Ottoman Athens

Although Ottoman studies have flourished significantly over the last decades, the Ottoman past of today’s Greece remains little examined. Partially due to the lack of primary sources, or, as modern scholarship shows, the lack of known and well-preserved and catalogued sources, knowledge of many aspects of the Ottoman presence in the Greek territory, including architecture, administration, and everyday life, is scarce. Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, the Ottoman past had been systematically neglected. Traditional historiography of the 19th and early 20th centuries associated the Ottoman occupation with mere vandalism and perceived the Ottoman centuries as the dark ages of “Greece.” Despite the attempts of several scholars to disentangle Ottoman history from such approaches, it is only very recently that the field has shifted towards a new and more concrete understanding of the Ottoman centuries. Instead of considering the Ottoman past as alien, modern scholars capable of conducting research in both Greece and Turkey focus on continuities and try to make sense of the Ottoman administration in today’s Greece, outside ideologically biased perceptions.