Western travel and collecting classical antiquities in the nineteenth century informed European understandings of Greece past and present and enriched private collections and museums. Travel and collecting have typically been studied separately by literary scholars, historians of archaeology, and historians of the Ottoman Empire and modern Greece. Similarly, publications have largely prioritised evidence from and about elite social groups.
This book breaks new ground through its interdisciplinary approach, its insistence on the interweaving of the phenomena of travel and collecting, and its emphasis on marginalised perspectives. Contributors drawn from Art History, Classics, History of Architecture, Ottoman History and Modern Greek History foreground diversity and small-scale engagements with the landscape and material past of Ottoman Greece. It explores the perspectives of both foreign travellers and local inhabitants through case studies, keeping a sharp focus on ethnicity and social status. Diaries, visual art, and rich archival material are analysed, often from a novel perspective, to give voice to a range of people including English servants, Albanian peasants, an illiterate Greek fighter and the Ottoman Sultan. The result is a micro-cultural history of travel and classical collecting which expands existing narratives. As such it changes the simplistic dichotomy between collecting as pillaging or saving, and nuances the important current debate surrounding repatriation.
Travel and Classical Antiquities in C19th Ottoman Greece addresses scholars in the areas of Classical Reception Studies, Classical Archaeology, Material Culture Studies, Nineteenth-Century Studies, Ottoman Studies and Modern Greek Studies. It will also appeal to a broader audience of people interested in travel writing, the history of archaeology and the history of Greece.
This book breaks new ground through its interdisciplinary approach, its insistence on the interweaving of the phenomena of travel and collecting, and its emphasis on marginalised perspectives.
Introduction
Chapter 1
A Granular Approach to Ioannis Makriyannis (1797-1864) and Antiquities:
Replication, Domesticity and Multivalence
Alexia Petsalis-Diomidis
Chapter 2
Viewing And Admiring (Seyr Ü Temaa): Foreign Travellers and Antiquarians
in Ottoman Documents, ca. 1790-1830
Edhem Eldem
Chapter 3
Entering the Peasants Cottage: Vernacular Architecture of Ottoman Greece
through the Eyes of Western and Local Travellers
Nikos Magouliotis
Chapter 4
Ethiopians and Arrowheads: Marginal Perspectives on The Marathon Soros
Estelle Strazdins
Chapter 5
Collections Of Antiquities in Athens on the Eve of the Greek Revolution
Alessia Zambon
Chapter 6
Marginal Voices, Ethnographic Judgement and Antiquarian Self-Definition in
Edward Daniel Clarkes Travels
Jason König
Chapter 7
Travelling In Europe, Exploring Greek Identity: Orientalism And
Occidentalism in the Diary of Constantine Karatzas (1790-1792)
Charalampos Minaoglou
Chapter 8
Perceptions of Ancient Remains in Ottoman Anatolia in The Mid-Nineteenth
Century: Modernity, Local Society, And Diverse Ways of Being Greek
Aye Ozil
Chapter 9
The Travel Journal of James Thoburn in The Ottoman Empire (1793-1798)
Michael Metcalfe
Alexia Petsalis-Diomidis is Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of St Andrews. She researches classical material culture in the Greek world, and its reception in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The body and travel are major themes in her work. She searches out marginalised voices and explores intimate, small-scale encounters with objects. Her publications include Drawing the Greek Vase (co-editor C. Meyer, Oxford University Press,2023), The Classical Vase Transformed. Consumption, Reproduction, and Class in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain (with E. Hall, Oxford University Press, 2020), and Truly beyond Wonders. Aelius Aristides and the Cult of Asklepios (Oxford University Press, 2010).
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