments. He describes its use as a summer retreat for Athenian lurks, with mosques, a religious school, bathhouse, travelers' hostel, country residences, and other features, while regretting the late nineteenth-century atmosphere of ultra-Hellenism in which all these buildings were demolished.
Figure   20.5   Eighteenth-century   Ottoman complex behind the Tower of the Winds, Athens, today. Author.
Ceramics of the Ottoman-Venetian Era
John Hayes has been the crucial pathfinder in the development of a detailed study of complete Ottoman ceramic assemblages, in the Bodrum Camii and Saracane excavation reports (Hayes 1981, 1992), updating pioneer studies of decorated tablewares from urban excavations in Athens (Waage 1933, Frantz 1942). Inspired by Hayes' subsequent work for a number of Greek survey projects are recent studies by Vroom (1998, 2003, 2007) and Vionis (2005a-b, 2006b, 2009). Venetian-dominated regions have not had such attention, so that MacKay (1996) remarks in a study of a small group of Italian majolica imports from Crete that even publishing such poorly-provenanced finds marks an innovation.
Domestic and coarse wares do not change so dramatically between Medieval and post-Medieval times in Greece until the nineteenth century, although current research is identifying trends through the Ottoman era, and regional variants. We confine ourselves here to the decorated wares, wjiich now become a steadily growing percentage of the assemblage. We already noted a steady rise in Byzantine to Frankish times in glazed ware representation, but Hayes pinpointed a later enhancement in Istanbul Ottoman-era assemblages: they comprise 35—40 percent for Early Ottoman, but 60—80 percent for Late Ottoman. In rural Greece however, the percentage of glazed wares
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remains at 30 percent in both eras (Vionis 2006b). Glazing, usually directly onto the clay except for tablewares, was now being applied to almost all kinds of household pots. This had functional value, creating impermeability and easier cleaning, but may have equally served to imitate metal vessels, thus to enhance the pottery's attractiveness. However some containers become less visible: after the recognizable amphorae series of Byzantine times, it appears that much of the transport containers from Frankish through Ottoman times w~ere shifting to wooden barrels. Finally, in Europe and the Islamic world, there is a widespread shift to metalware for the kitchen, tableware, and work assemblages, which for the vast bulk of the population meant ironware and pewter (very rarely surviving till today in archaeological contexts, but common in Folklore Museums). The imbalance of ceramic assemblages in terms of quantity and forms may be a guide to these missing elements, and a good start can be made as with earlier eras through study of contemporary art (icons and travelers' illustrations), where both contemporary and biblical scenes are portrayed with current household items (Vroom 2003, Vionis 2005a, 2009). An icon from Zakynthos shows that by the seventeenth century pewter tableware was a major replacement item for ceramics (Mylonas 1998, figure 22).
Pottery styles as often do not change with key historical events, and the first relevant, widespread Aegean assemblage is characterized as Late Frankish-EarlyTurkish (fourteenth to sixteenth centuries). The three commonest styles are:
1. Brown and Green Sgraffito late thirteenth to seventeenth century, wide careless incised decoration, especially with brown and green splashes (Color Plate 20.3b).
2. Proto-Majolica, tin-glazed polychrome, Southern Italian product, late twelfth to early fifteenth century.
3. Archaic Majolica, tin-glazed painted and sgraffito-decorated. Northern Italian product, thirteenth to seventeenth century.
At the late Frankish-Venetian town of Kephalos on Faros (Vionis 2006a), distributional studies suggest that the Lower Town and its peasants possessed local Late Sgraffito wares, whilst the elite of the Upper Town were owners of more expensive Italian majolica imports.
In the following but also overlapping Early to Middle Ottoman era the major tablewares are:
1.   Local Majolica, Italian influenced, especially blue and white, also polychrome, associated with the
app
earance   of distinctive trefoil-mouth
jugs,
fifteenth to eighteenth century (Color Plate 20.3b).
2. Late Sgraffito, includes trefoil jugs, with blue and green splashes, fifteenth to eighteenth century.
3. A high-quality blue and white, or polychrome, painted white paste ware from Iznik in Northwest Turkey, sixteenth to seventeenth century (Color Plate 20.2a).
For the Late Ottoman eighteenth century, cheaper and less elaborate painted earthenware tableware from Kiitahya, also in Northwest Turkey (Color Plate 20.2b), is accompanied by finer majolica tablewares from Italy, for example Pesaro (Color Plate 20.3a), which seem made specifically for the Aegean markets (including some with Greek inscriptions). As just noted, over time more and more non-tableware vessels are monochrome-glazed.
Coffee-drinking spread from Ethiopia to Yemen and then took off in popularity throughout the Ottoman empire from the sixteenth century, with its typical drinking-cups (Lewis 1995). Another type-fossil of Ottoman times is the clay tobacco pipe with a molded clay bowl (chibouk-style), likewise spreading through the empire from the end of the sixteenth century; its typology has been analyzed to allow pipes to form a significant dating tool (Robinson 1985, Humphrey 2009).
Following Blake (1980), Italian rural impoverishment for the sixteenth to early eighteenth centuries, a consequence of economic decline and political stagnation, was marked by cheap slip-coated wares being the best quality obtained. In the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries this improved (renewed penetration in quantity of exotic glazed wares but from Western and regional factories), culminating in what has generally been recognized as a Mediterranean-wide boom for rural society in the final decades of the nineteenth century, within the framework of an increasingly integrated capitalist and commercial, export-oriented agricultural economy in which Greek rural society plays its part. In Greece Blake's
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first era contrasts th£ rising wealth of the merchant and landowning class in towns and proto-industrial villages, against the continuing poverty of peasant life in the lowland farming settlements till the demise of the tied-labor system and other major improvements over the course of the nineteenth century. Only initial evidence for peasant villages is available, such as that from deserted later Ottoman ciftliks in Boeotia (Vionis 2006b), but the cheap glazed wares normal till the later nineteenth century suit the continuing use of traditional longhouscs and the literary accounts for peasant impoverishment (as predicted by Blake's (1980) model). On the Cyclades, however, the rise of a prosperous international town-based Greek merchant class with continued cultural links to Italy results in a different picture, with the widespread dispersal of late majolicas and other Italian tablewares from the seventeenth century onwards.
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Kiel, M. (1997). "The rise and decline of Turkish Boeotia, 15th-19th century.'' Inj.L.BintlifT (ed.),Recent Developments
in the History and Archaeology of Central Greece. Oxford:
BAR Int. Series 666, 315-358. Kizis, G. (1994). PiHoreitiki oikodomia. Athens: Politistiko
Technologiko Idrima ETBA. Ladurie, E. L. R. (1966). Les Paysans de Languedoc. Paris:
Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. Ladurie, E.L.R. and J. Goy (1982). Tithe and Agrarian History
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and Paris: Cambridge University Press / Editions de la
Maison des Sciences de FHomme. Lawless, R. I. (1977). "The economy and landscapes of
Thessaly during Ottoman rule." In F. Carter (ed.), An
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Press, 501-532. Lewis, B. (1995). The Middle East London: Weidenfeld &
Nicolson.
McCarthy, J. (1997). The Ottoman Turks. London: Addison
Wesley Longman. MacKay.T. S. (1996)."A group of Renaissance pottery from
Heraklion, Crete: Notes and questions." In P. Lock arid
G.D.R. Sanders (eds.), The. Archaeology of Medieval Greece.
Oxford: Oxbow, 127-137. McKec, S. (2000). Uncommon Dominion: Venetian Crete and
the Myth of Ethnic Purity. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press. Mackenzie, M. (1992). 'lurkish Athens. Reading: Ithaca Press. Malliaris, A. (2007). "Population exchange and integration,
1687—1715." In S. Davies and J. L. Davis (eds.), Between
Venice and Istanbul. Colonial Landscapes in Early Modern
Greece. Athens: American School of Classical Studies,
Hespena Supplement 40, 97-109. Mouzakis, S. A. (2008). Myloi ke diamorphosi pheoudarchikou
dtkaiou sti ditiki, byzantini ke othomaniki oikonomia ke koino-
nia. Athens: Epimeleia Epislimoriike Etaireia Attikon
Meleton.
Mylonas, Z. A. (1998). Mouseio Zakynthou. Athens: Ministry of Culture.
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Continuity and Change 8, 159-179. Pallis, G. (2006). "Ta othomanika mnimia tis Kiphisias."
Athens Annals in Art and Archaeology 39, 229-240. Petmezas, S. D. (1990). "Patterns of protoindustrializatipn
in the Ottoman Empire. The case of Eastern Thessaly,
ca. 1750-1860." Journal of European Economic History 19,
575-603.
Rabb,T. K. (1975). The Struggle for Stability in Early Modem
Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Robinson, R. C.W (1985). "Tobacco pipes of Corinth and
of the Athenian Agora." Hesperia 54. 149-203. Sigalos, E. (2004). Housing in Medieval and Post-Medieval
Greece. Oxford: BAR Int. Series 1291.
Sphiroeras, V, A. Awamea, and S. Asdrachas (1985). Charles ke chartographoi touAigaiou pelagous. Athens: Olkos.
Stallsnnth, A. B. (2007). "One colony, two mother cities: Cretan agriculture under Venetian and Ottoman rule." In S. Davies and J. L. Davis (eds.), Between Venice and Istanbul. Colonial Landscapes in Early Modern Greece. Athens: American School of Classical Studies, Hespena Supplement 40, 151-171.
Tolias, G. (1999). The Greek Portolan Charts. Athens: Olkos.
Travlos, J. (1993). Poleodomiki exelixis ton A thin on. Athens; Ekdoseis Kapon ke Angeliki Kokkou.
Triposkoufi, A. and A. Tsitouri (eds.) (2002). Venetians and Knights Hospitallers. Military Architecture Networks. Athens: Hellenic Ministry of Culture.
Tsigakou, F. M. (1981). The Rediscovery of Greece. London: Thames & Hudson.
Vionis.A. K. (2004-2005)."The Medieval and post-Medieval pottery and Tanagra village-history." In BintlitT, J. L. et ah, "The Tanagra project: investigations at an ancient city and its countryside (2000-2002)." Bulletin de Correspondance Hellenique 128—129, 541—606.
Vionis, A. K. (2005a). " 'Crusader' and 'Ottoman' material life: Built environment and domestic material culture in the Medieval and post-Medieval Cyclades Islands, Greece (c,13th-20th [centuries] AD)." University of Leiden, PhD thesis. Faculty of Archaeology.
Vionis.A. K. (2005b).'Domestic material culture and post-Medieval archaeology in Greece: A case-study of the Cyclades Islands." Journal oj the Society for Post-Medieval Archaeology 39,172-185.
Vionis, A. (2006a)."The thirteenth-sixteenth-century kastro of Kephalos:A contribution to the archaeological study of Medieval Paros and the Cyclades." Annual of the British School at Athens 101, 459-492.
Vionis,A, (2006b)."The archaeology of Ottoman villages in central Greece: Ceramics, housing and everyday life in post-medieval Boeotia." In A. Erkanal-Oktu et al. (eds.), Studies in Honor of Hayat Erkanal: Cultural Reflections. Istanbul: Homer Kitabevi, 784-800.
Vionis.A. (2009). "Material culture studies: The case of the Medieval and post-Medieval Cyclades, Greece (c.AD 1200-1800)." Inj. Bindiffand H. Stöger (eds.), Medieval, and Post-Medieval Greece. The Corfu Papers. Oxford: BAR Int. Series 2023, 177-197.
Vroom, J. (1998). "Early Modern archaeology in Central Greece: The contrast oi artefact-rich and sherdless sites." Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 11,131—164.
Vroom, J. (1999). "Medieval and post-Medieval pottery from a site in Boeotia: A case-study example of post-Classical archaeology in Greece." Annual of the British School at Athens 92,513-546.
Vroom, J. (2003). After Antiquity. Ceramics and Society in the Aegean from the 7th to the 20th Century A.C. Leiden: Leiden University Archaeological Studies 10.
Vroom,J. (2007)."Kutahya between the lines:Post-Medieval ceramics as historical information." In S. Davies and J. L. Davis (eds.). Between Venice and Istanbul: Colonial Landscapes in Early Modern Greece. Athens: American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Hesperia Supplement 40,70-93.
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Zarinebaf, F.,J. Bennet, and J. L. Davis (2005). A Historical and Economic Geography of Ottoman Greece.The Southwestern Morea in the 18th Century. Athens: American School of Classical Studies, Hesperia Supplement 34.
Further Reading
Athanassopoulos, E. F. (1997). "Landscape archaeology of Medieval and pre-Modern Greece: The case of Nemea." In P.N. Kardulias and M.T Sliutes (eds.), Aegean Strategics. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 79-105.
Aymard, M. (1982). "From feudalism to capitalism in Italy: The case that doesn't fit." Review 6(2), 131—208.
Baram,U and L. Carroll (eds.) (2000)./! Historical Archaeology oj the Ottoman Umpire Breaking New Ground. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum.
Bcrktay, H. and S. Faroqhi (eds.) (1991). New Approaches to State and Peasant in Ottoman History. Journal of Peasant Studies 18(3-4) special issue.
BintlifT, J. L. (1997). "The archaeological investigation of deserted medieval villages in Greece." In G. de Boe and F. Verhaege (eds.), Rural Settlements in Medieval Europe. Zellik: Archaeological Institute for the Heritage, 21-34.
BintlifT, J. L. and A. M. Snodgrass (1988). "Mediterranean survey and the city." Antiquity 62,57-71.
BintlitT, J. L. el al. (2000). "Deconstructing 'the sense of place'? Settlement systems, field survey and the historic-record: A case-study from Central Greece." Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 66,123-1 49.
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BintlifF, J. L. et al. (2001). "The Leiden Ancient Cities of Boeotia Project: Preliminary report on the 2001 season." Pharos. Journal of the Netherlands Institute in Athens 9, 33-74.
Bommelje,Y. and P. Doom (1996). "The long and winding road: Land routes in Aetolia (Greece) since Byzantine times." In H. Kamcrmans and K. Fennema (eds.), Interfacing the Past. Leiden: Analecta Prachistoric.i Leidensia 28, 343-351.
Cherry, J. F., J. C. Davis, and £. Mantzourani (1991). Landscape Archaeology as Long-Term History. Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, University of California.
Dunn, A. (2009). "Byzantine and Ottoman maritime traffic in the estuary of the Strymon." In J. BintlifFand H. Stöger (eds.), Medieval and Post-Medieval Grcece.Tlw Corfu Papers. Oxford:BAR Int. Series 2023,15-31.
Harrison, P (1993). "Castles and fortresses of the Peloponnese." Fortress 17, 2-20.
Hiitterotli.W (1975)."The pattern of settlement in Palestine in the sixteenth century.'1 In M. Maoz (ed.), Studies on Palestine during the Ottoman Period. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 3-10.
Jochalas.T. (1 971). "Über die Einwanderung der Albaner in Griechenland." Beiträge zur Kenntnis Südosteuropas und des Nahen Orients 13,89-106.
Mazower, M. (2004). Salonika, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jeu's 1430-1950. London: Harper Collins.
Rackham.O.andJ. Moody (1996). The Making of the Cretan Landscape. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Stedman, N. (1996). "Land-use and settlement in post-medieval central Greece: An interim discussion." In P. Lock and G. D. R. Sanders (eds), The Archaeology of Medieval Greece. Oxford: Oxbow, 179-192.
Vionis, A. K. (2001). "Post-Roman pottery unearthed: Medieval ceramics and pottery research in Greece." Medieval Ceramics 25, 84-98.
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Material Culture, the Built Environment, and Society in Ottoman and Venetian Greece
Domestic Housing in the Post-Medieval Era
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, ciftlik 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 (hey). Megas (1951) was a folklorist who
Tile 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.
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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 shecpfolds (mandres). The greatest contribution has been the multi-authored series of "Greek Traditional Architecture" (Phihppides 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 arc 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.'! he 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 (Lcc 2001) and Venetian-Ottoman military architecture (Davies 2004), and the latter topic with an overview of major Greek sites is well presented in Iriposkoufi and Tsitouri (2002). Our own Boeotia Project made early progress with town, village, and house plans (Stedman 1996, Bintlifl 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 oflndependence. On Crete the long Venetian 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 (half-story) 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).
Urban Planning and House Forms in Ottoman Times
Ottoman towns in the Balkans were typified by their division into ethnic or religious quarters (machaladesI 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 casde 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,
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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, governors 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). But Venetian 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 ciftlik 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-r/fea).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-Venctian" 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 of Ottoman 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, cither 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 (sahtiisia) 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 (mousandrcs) 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 Ioannina 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 whiter (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 ui 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 m 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 exnamural 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
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Figure 21.1   Town house in Toannina.
E. Sigalos. Mousing 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, hut we can admire the modern initiative of the city of Thessaloniki in conserving its fifteenth-century covered market {Bedcstan), still in use, and its restoration of a splendid contemporary bath-house (the Bey Hamami) (Kourkoutidou-Nikolaidou andTourta 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,Vioms 2001, 2005, 2009). The largest collection of pre-nineteenth-century West European-inspired public and private buildings in Greece he 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 plairs 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 (Binthff 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 mihtary-admiiiistrative 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 of modern 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 Tabachna. 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 throe-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 out-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 semi-public 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
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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 e( 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 onc-and-a-haff-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 Grcccc,Venetian Crete gave rise to a lively production of the arts, including literature and painting: the star product was Domemkos 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 ofWcstcrn 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 mihtary element in suggesting
Figure 21.3 The Venetian-era monastic church at Arcadi, Crete.
Shutterstock Images/Paul Cowan.
Figure   21.4   Scvcntccnth-century Venetian palace in
Corfu (The Nobles'Lounge).
Author.
that the prevalence of multi-story terraced house-blocks,reminiscent of modern 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 Pcloponnese 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.
Vernacular Housing in the Countryside
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 post-Ottoman 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 die Skourta Plam,Dimitsantou-Kremezi
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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 "proto-industrial" 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 ciftliks 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 ciftlik, consisting of four long-houses end-to-end associated with a restricted scatter of domestic ceramics of seventeenth- to eighteenth-century age (Bintliffet al. 2004-2005). No controlling
Figure 21.5   Ottoman-period painting of a riftlik 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 ciftlik" 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 ciftliks 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,
OTTOMAN AND VENETIAN CULTURE AND SOCIETY
469
probably for storage of the estate's produce. At another deserted Boeotia ciftlik, Guinosati, a likely controlling tower has also been identified amid dispersed long-houses (Vioms 2006, 2008).
A further ciftlik studied archaeologically is die 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 ciftliks, is provided by Lawless (1977). In Epirus the pre-Ottoman fortress of Ragion appears to have been resettled as a ciftlik (Preka-Alexandri 1988), with a series of single-story 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 (onias), 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 Kytiiera till the eighteenth saw elaborate rural estate-centers m
t       *      > r~
Figure 21.6a Ottoman-period rural elite mansion: towerhouse type, Lesbos.
E. Sigalos, Housing in Medieval and Post-Medieval Greece. Oxford 2004, Figure 18.
I
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
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47 1
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 mid-nineteenth 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. F,. 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 post-Medieval 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 downscal-ing of social aspiration and perhaps wealth (lnce 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 (seeText Box).
A very different case study is that of the largely infertile, remote maritime peninsula of Mam in the Peloponnese (Saitas 1990, 2009). Isolated from easy contact with the wider world and with hunted resources, its inhabitants developed specific adaptations to such conditions. Competition for scarce agro-pastoral 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 dear (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 Ncoclassicism.
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wayside travelers' hostels. They have recently been mapped by the Dutch Aetolia Project in the rugged uplands of Aetolia (North-Central Greece) (Bommelje and Doom 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 Pcloponnese (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).
Religious, Military, and Other Public Architecture
We already noted the rare survival of Ottoman mosques in much of Greece. But there is much to be done in researching written and pictorial records of lost examples, where often it is possible to discover Ottoman records referring to their foundation or maintenance (Kiel 2002). One such example I discovered in the background of an icon of Saint John the Baptist from Thebes. Our Boeotia Project Ottoman archivist, Machiel Kiel, also specializes in architecture and has published this lost monument (Kiel 1999), based on this image, attributing it to the 1660s and classing it, with a very similar mosque in Athens, as a major provincial imitation of the great imperial mosques of Istanbul.
The prosperity of the Ottoman Aegean in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the more restricted wealth of parts of the Greek population in the seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries, arc manifested not merely in mansions in town and country, but also in the patronage of Orthodox churches and monasteries. It has sometimes been claimed that "Byzantine Art," relying as it did on Byzantine imperial and elite
patronage, would have virtually disappeared with the takeover of the Ottomans. A small proportion of churches were indeed taken over and converted to mosques by the Ottomans, in part to meet the urgent need for places of Islamic worship for the conquerors, as well as (in the case of prestige churches such as Aghia Sophia in Constantinople) to demonstrate the victory of Islam. However in keeping with traditional Islamic tolerance of other ethnic and religious communities, most were not just allowed to continue as places for Christian worship, but could be rebuilt or founded throughout the Ottoman era (cf. Vocotopoulos 1984). In a few cases wc know that Ottoman financial support was provided for church repair or construction, whilst religious institutions of all faiths were given tax privileges. It can also be shown that at the major churches and monasteries there can be found impressive works of art from the Ottoman centuries. Thus on Mount Athos (Cormack 2000) the sixteenth century witnessed great buildings and art and many of the most accomplished Greek artists went to work there.
Bouras (2006) argues however that there is a contrast between the Early to Middle, and then Late, Ottoman eras. In the former the tax-privileged rural monasteries erected large well-decorated churches in traditional Middle Byzantine styles (although paintings can be in contemporary fashion, such as the Cretan School), whilst Mainland towns sec small monuments inhibited by the dominant Islamic atmosphere. Additionally the countryside sees a proliferation of small public churches donated by local Greek elites, who may be commemorated in the paintings (notably in Epirus and the Pindos uplands), doubtless a reflection of the wide level of rural prosperity. In the Venetian possessions in Greece, Renaissance and later Baroque church architecture entirely displaces Byzantine traditions and reflects a wider Italianlzation in lifestyle.The standard design for Venetian areas is an aisled basilica with prominent facades, highly ornamented in carved stone and plaster (Figure 21.3). For the Cyclades, a more hybrid culture creates churches where older Italian Gothic styles mix with Byzantine and Italian Renaissance influences. Nonetheless a unitary trend in both Ottoman- and Venetian-controlled regions is for great attention to be given to grand wooden altar screens with inset icons.
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For Late Ottoman times, from 1700 into the nineteenth century, Bouras argues for Ottoman Greece that monasteries continue to be well endowed by wealthy Orthodox elites and retain traditional Byzantine architectural traditions. For Mount Athos notable sponsors are the Greek elite in Istanbul (the Phanariots) and in the Ottoman Danubian provinces. Very different is an explosion of new rural churches which almost completely abandon Byzantine forms and combine influences from popular architecture, Venetian design, Ottoman "Baroque" ornament, and a perhaps conscious revival of Early Christian plans.The standard design is a large three-aisled, wood-roofed basilica and is particularly to be found in the proliferation of substantial village churches which replace the often small domed monuments preceding them. The taste for carved and painted wood shows clear influences from the contemporary mansions of local elites (archontika), who usually funded such new communal foci (wealthy merchants, shippers, and landowners). Naturally some of the finest examples are found in the most flourishing economic foci such as eighteenth-century Mount Pelion and the island of Lesbos.
Till very recently; the military architecture of the Ottoman Aegean has been barely researched. It had long been clear that many castles and towers, and in some cases urban walls, of Byzanrine-Frankish-Venetian foundation continued in use and were modified during Ottoman times. Ottoman archives are full of details of the maintenance of such installations. Much valuable work could be done on the Ottoman constructional evidence at Greek fortifications, although one has to admit that little has been published to modern recording standards for earlier phases of these monuments, with the standard books and articles on Greek castles remaining remarkably vague on questions of phasing (Andrews 2006 [1953]). Promising developments can now be show-cased: the recent detailed tower- and castle-recording of Frankish fortifications in Greece (Lock 1986, Gregory 1996), study of the Ottoman phase of the castle at Mytilene (Karidis and Kiel 2002,Williams 2009), the Messeman PRAP Project's textual and architectural analysis of Navarino castle (Zarinebaf a ah 2005), and initiatives such as the Archi-Med Pilot Action (Triposkoufi andTsitouri 2002).
Finally port facilities have been approached inno-vatively by the Strymon Valley Survey in Macedonia (Dunn 2009). As has also been shown in Thessaly (Reinders and Prummel 2003), an Ottoman-era decline in port-towns occurred to the advantage of land routes, but nonetheless coastal warehouse facilities existed of major importance for the imperial grain supply and for the private export of ciftlik commercial products in the later Ottoman era.
Material Culture in the Middle to Late Ottoman Era
The artifactual reflection of the table manners of Ottoman Greece arc 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
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Figure 21.9   Interior of a peasant single-story longhouse (makrimri) 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. Diniitsantou-Kremezi, Attiki. F.llilliki paradosiaki architektoniki. Athens 1984, Figure 49.
domestic furnishings (divans,sofas, carpets) withWestern decor (paintings, stucco) (PhiHppides 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).
An Annates Perspective
As we noted earlier, scholars such as Haldon (1992) have noted the parallelism between the Byzantine and Ottoman empires, whose flourishing then decline in the medium term can be linked to weakening of the central state and devolution to self-aggrandizing local elites. A further parallel to the fate of the Byzantine state can be found in the increasing role of capitalist intervention emanating from Western Europe, reducing the self-sufficiency of Ottoman commerce and industry. The rise and fall of a prosperous peasantry is also matched. The short term is most striking in the unexpected Ottoman conquest of Crete in the seventeenth century, placing the island on a very different trajectory to that of the Ionian Islands which remained in the West European developmental mode.
In contrast, the shcTrt-lived contemporary Venetian occupation of the Peloponnese seems to have had few long-lasting effects. On the longer term, the favorable environment for ethnic entreprcneurship within the Ottoman Empire led by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to a widespread class of Greek businessmen, with networks in both East and West. Greeks played a key role in international finance and religious culture throughout Christian Europe and the Ottoman Balkans and Middle East, through their cultural influence and personal diaspora (migration). Ironically, the price that the Greek people were to pay for the birth of their independent state in the nineteenth century, was a drastic and permanent shrinkage of this commercial and cultural world (Kamusella 2009).
A PersonalView
The Ottoman era in Greece is a long period, for which the archaeological evidence now appears to be abundant, at least in the countryside. More willing hands are needed to exploit the innumerable deserted villages with their surface pottery scatters and ruined houses. In the towns, continual redevelopment should offer many opportunities to study houses and everyday life (recent examples include rescue excavations in Thebes and research excavation in Ancient Corinth), even though specialists in the material are still just a handful of scholars. With a growing, if unsteady, rapprochement between the modern Greek and Turkish states, scholarly interest within Greece amongst historians and archaeologists is progressing. One looks forward to the day when the sherds and walls of the Ottoman period are integrated into a full respect for the entire multi-ethnic and multi-faith societies that it included, and in which the texts consulted are not just the tax records but the poetry and personal writings of the Ottoman intellectuals and (multicultural) ruling elites.
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Further Reading
Bintliff, J. L. (2000). "Reconstructing the Byzantine countryside: New approaches from landscape archaeology." Tn K. Blelkc et al. (cds.), Byzanz als Raum. Wien: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 37-63.
Blake, H. (1980)."Technolog)', supply or demand?" Medieval Ceramics 4, 3-1 2.
Harper, R. P. and D. Pringle (eds.) (2000). Belmont Castle. The Excavation of a Crusader Stronghold in the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jardine, L. (1996). Worldly Goods. A New History of the Renaissance. London: Macmillan.
Kezer, Z. (1996). "The making of a nationalist capital: Socio-spatial practices in early Republican Ankara." Built Environment 22,124-137.
Kiel, M. (1990). Studies on the Ottoman Architecture of the Balkans. Aldershot: Variorum.
Kiel,M. (1996). "Das türkische Thessalien." In R. Lauer and P. Schremer (eds.), Die Kultur Griechenlands in Mittelalter und Neuzeit. Abhandlungen der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen. Philologisch-historische Klasse, Dritte Folge 212, 109-196.
Lcc, M. et al. (1992). "Mainluk caravanserais in Galilee." Levant 24, 55-94.
Marzolff, P. (2006). "Lechonia. Ein mediterranes Schicksal.' In Doron. Timitikos tomos ston Kathiyiti Niko Nikonano. Thessaloniki: 10th Ephoreia of Byzantine Antiquities, 89-99.
Petersen, A. (1998)."Qalat Ras al-Ayn: A sixteenth century
Ottoman fortress." Levant 30,97-112. Vroom, J. (1996). "Coffee and archaeology. A note on a
Kutahya Ware find in Boeotia. Greece." Pharos, journal of
the Netherlands Institute al Athens 4, 5 19.
22
The Archaeology of Early Modern Greece
Introduction
The chronological start to this period is the end of Turkish domination and the foundation of the Greek state in 1830. The end is a matter of opinion, and brings us to the nature of Early Modern Archaeology in a global sense. If Medieval Archaeology has now had a healthy grounding as a formal field for some 50 years, and Post-Medieval Archaeology' for at least 40 years, the archaeology of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is less clearly defined and not so established academically. Its boundaries with Cultural Studies, Art History, Anthropology, Sociology, and Folklore are neither clear nor, might one say, would benefit from any attempt to clarify. Indeed Marc Dion, a modern artist working with material culture found through "beachcombing" on the shores of the Thames in London, is as much exploring the cultural value of recent debris as archaeologists who are called to excavate the same areas in the context of redevelopment projects (Mouliou 2009).
The situation in Greece is less developed than in Northwest Europe or America, not only as we have already seen in the fields of Medieval and Post-Medieval Archaeology, but also in that of the Modern Age. The almost unparalleled richness of the Greco-Roman eras in Greece are enough to preoccupy almost all professional archaeologists, both Greek and foreign. Furthermore the needs of the enormous
tourist industry and public interest in the periods when Greece shone brightest in cultural terms (Hamilakis and Yalouris 1996, Hamilakis 2007, Mouliou 2009), have all served to prevent major work on the material culture of the recent eras of Greek history. Nonetheless a research initiative for Industrial Archaeology within the Greek Ministry of Culture (Ministry of Culture 1989), and the recent Antiquities Law protecting monuments and finds up to 100 years ago, point to promising developments. One becomes increasingly aware of the growing collections of clothes and domestic artifacts (including ceramics, photographs, etc.), which represent the life of most people in Greece from the late Ottoman era to the immediate postwar (WWII) period. Admittedly this is generally within the context of folklore museums or Modern Greek history and heritage organizations, but nonetheless these are of immense value for an archaeological and material culture approach to the last few hundred years.
As is well known, the nineteenth to early twentieth century witnessed the final subversion of the Ottoman Empire by Western military, political, economic, and social pressures (insights into these processes can be seen in three excellent studies of their impact, at the imperial capital of Istanbul by Celik (1986) and Mansel (1995), and at the city of Thessaloniki by Mazower (2004)).The Empire's dismemberment was associated with its replacement by many nationalisms,
The Complete Archaeology of Greece: From Hunter-Gatherers to the 20th Century AD, First Edition. John Bintliff. © 2012Jolm Bintliff. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
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as strong in Greece* as in the survival capsule created by Ataturk in the form of a created rather than rediscovered Turkish nationalism. In Southern Mainland Greece, rejection of the Ottoman past meant rebuilding middle-class homes, and erecting new public buildings, in Neoclassical style. Rural life however was far less radically transformed, except by prolonged decay and stagnation. In many parts of the countryside there were severe economic problems till the last quarter of the nineteenth century, which held back the remodeling of peasant lite, whether we look at houses, portable material culture or lifeways in general. Travelers of the period are frequently struck by poverty and underdevelopment (Tsigakou 1981). However the last three decades of the nineteenth century began to bring more dramatic changes in the Greek countryside, with improved transport and the rise of national and international trade both impacting progressively in rural areas (Aschenbrenner 1972). In many landscapes rural population by the end of the nineteenth century at last returned to the level of the late sixteenth-century Ottoman climax, but for most of Southern Greece it seems well below the levels reached in Classical Greek times (Bintliff 1997,2005).
The Historical Context
During the Greek War of Independence (1821-1830) urban life and economic prosperity was, in the south of the country, crippled by the prolonged and destructive struggle. The final Ottoman era had in any case been very negative for the development of Greek life, due to corruption amongst imperial and local officials and the failings of the Ottoman economy to adapt to and take advantage of commercial and industrial modernization (in no small part due to its undermining by Western bankers and entrepreneurs for their own financial advantage). On the other hand there had developed an indigenous response amongst Balkan middle- and upper-class society to the waves of economic and cultural change emanating from Western Europe from the late eighteenth century, and the additional Napoleonic stimulus to political emancipation and nationalism. As a formally multicultural empire, the later Ottoman Empire offered scope for ethnic and religious communities to develop networks
of trade and production, and unintentionally to encourage such groups to affirm and strengthen their identity. In such changing international circumstances this served as a potential springboard for aspirations to achieve a greater degree of self-government or even for some, independence. (For good modern historical backgrounds see McNeil 1978, Clogg 1992, Koliopoulos andVercmi 2004.)
But the successful Greek Revolution of the 1820s created a small state (Color Plate 22.1), comprising Southern and Central Greece. The incorporation of Northern Greece and Crete, together with the Ionian and Dodecanese Islands, had to await the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Thus the creation of the modern Greek territorial state was not just a matter of a few revolutionary years of struggle, but a long drawn-out process of irregular large increments. Moreover in order to comprehend the history of the young independent Greek kingdom, even up to the present day, we need to set the new state into its preceding era of final Ottoman control.
The weakened central administration had progressively allowed local indigenous elites (ayan) as well as imperial officials to assume wide-ranging powers in town and country outside of the capital Istanbul. Greater contact with Western merchants provided many opportunities for enrichment, while the dependence of large sectors of the peasant farming and urban artisan communities on regional elite families encouraged clientelism (informal dependence of the poor on rich patrons). The achievement of independence from Ottoman rule was thus seen in divergent ways by the people of Southern Greece. Established elites envisaged their political and economic bases to be threatened bv any development of "democratic" reforms, believing the lower classes to be incapable of participating in public affairs. In contrast, the Greek intelligentsia and especially those living as expatriates in Western Europe were more inclined to plan for the creation of a modern, educated citizenry and a stronger state bureaucracy, in which traditional patrons would be subordinated.There was also a third constituency to be included, not numerically large, but whose power was nonetheless real: this was the widespread phenomenon of armed bands (armatoloi), whose origin lay in the weakness of the official Ottoman army
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and provincial militia, allowing local bosses to make use of such irregulars to police their spheres of influence.They also had arisen as bandits where neither state nor local bosses were able to assert total control. During the Revolution these bands had often earned credit in the cause of Independence, but their existence now clashed with the intended creation of a civil society policed by the state. There was yet a fourth element to upset the steady flourishing of the young state, and that was the imposition by the Great Powers of an alien concept, kingship, and its first incumbent, a Bavarian prince, on the nascent nation-state.
These historical pressures burdened Greece with a constant threat of political disorder, diverting energies from pressing action to promote the economy and welfare of the rural and urban population. Until the last quarter of the nineteenth century population was depressed and land use linnted, whilst health, education, and living conditions for the bulk of the population remained poor. The condition of the rural peasantry only began to improve at the end of the nineteenth century, before which their life remained remote from the limited points of commercial development centering on the key ports of the   kingdom   and   their   immediate hinterlands. Industrialization was also highly localized and small-scale into the early twentieth century, allowing a minute working class to arise around Athens and in small pockets in other larger urban centers. The lack of technological innovation had long plagued craft and industry in later Ottoman times and it continued throughout the early decades of the new Greek state. Efforts to revive cotton manufacture in Livadheia town in Boeotia during the 1830s, for example, failed, only succeeding during the 1860s, by which lime the city acquired a virtual monopoly of processed cotton production for the kingdom (Sigalos 2004). During the latter nineteenth century Greece saw a slow expansion in the scale and spread of local industrial processing of its agricultural cash crops such as cotton, silk, tobacco, and currants. However a population boom outstripped wealth accumulation, whilst highly unstable markets for these cash crops could impact severely on peasant fortunes, with the result that this era and the first half of the twentieth century saw massive emigration into distant parts of the world,
notably North America and Australia, to seek a faster and securer path to enrichment.
At the start of the twentieth century living conditions improved, communications became more efficient, and over the following decades the kingdom expanded to incorporate large landscapes in the North and on Crete. Meanwhile the Greek econoinv as a whole began to interact more vigorously with that of the wider commercial world. Population gradually moved toward levels only achieved in many regions previously during the climax of Classical Greek civilization, 2500 years earlier. Yet Greece remained a land with limited resources in raw materials to promote heavy industry or international exchange, and a traditional small-scale agriculture little suited to compete with global commercial-estate farm produce. Moreover during the largest part of the twentieth century Greek politics suffered from violent see-saws from left to right, a dictator, a Civil War hard on the heels of a devastating Nazi occupation, and a military junta. Nonetheless renewed modernization and growth m every aspect except political stability marks die postwar era, whilst entry into the EEC in 1981 seemed to promise well for a very different twenty-first century to the uneven development of its predecessor. As I write however (2011) the consequences of an incomplete modernization process in the workings of the state and in the relationship between private and public economics have brought the country into a debilitating crisis. One must hope that Greece will emerge from this with a more lasting and robust form of civil society.
The Material Culture of the Early Modern Era
We can approach this period of almost two centuries along a series of archaeological dimensions: movable material culture found in very good condition largely in Folk Museums, but in far greater numbers as artifacts at deserted villages or in exposures in and around contemporary settlements; standing buildings such as houses still occupied, or at least in some kind of use, and also as ruined foundations; and Early Modern field systems.
Early Modern ceramics
It must be admitted that no archaeological textbook or large-scale case study exists for the ceramics in use over the Aegean, if we mean a total assemblage for each region. On the other hand the decorated wares have been brought together by Greek specialists in attractive  volumes   (Kyriazopoulos   1984, Korre-Zographou 1995), and some classes of widely-sold pithoi and other specialist pots have also been studied (Hampe and Winter 1962, Bhtzer 1990). The basic work of establishing a series of assemblages of coarse wares, domestic wares, and tablewares for each region of Greece is only just beginning. Ceramic assemblages from individual villages are an important resource, as with our Boeotia Project finds from the village surface survey of modern Mavromati in Boeotia (Vroom 1998), where the continuing flourishing of that village required us to collective surface finds from garden zones between the houses and in the peripheral sectors of traditional rubbish disposal. For the last two centuries we could illustrate the participation of such an inland, agricultural community in new networks of ceramic exchange including distant Greek and Anatolian centers of production, as well as Italian and Western European factories. Significantly these new orientations include the arrival of cheap industrial tablewares for individual table settings (sec below).
The dramatic takeoff in rural population and agricultural production in the late nineteenth century, in both Italy and Greece, could be expected to be reflected in a new variety and richness of decorated and imported ceramics found at rural surface sites. This is indeed argued for the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century survey finds in North-Central Italy by Blake (1980), with rural improvement marked by renewed penetration in quantity of exotic glazed wares. In Greece the last quarter of the nineteenth century witnessed a phenomenal population boom focused on generally larger villages, one paralleled in almost all the rural zones of the Mediterranean lands. More secure conditions and the impact of commercial agriculture, a rise in rural industrial production (proto-mdustrialization), and improvements in maritime and overland communications, are amongst the critical factors. One material symptom is the arrival in quantity during this
period either side of 1900 of relatively inexpensive factory-produced ceramics into rural villages, including imports from Western Europe.
The rise of such factory-products let! to imports to Greece during the nineteenth century from a wide range of distinctive centers making true porcelain tablewares or fine ware imitations in other fabrics (Color Plate 22.2b left). Surface finds in the Aegean include sherds from England, France, Germany, and Austria, with a particular popularity from the later nineteenth into the early twentieth century of the cheap but well-made glazed earthenware tablewares from Grottaglie in the Italian province of Apulia (Colour Plate 22.2b right). Production within Greece concentrated on traditional storage jars (pithoi), including giant versions from a small number of well-known centers of production, and competent glazed earthenwares for heavier-duty household use.
By this time the orientation of rural life was once again facing toward Western Europe, so that rapidly we see the adoption of modern styles of individual eating as required by the ceramic sets being supplied. As in later Ottoman times however, a major part of household assemblages was now met through copper and iron (and increasingly from the mid-twentieth century, plastic) containers, most of the first two now recycled, although fortunately these are well represented in folklore museums. As a warning however to regional surveyors, remoter parts of Greece without good local clays may have relied almost entirely on metal, wood, and other organic containers and implements till well into the twentieth century, leaving little ceramic debris to mark settlements (Vroom 1998).
The following descriptions of Early Modern ceramics (Color Plates 22.2a-b) are based on the research of A.Vionis (unpublished lectures).
Late Sgraffito wares
Epirus and Macedonia saw a tremendous production of polychrome sgraffito wares (jugs and flasks) (Color Plate 22.2a left) during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a result of cultural influences stemming from economic growth and trade with the Ionian Islands and Italy. They are widely distributed throughout Greece and into Northwestern Turkey. The sgraffito decoration is incised whilst green and brown paint splashes enrich the decoration under a
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clear or yellow lead glaze. Motifs include flowers, animals, and people.
Canakkak ware
Production center, Canakkale (Northwestern Turkey) (Color Plate 22.2a right). Flourishing from the mid eighteenth to the late nineteenth century. Coarse fabric, white slip, then designs painted in brown, blue, orange, yellow, and white, and covered with a creamy lead glaze. Motifs: boats, mosques, animals, flowers.
Transfer-printed wares
Technique used in England since the later eighteenth century and fashionable in Greece after 1860 (Color Plate 22.2b left). Decoration is engraved onto a bronze plaque, the surface of which is then inked, and the design transferred onto thin paper and from that to the ceramic object, where it is sealed under a transparent glaze. Produced in Western Europe, with a white fine clay or porcelain body. Also known as Syriana, since the Greek merchants who placed the orders for these dinner wares were established on the island of Syros. Ubiquitous in Greece.
Grottaglie or Corfu wares
Originally produced in Apulia (Southeast Italy), then local production arose on Corfu and Kythera (Color Plate 22.2b right). Mainly plates. Medium hard fabric, painted decoration in blue, yellow, and brown over a lead-tin opaque glaze resembling earlier Majolica. Motifs: flowers, animals. Ubiquitous.
Siphnos cookware
Siphnos in the Cyclades was known since the early eighteenth century for quality cooking-pots, due to the good quality lead glaze and high heat-resistant local clay. Distributed throughout Greece till being replaced from the 1970s by metal and plastic wares.
Rural houses and housing culture
Excavations have not yet focused on buildings of the Modern Greek state, not least because it is only as a result of a very recent update to antiquities legislation that material culture of all kinds after the Medieval period has been protected formally. Even
so, the limit is still set at over 100 years ago, although one imagines that growing interest in Industrial Archaeology in Greece may allow study also of major twentieth-century installations. Despite these limitations, the enthusiasm of Greek and foreign architects for recording traditional buildings, notably the remarkable series of volumes in several languages published by the Melissa Press (Kartas 1982, Philippides 1983—1990), has allowed a considerable record of Early Modern vernacular (local domestic) architecture in the Greek Aegean. House and village studies associated with regional archaeological projects have been published, amongst others by Aschenbrenner (1972), Lee (2001) and Cooper (2002).We now possess in the monograph by Sigalos (2004) a synthesis and analysis of all the chief publications in this field. He has further demonstrated how an archaeological perspective on the evidence now available, taken in its historical context, can yield major insights into popular life from Ottoman into Modern times. I shall lean heavily on this major work in the following discussion of Early Modern developments in housing.
We noted earlier that the Mainland rural peasantry till the late nineteenth century dwelt for the most part in nucleated settlements, lacking regular plans and even the "traditional" infrastructure of a main square ringed by public buildings. Houses were generally one-story, of rectangular or longhouse style (Figure 22.1a and Color Plate 22.3a), but in sloping terrain a one-and-a-half-story house was common. In the single-story form, domestic animals shared the home, with limited division of the two halves of the roofed space. A yard was a major feature, usually on the side of the house where most light and warmth through the year was available. Ancillary facilities such as a bread oven, presses for oil and wine, and storage sheds, could be found around the house and yard, but an enclosure wall round the property was rare and usually not a high barrier. Life was lived in the public eye and was as much as possible carried out in the open air. In contrast, the wealthier landowners and professional classes owned larger rural homes or estate-centers. They might be towerhouscs or more extensive multi-story mansions (archontika), and be built as imposing monuments within the low-rise villagescape,
Figure 22.1a Historic photograph of Thespics-Enmokastro longhouse-village, Boeotia ca 1890 © EFA/P.Jamot.
Figure 22.1b Deserted village of Rhadon. House rums and two churches. Late Ottoman to mid-nineteenth century. E. Sigalos, Housing in Medieval and Post-Medieval Greece. Oxford 2004, Figure 43.
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or as independent entities in the open country, hut mostly they conformed to variants of the International Ottoman style.
A good example of a ruined village abandoned due to late nineteenth-century banditry is the site of Rhadon in the rocky hinterland of the Boeotian town of Orchonienos (Figure 22.lb).The Ottoman archives inform us that Rhadon was founded as an Albanian colony by Early Turkish times, whilst recent records show it was abandoned for the larger neighboring village of Pavlo in the late nineteenth century.The surface ceramic finds are the expected mixture of sixteenth- to nineteenth-century wares. Planning of the ruined settlement by the Boeotia Project showed a characteristic settlement design for Mainland lowland settlements. Associated with two churches (shown within their enclosures), still maintained by descendants of the villagers, we see a line of (1 2?) discrete longhouses, of typical single- or occasionally one-and-a-half-story form, ranged across a gentle slope and with a north-south aspect, so as to allow one long side of the home to receive maximum sun in the winter months. The wide space between each identical house and the absence of elaborate enclosures conveys a sense of the communal openness of rural life in such Early Modern hamlets, whilst the absence of a public square and non-religious public buildings is noteworthy.
A rather different sort of deserted site is the once very common outlying estate-center belonging to a monastery (tnetocht).The surviving nineteenth-century ruins at Sta Dendra not far from Rhadon consist of a small cluster of at least four longhouses and one smaller rectangular house, as at Rhadon loosely spread across the site but with a common north—south alignment. On the eastern edge of the ruins stands a more complex building made up of eight chambers. This seems to have been a storehouse or stable. In the south of the hamlet is a still-maintained church.
In the final quarter of the nineteenth century conditions for Aegean countryfolk began to improve. Rural insecurity was dealt with, vast areas of state land were finally distributed to local communities, communication by land and sea improved, and the Greek agricultural economy saw a piecemeal incorporation into international commerce, all of which led to a dramatic general transformation of the Greek village and its territory. A desire to improve production
encouraged farmers to invest more effort in their land (Davis 1991, Wlntelaw 1991) through increased terracing, the improvement of rural paths, and the building of field-houses for storage, temporary residence or crop-processing. In some regions dispersed settlement reappeared, if still within the sphere of a village boundary and rarely far from a nucleation, but also a symptom of increased investment in land use.
At the same time rising wealth and social aspirations introduced "urban" forms of housing to the rising class of farmers of "middling status" in the Aegean countryside and local professionals (doctor, teacher, lawyer) (Stedman 1996,Sigalos 2004).This meant not only two-story homes, with a clear separation of stock (below) and humans (above), but an increase in the number of internal family spaces associated with a West European "bourgeois" concept of defining rooms for distinct functions. This departed from the previously-dominant Ottoman concept in complex houses of accumulations of flexible domestic spaces (ondas). A formal reception room, or saloni, was a parallel to the Victorian "parlor," and contained displays of the more expensive pottery and metal objects owned by the household, together with photographs of family members as a "dynasty" proud ofits generational development. Kitchens could be set apart from a general family room, and eventually private bedrooms were normal, not just for the family but for parents, grandparents, and children.
Also diffusing from towns into villages was the concept of a village square with a prominent church, coffee-houses, shops, and an administrative building: a small-scale imitation of a town center. This seems to be developing largely in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
In the towns the new Greek state had rapidly and formally rejected maintenance of Ottoman-era street plans and house styles. It encouraged the adoption of architectural styles for public and private use which glorified both the Greek ancient past, and the order and regularity of Western European designs, which were themselves rooted in Greco-Roman traditions filtered through Renaissance and Baroque elaborations. The new tradition was Neoclassicism (Kardamitsi-Adami and Biris 2005). Beginning in the larger urban centers, where it had been encouraged by the Bavarian royal court, it spread more slowly.
Figure 22.2   Neoclassical village house in Messenia. Courtesy E. Sigalos.
during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, into the smaller towns and then the villages, being adopted first by the "leading sectors" of wealthier landowners and the professions. Now the villagers saw fine four-square multi-story homes arising in their midst, with neat cut stone at the corners (quoins) and around doors and windows (Figure 22.2). The tiled roofs imitated ancient models, with decorative terracotta affixes. House facades were marked by symmetry. Even in Northern Greece, which remained under Ottoman control into the early twentieth century, "Westernization" of the Empire resulted in a widespread adoption of Neoclassical architecture in public and wealthy private construction (Sigalos 2004).
The house transformation was accomplished with an easy modification of the former one- or one-and-a-half-story longhouse, through erecting a second story within the same scheme (Sigalos 2004). Often the dimensions of the older house were retained and its two-room plan. Separate access to the upper floor from outside underlined the conceptual division, having already existed as we have seen in Ottoman-era town houses.
However the traditional pre-Modern homes remained in the majority till the 1960s.Today they are heading toward an almost universal extinction. Case studies seem to indicate that multi-story houses of "Modern" Neoclassical type were widespread but in a minority, as rural wealth was confined to a small middle and upper class by recurrent problems of Greek
politics and economics, till the last third of the twentieth century, when the Aegean went through a new burst of economic growth. When wealth finally began to spread to the majority of rural inhabitants, from the 1960s onwards, yet newer styles were emulated, with an emphasis on domestic versions of concrete Modernism, decorated with new forms of Internationalism copied from America and even with small-scale versions of "tourist hotel" architecture. The pace of change can be illustrated through my own case studies from Boeotia (sec Text Box).
In a classic anthropological monograph, Friedl (1962) captured a phase of major change in the Central Greek village of Vasilika, looking back to life in previous generations as well as observing recent and ongoing transformations toward a wealthier and in material terms far more complex "modern" lifestyle. She argued that the basic Early Modern home had been single-story and wmdowless, animals and humans cohabiting. As a result of external influences we might term "urban" or "bourgeois," it had gradually become common to create physical and conceptual boundaries. She noted the combination of pre-Modern alongside "Western" Modern stylistic unportations. Often three rooms resulted: a traditional earth-floored one remained as the kitchen, two others with wooden floors served as a bedroom and a combined living and reception room. At the time of study Vasilika had very few grander homes but they conformed to diffusing urban models: two storys, the ground floor with a storage/stock room and a second area for living, cooking, and sleeping, whilst the upper floor, separately accessed from an outside staircase, contained an alternative domestic space and a more public guest reception room (the saloni). At the top of the stairs a veranda (hagiati) offered a suitable semi-open space for summer family life, including sleeping. In the saloni a display of family valuables, fine furniture, and family photographs gave a sense of status and generational stability.The alternative family rooms allowed a choice of location dependent on season, and scope also for different generations and events to be accommodated.
In Macedonia another study conveniently placed in time is that of Common and Prentice (1956), who found rural settlements still made up of dispersed, rather randomly-placed houses, without a
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Domestic HoLising Changes in Boeotia
In the village of Aghios Gcorgios near ancient Koroncia in Boeotia (BintlifFel at 2007) house survey found hardly any houses predating the late twentieth century. It was urgent to record those surviving before their demolition. The reasons for traditional homes remaining till now are closely tied to the survival of the oldest family members, who remain physically and emotionally attached to the residences of their younger years. Often the old, simple house exists as a partly-occupied home for the oldest generation, or may be used by animals or for storage and processing, or is already in ruins awaiting final destruction and replacement by a modern luxury bungalow or multi-story concrete structure. One house we recorded in 2007 was T-shaped, with each limb a single-story structure on different levels to fit a steep slope. One limb was a roofless ruin, the other continued to contain storage space and a family room. The surviving grandmother had come to the old house in the 1930s as a bride, and gave us detailed memories of how the extended family used the home. Just as in our discussion of Ottoman-era domestic life, she recalled the eating of meals seated on low stools around a low table, and was able to produce the latter for us.
clear street infrastructure, although by now a village focus had crystallized around a square, onto which faced the main church, shops, and coffee-houses. Most families still occupied one-story earth-floored houses with almost no furniture; in adjacent yards lay ancillary structures for farm-use. A minority of wealthier homes were two-story. In the Ionian Islands Aalen (1984) documented the late nineteenth-century transformation of rural peasant homes into two-story residences, with urban Neoclassical influences and associated new lifestyles (see Figure 21.7). Likewise, the study by Kizis (1994) of the mansions of the Mount Pelion villages identified a third house style (for preceding styles see Chapter 21) from the nineteenth century onwards,
Now grandmother and her children's family live in a large concrete three-story house in an adjacent part of the house-plot, where previously part of the yard and a kitchen garden had been situated.
Another Boeotian village, Aghios Thomas, clearly less wealthy, contains a larger number of traditional homes, all it seems of longhouse type. They appear now to be out of normal residential use, but their appearance along the main street adjacent to their replacements, Modernist villas and multi-story homes, is a striking witness to the extraordinary rate of change in the last two generations (Color Plates 22.3a—b).
In the Boeotian village of Chaeroneia the decaying remains of the traditional longhouses are dwarfed by recent concrete two-story replacements, whilst a more traditional form of local family dominance can be shown by the nineteenth-century towerhouse of the Rangave family, even today rising prominently from the villages-cape. This elite family had formerly been active in Ottoman service in the Northern Balkans but emigrated to the new Greek state after its foundation (Sigalos 2004). The style is reminiscent of Ottoman-era elaborations of Medieval towers and predates the diffusion of Neoclassical forms to the Greek countryside.
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when Neoclassicism is adopted in the grand family residences.
Field systems and land use
What should attract far more attention from archaeologists is the remarkable potential of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Greece for deeply insightful links between artifacts, houses, the very full historical and ethnographic records, and built landscapes. Rapidly disappearing is the last category of material evidence, what geographers call "landscape architecture," the accumulating human modifications to the countryside in the shape of field divisions, terracing, stream   diversions,   built   paths, threshing-floors,
temporary field-huts; and many other physical impacts. We already have a fine pioneer study with Todd Whitelaws (1991, 1994) analysis of the field systems and rural structures for storage or residence on the island of Kea. Combining aerial photos, field mapping, and historic records, a valuable understanding was achieved of the radical restructuring of the island's countryside during the late nineteenth and early-twentieth century. Whitelaw suggested that the Late Ottoman peasantry had no clear rights to land or its profit, this being in the hands of the Church or powerful landowners, who invested little in its infrastructure. When the new Greek state finally redistributed land as freehold to the peasantry, at the same time as opportunities for commercial agricultural marketing increased, farmers responded by a major building campaign in the landscape, improving the layout and drainage of fields, access routes, and facilities for working their estates. Hamish Forbes (2007) has also reminded us of the temporary use of rural landscapes through the year in Ottoman and Early Modern Greece, and the difficulty of detecting this archaeo-logically, as well as showing the complexities of relating archives to oral history and surface archaeology for the recent development of settlements on the Pelopormesian peninsula of Methana (Forbes 2009).
Changes in the Countryside
The same nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Travelers' reports and pictures (paintings, sketches, and increasingly photographs; Tsigakou 1981), which assist the identification of deserted villages and offer details of lifestyles for the Late Ottoman era, are equally significant for our understanding of the history and archaeology of town and country during the early generations of the young Greek state after the Revolution (from the 1830s well into the twentieth century). Major resources include the "phototheques" or collections of historic views of Greece in the French and German Archaeological Schools in Athens, and the extremely detailed maps prepared by the French Army Geographical Service immediately after the creation of the new7 kingdom, in the Peloponnese (Bory de St. Vincent 1836), and Central Greece (never published but the basis for the
excellent cover of that area in the Atlas de la Grke of 1852). Since the 1980s there has been a growing interest in historic photographs of Greece (cf. Figure 22.1a), shown in a series of books (for example Louvrou 1999, Koumarianou 2005) and a center for photographic archiving in Athens (Stathatos 1999).
The field investigation of the archaeology of Early Modern villages can take two obvious forms. They can be found identified as deserted villages or as still-occupied historic villages. Both can be approached through the collection of surface pottery (for the former), and for the latter from ceramics found on their outskirts and between houses or in yards and gardens. Frequently house ruins survive on abandoned village-sites, or in neglected older quarters of contemporary settlements, and these can date back through the last 180 years of the modern Greek state, and even back into the Ottoman period.
It remains to be shown whether the signs of demographic growth in eighteenth-century Greece and the well-known historic evidence for a rising middle class of urban merchants were associated with any improvement in the living conditions of rural communities. Subsequently, the endemic violence of the Greek Revolution precipitated large-scale village abandonments and relocations in the South. This was followed by difficult decades from the 1830s to 1870s. Firstly many country districts were terrorized by bandits (Jenkins 1961, Slaughter and Kasimis 1986). Indeed a final phase of changes to the village network took place during the nineteenth century, as insecurity continuing as late as the 1870s caused many settlements to become deserted as communities clustered into larger villages against rural banditry. These usually remain as conmrunities today. Secondly, land reforms remained urgent but neglected. All of this prevented a rapid recovery of the Greek countryside after the establishment of the Modern Greek state until the 1880s.
A working hypothesis would be that most Mainland village communities were generally impoverished longhouse dwellers for the intermediate period, with few ceramic vessels and those of mediocre quality (even the occasional imports which are attested are of cheap "peasant porcelain" such as Canakkale ware). The early nineteenth-century painting illustrated in the previous chapter (Figure 21.9) of a family within their longhouse may be representative of the poor
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living standards of the nineteenth-century peasantry: animals at one end of the house, the human family at the other, with a small collection of household utensils kept below the rafters - the odd earrhenware vessel, some metal containers, wood and leather often used in place of ceramics. Small wonder that Western Travelers visiting Greece to glory in its Classical monuments considered its surviving inhabitants a sadly fallen race, best left in the background of their sketches and travelogues (Tsigakou 1981).
The last quarter of the nineteenth century witnessed a phenomenal population boom focused on generally larger villages, one paralleled in almost all the rural zones of the Mediterranean lands. More secure conditions and the impact of commercial agriculture, a rise in rural industrial production (proto-industriahzation), and improvements in maritime and overland communications, are amongst the critical factors. Land reclamation, especially drainage of the extensive lowland marshes of Greece, opened up highly fertile land and reduced endemic wetland diseases (Fels 1944).
The massive population exchanges following the Greco-Turkish war of the early 1920s led to almost all parts of modern Greece being affected either by the emigration or immigration of populations. Since the Second World War, further large-scale changes to the rural settlement system have seen contrasted developments. On the one hand, agricultural villages in remoter, more rugged terrain have declined in favor of those in or near plains suitable for irrigated cash crops. On the other, we witness the often uncontrolled creation of new tourist or weekend and second-home settlement concentrations; if many houses or apartment blocks arise in natural resort locations by the sea, in some regions almost as many second homes can be found inland in rocky, scrubby terrain, inexpensive to purchase and easily accessible from the largest centers of population such as Athens.
The more prosperous and educated small farmers typical for twentieth-century Greece became for foreign archaeologists, historians, and anthropologists a supposed element of continuity to the admired Classical (or even Bronze Age) past, studied to understand the lifestyles and attitudes of their heroic predecessors (Fotiadis 1995), despite the remarkable changes in rural society that w-ere occurring in the second half
of that century (Slaughter and Kasimis 1986, Forbes 2007,2009).
Urban Change
After the creation of the independent Greek state in 1830, towns changed at varying rates from their Ottoman form. One of the faster transformations was in what scholars refer to as "polite architccture."The wealthier classes, who had previously emulated the Ottoman International style in their town houses and rural mansions, turned their heads "Westwards" and also "backwards in time" by adopting Neoclassical designs. These could result in entirely new constructions, but also might be applied as new facades to existing homes. For a while in the nineteenth century the port of Ermoupolis on the island of Syros was a key commercial port, and it was a flourishing center for Neoclassical commissions from its prosperous merchant class (Kartas 1982, Agriantoni et at I 999).
On a piecemeal basis, town plans were altered, also to conform to "Western" and "Classical" logic (Yerolympos 1996).The Greek government formally-announced that straight, grid-plan communication lines were to be preferred to the twisting, narrow-lanes of Ottoman towns, the latter to be removed as they "so explicitly reflected the character of their former rulers" (quoted in Sigalos 2004). Towns such as Navplion, Kalamata, Tripolis, Patras, and Athens were in part redesigned, or expanded, according to regular Western urban planning principles. In the expanding Early Modern town of Livadheia, the Old Town retained its cramped and picturesque character well into the late twentieth century, but to the north and east vast new suburbs arose on a grid-plan, with large open spaces at major intersections. Lining these new prestige streets arose ranks of Neoclassical mansions for the prospering middle classes (Bintliff et al. 1999, Sigalos 2004). In contrast the other major town of Boeotia, Thebes, had its original center replanned along gridline streets during the nineteenth century, destroying a more multifocal plan of winding small lanes linking religious foci which bad characterized the Ottoman town.
When, after some experimentation and debate on alternatives, Athens was chosen in  1833 as the
Figure 22.3 Neoclassical Main Building of Athens University, late nineteenth century. Wikipedia image.
permanent capital of the new Kingdom of Greece, the Bavarian rulers brought in foreign architects to ornament the city with appropriate public buildings for its role. Naturally- the Neoclassical style was adopted, reflecting the intention of reconnecting the new state with the finest moments of its past. Today along Panepistimiou Street, the central complex of the Academy, the University, and the National Library-are impressive achievements in this style of the 1850s to 1880s (Figure 22.3), and still attract attention within their surrounding modern concrete higher-rise shopping and apartment blocks. It was a natural counterpoise that Kapodistrias, the first President of Greece, ordered the demolition of traditional overhang rooms (sahnisia) as reminiscent of the hated Turks (Sigalos 2004). Forninately for everyone, a scheme by the German Neoclassical architect Schinkel to construct a new royal palace-citadel-museum on the Acropolis for the imported Bavarian King Otto, was not approved (Erienne and Etienne 1992, Hamilakis andYalouris 1996).
The pace of regular planning but also increasingly, unplanned expansive urban sprawl, increased considerably with the arrival in the 1920s of a vast army of
refugees and population exchange communities, resulting from the disastrous outcome of the war with Turkey. These incomers were accommodated all over the Greek towns and also in new rural settlements, since they included town-dwellers and villagers from what is today European and Anatolian Turkey. A classic analysis of the effect of this on the city of Athens has been made by Bastea (1999). For the rise of Athens from 1833 and its escape from an early attempt at formal planning by the Bavarians see Ante (1988).
But we should not exaggerate the scale of change. There was indeed a proliferation throughout the Aegean of new street plans, Neoclassical and later "Modernist" homes for the wealthy, and "worker cottages" for a small proletariat. But there was also, perhaps still dominant, the continuing survival alongside these new forms of life of traditional narrow winding streets and Ottoman-style house plans in towns for the lower middle classes, and agricultural-style single-and one-and-a-half-story longhouses for the poorer classes both in urban suburbs and in rural settlements. Descriptions and photographs till the mid-twentieth century and the widespread survival of such architecture even today (if ruined or en route to demolition in
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the near future) confirm this picture. In provincial towns with a few thousand inhabitants, the norm till the mid-twentieth century, life was very internalized, and out-marriage was atypical (Caftanzoglou 1994), whilst such market-centers were not strongly interconnected so as to create an integrated urban system for Greece (Dertilis 1992, Katochianou 1992). As for the appearance of the townscapes, the town of Argos for example, was largely destroyed in the War of Independence, which led to a new town plan which expanded on the old irregular settlement with new regular suburbs. Yet it remained essentially a low-rise townscape until the first tower-block appeared in 1962, followed in the 1970s by hundreds more for apartments and stores (Pierart andTouchais 1996).
All this gives a material basis to the view often expressed that Modern Greeks have a strong sense of identity, but in two contrasted senses (Leigh Fermor 1966). One is to their recreated Classical Greek past, of which they are rightly proud, the other however is to the qualities of Greek life and sensibility inherited from Greek mentalities common in Medieval and Ottoman times (Romaiosyne).As we saw above,in contemporary villages three generations of a single family can view a discordant time-perspective on their own property. This can include three-story Modernist or even Postmodernist luxury concrete housing, with all the latest furniture and electronic fixtures, surviving alongside a single-story longhouse with minimal furniture and retaining simple fittings from the early twentieth or even late nineteenth century, and a plan which may descend from several centuries earlier.
However, as noted for rural setdements, the owners of both traditional and modernizing houses became keen to follow Western bourgeois patterns in the internal definition of space. A multiplication of rooms and their subdivisions became typical, to mark out spaces for distinct activities, wdiethcr functional or social.
Industrial Archaeology
This is a growing field in Aegean historical research (Ministry of Culture 1989; Monumenta electronic journal). Published studies include the changing fates and functions of commercial and manufacturing premises   and   public   transport   facdities (e.g.,
Papanicolaou-Christensen 1986), and analysis of specific installations (e.g., for water- and wind-mills Mouzakis 2008). Much rich material survives from the last 150 years, since Greece developed large-scale complexes for these purposes. Real industrialization only properly arose in Greece from the end of the nineteenth century and was largely confined to Athens and small pockets at the other major urban centers, a situation still observable at the end of the twentieth century (Katochianou 1992). In the provincial Boeotian town of Livadheia for example (Sigalos 2004) a local dispersed proto-industrial tradition of textile manufacture (see Chapter 21), encouraged the subsequent establishment of a series of factories in the town, chiefly for cotton, utilizing the strong water-power from the river Herkyna. Today some of these installations have been refurbished to provide the modern town in the public areas of its old quarter (now largely a leisure zone) with cultural halls, restaurants, and a pleasant place to promenade. Dating back to such industrializing suburbs, small homes for non-farming workers occasionally survive in the rapidly-modernizing urban fabric in cities like Livadheia.
The late nineteenth-century expansion of the Greek economy and its international commercialization can also be followed in the rural agricultural sector through new forms of building construction. In this period a British venture, the Lake Copais Company, succeeded in draining a perennial body of freshwater and marshland in Boeotia (Slaughter and Kasimis 1986, Papadopoulos 1993), some 200km2 of reclamation. The Company was poorly managed, and made no significant dividends for its international shareholders. The drained land was let out on short-term contracts to the surrounding villagers, who were treated badly. There were riots and conditions were sufficiently unattractive to leave much of the reclaimed "polders" uncultivated. The Company was finally forced to hand over its rights to the Greek government in the 1950s. Life for the "colonial" managers and foreign staff of the Company had nonetheless been rather luxurious. We hear about this from time to time in outside accounts (e.g., Levi 1971 concerning Haliartos).
For an archaeologist the surviving complex is still vast and impressive. Beside the lake at Haliartos, an
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Early Ottoman vitlage was in ruins by the nineteenth century, when the Lake Copais Company established its base there. With a large staff of expatriate managerial and clerical officials, supported by numerous Greek service personnel, a veritable town was called into existence. Being in a natural half-way location between the two major towns of East and West Boeotia, Thebes and Livadheia, and far enough to attract its own clientele for small businesses, shops, and professions, the "colonial" enterprise gradually grew into a local market town. When the Company was expropriated in the early 1950s it was converted into a nationalized company commissioned to maintain the drainage system, although the land was shared out amongst 16 local villages, which have prospered as a result ever since.
What remains of the "Company Village" is a very extensive and striking heritage. A minor part of the offices and barns for the produce of the drained lake has been converted into a cultural center (Figure 22.4a), whereas most of these facilities are locked ruins. Set back from the former main road can still be found the "bungalow villas" for the clerical-supervisor class of expatriates (Figure 22.4b).They were clearly designed to recall the suburban villas of outer London, with neat front and back gardens and many ornamental trees and shrubs. For the top management, substantial mansions in extensive woodland continue to excite visions of garden parties and the associated games of cricket and tennis that we know were popular with this expatriate community.
Symbolic Material Culture
Although the rich and diverse non-ceramic material culture of nineteenth- and twentieth- century Greece deserves fuller attention than we here have space for, there is a variety of topics which a future Early Modern Archaeology of Greece should include. Dress and furniture are increasingly well represented in museums such as the refurbished Benaki in Athens and we are able to study these topics further in well-illustrated books. For dress, see Papantoniou (1996), Anon. (2006),Broufas and Raftis (1993).These studies inform us on the one hand of the trend known throughout   Southern   Europe   and   the Eastern
Mediterranean of the "Westernization "of clothes, and the trickle-down effect as first the wealthy and more educated emulate bourgeois lifestyles of Western and Central Europe, before they reach all classes. On the other hand, they also show the persistence of distinct local folk costumes in the Greek provinces, recognizable down to village level (Color Plate 22.4). Originally regional folk costumes included both everyday and special occasion clothes, but increasingly they became confined to the latter, and most recently they tend to appear for "cultural events" which have lost their real identity as celebrations of living local traditions. For archaeologists, these relations between material culture and society are of great importance, not only for an Archaeology of the Recent Past, but to illuminate comparable changes in much earlier periods. The mixing of materials and cultural influences on the very distinctive formal dress of each Greek village opens up major insights into concepts of identity, population contacts, and the globalization of textile fabrics. Of special interest is the mixture of Western and Eastern dress in recent centuries in the Cyclades, marked by strong influences from Venice and the Ottoman world (Vionis 2003) and the much longer wearing of Italian and other West European clothes (at least amongst the middle and upper classes) on the Venetian Ionian Islands (Theotoky 1998).
An overlap between dress and furnishings comes with the study of embroideries and jewelry to be worn on the body or for the latter also placed on house furniture, also rich in social and economic meanings. For studies of the post-Medieval and Early Modern period see Zora (1981),Trilling (1983), andVionis (2005).
Dress of course offers one of several pathways into the study of the construction of the modern Greek nation, in which many ethnic or religious minorities have been absorbed into a culture centering on Greek Orthodox populations (Bintliff 2003, Karakasidou 1997). A prominent example is the wearing of a short kilt by the Greek National Guard, which is actually derived from Greek Albaman male dress (Biris 1998). For the archaeologist tracing village histories, a relevant and striking observation is the policy within the new Greek state, frequently solicited by these communities themselves, to "ethnically cleanse" place-names denoting non-Greek settlers, for example of Albanian or Slav origin,
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Figure 22.4a   Surviving remains from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of the Lake Copais Company's
establishment, Haliartos. Offices and barns for the produce of the drained lake.
Author.
Figure 22.4b   Surviving remains from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of the fake Copais Company's
establishment, Haliartos.The "bungalow villas" for the clerical-supervisor class of expatriates.
Author.
replacing them with a Classical toponym from the neighborhood (Alexandri 2002).
Furniture andjixed house furnishings are also a fruitful area to combine existing folklore analyses with an archaeological approach. Mobile furniture is introduced by Darzenta-Gorgia (2000) and fixed furnishings in Kizis (1994) and Philippides (1999).
F.arly Modern Greek burial traditions have been studied in a pioneer ethnoarchaeological study (Tzortzopoulou-Gregory 2008),sensitive to historical processes. From a database of more than 2000 graves in Corinthia and Kythera it is argued that current village cemeteries are essentially new foundations since the founding of the Greek state, when relocations outside communities were enforced from earlier graveyards within villages. F.arly simple graves were replaced in the twentieth century by stone monuments usually of some sophistication, reflecting rising incomes and Western influence to commemorate family members. The author significantly links the monumentalization of graves (Color Plate 22.5b) with the equivalent rise in sophistication of houses over the same period.
The study of mobile art can also be incorporated. One published example could be mentioned. Mykoniatis (1986) in a thoughtful study of plaster busts and statues of the period 1833-1862 suggests that the cheapness and flexibility of plaster sculpture (compared to marble) ideally suited the needs of contemporary patrons. There was an enthusiasm for reviving ancient Greek art and a desire for affordable new works in Neoclassical styles which this material could match. Important individuals in Early Modern Greek life, as well as Neoclassical compositions of an historicist nature, celebrated the "rebirth of Greece" through expressing in art its favored identity7 as the inheritor of ancient glory. There is also a striking link between the purity7 of white nineteenth-century plaster casts and new marble statues and the contemporary enthusiasm for seeing Classical temples and sculpture as equally idealized in their lack of naturalistic colors. This was despite clear evidence by this time for the high degree of color in ancient Greek artworks (Lowenthal 1988).
A mansion filled with Early Modern artworks with a unique origin lies today on the rural fringes of the town of Corfu: the Achilleion (Dierichs 2004). The
wife of the Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph, Elisabeth (popularly called Sissi) had it constructed as a summer retreat in 1891. By this late date, the mixture of styles associated with a retrospective Romanticism had replaced pure Neoclassicism as a favored architecture for the upper and middle classes. The design of the villa and its decor are thus harmonious but culturally mixed. The mansion exterior mixes Baroque and Renaissance with wings like a Greco-Roman villa, while inside there are walls with imitation Pompeian wall-paintings and others with contemporary Romantic realist art depicting Classical subjects.The halls and gardens are filled with imitation Greco-Roman art and nineteenth-century heroic fantasy figures of Sissi's favorite myth-hero Achilles (Color Plate 22.5a). After Sissi's assassination in 1898 it was bought by the German Emperor Wilhelm. The German court was conveyed here for periods of holiday residence by boat from the head of the Adriatic, while from this mansion many of the dramatic affairs of the final years of the German Empire were played out. The building and its fascinating display of imagination concretized for foreign philhcllenes (admirers of Greece), marks the steady rise in Greece's function as a potential "Disneyland" where the idealized "Other" could be encountered or resurrected in the original soil of myth.
This amputation of the intervening millennia between Classical and Modern Greece is a central aspect of the use of "symbolic capital" to homogenize the young nation around an inspiring image of its former greatness. Thus might Greece's greatness be revived after the intervening periods of foreign domination (Lowenthal 1988, Mouliou 1994, 2009). Seemingly essential to this aim was the permanent destruction of intervening material culture: between 1836 and the end of the nineteenth century the Athens Acropolis was "cleansed" not only of its Ottoman and Frankish but also its Byzantine and Early Christian monuments (Hurwit 1999). Doukellis (2004) underlines how the very recent pedestrian precinct around the Acropolis creates the townscapc as a picture, movement through which signposts key monuments in the city's Classical cultural identity. Bastea (2003) recalls growing up in Thessaloniki with an instinctive admiration for its mosques and traditional houses in the Upper Town, yet her formal
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education counter-intuitively allowed her to feel that the homogeneous Greek city had always been essentially the same since its foundation in the fourth century 13C. The rich multicultural svorld of the pre-SecondWorldWar city had effectively been erased from the collective memory of most of its inhabitants.
In a parallel fashion, ethnographer Hamish Forbes (2009) explains how most inhabitants in traditional Greek rural farming villages still possess a limited historical perspective, in which the detailed past ends with their grandparents' generation, after which local legend merges every other era. Indeed for them, the "Acropolis-focused" history of schoolbooks and national culture is a remote object divorced from their landscape and their communities' history. Such provincial communities instead increasingly identify with local historical or even legendary events that can be celebrated within their own localities.
An Annaliste Perspective
In the medium term the slow recovery of Greek rural and urban life after the traumas of the Late Ottoman era has culminated in population levels and lifestyles without previous parallel. Advances in production (for example chemical fertilizers, tractors, bank loans) and Greece's position in the EU and international markets, have enabled the country to achieve a relatively high degree of prosperity.The massive promotion of tourism ensures a steady year-round income to many parts of the land. In these respects Greece has shared in European-wide innovations and initiatives. In parallel, Early Modern Greece has also shared in the rise of the nation-state, the globalization and commercialization of agricultural and industrial production, and the convergence of political and social values within Western societies. More unique are short-term events, which have hindered Greece's advance: the nineteenth-century failings of its politicians to solve the land question, a twentieth-century dictatorship and military junta, and a society plagued by an infrastructure of clientelism inherited from late Ottoman times. And yet here especially Braudel's own preference for the longer term seems to offer a positive viewpoint for Greece's future. Improvements in standards of living and education, the modernization of the still important
rural farming sector, and the steady support of EU partners are vital features of Modern Greece which are the result of Greeks enthusiastically and energetically seizing on advances and opportunities arising across Europe as a whole over the last two centuries.
A Personal View-Having begun my own research in Greece as a landscape archaeologist in the early 1970s, daily contact with rural farmers, their villages, and small towns has been an annual part of my life for almost 40 years. I naturally followed the accepted scholarly view that the "direct historical approach" allowed one to see many surviving traditions of work, social organization, and mentalities in contemporary rural society, that emanated from medieval, ancient, and even prehistoric life. This view was challenged through working firstly with our Boeotia Project sociologist Cliff Slaughter (Slaughter and Kasimis 1986), and later with our Ottomanist Machiel Kiel (Kiel 1997), with post-Medieval ceramic specialists JoanitaVroom (2003) and NasosVionis (2005), and finally with our housing and settlement specialist Lef Sigalos (2004). I gradually realized how dynamic the last three centuries of Greek life have been.The possible similarities between society, religion, and mentalities in Early Modern Greece, Antiquity, and late Prehistory are not to be rejected out of hand (Forbes 2009), but are largely convergences due to similar socio-economic and ecological conditions. On the other hand, one major result of our own and other regional projects' researches has been to demonstrate genuine continuities in many practical aspects of rural life since the Frankish period, in housing and other aspects of lifestyle. The rapid disappearance of these links to the recent past bring urgency to the task of recording their still-visible remains in town and country, work which will require the promotion of post-Medieval archaeology and local history throughout Greece, especially through schools (Papagiannopoulos 2004). This is, encouragingly, a rapidly growing field of interest.
Greece has a wonderful Classical heritage to be proud of and its inspiration has always survived during the last 2500 years amongst the peoples of the Aegean and in the widet world. But the Greek landscape and
people also have, a fascinating and inspirational past from the millennia before Classical times and for the millennia since then to the very recent past. I hope this volume will contribute to a wider awareness of the rich history of this beautiful country in every century of its remarkable past.
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Further Reading
Bindiff, J. (2000). "Deconstructing 'the sense of place'?
Settlement systems, field survey, and the historic record:
A case-study from Central Greece." Proceedings of the
Prehistoric Society 66,123-149. Kezer, Z. (1996). "The making of a nationalist capital:
Socio-spatial practices in early Republican Ankara." Built
Environment 22, 124—137.