2. The Place

Ottoman Athens

Before the Revolution, the town of Athens was clustered round the north and north-eastern slopes of the Acropolis, as shown in Figure 2.1.

Figure 2.1. ‘Athens from the foot of Mt Anchesmus’ (ancient and modern Lycavettos). Coloured aquatint, from a view made on the spot, c.1810.¹

During the hot summer months, the Acropolis appeared as a grey rock, standing among its olive groves and fruit orchards in a brown, dusty, landscape. According to a visitor in 1819, the oil that was destined for export was carried in goatskins, specially made, in which the head of the animal was cut off but the neck and front legs remained, so that they could be strapped to the sides of donkeys, a more effective and economical means of transport, especially by land, than the heavy amphorae found in ancient shipwrecks, and one that may have been used in ancient times but has left no trace in the archaeological or literary record.²

The town was not visible from ships at sea. It was because many mariners from western countries saw the Acropolis but not the town that a story had taken root in western countries that Athens, like Troy, had ceased to exist. Athens had, some apparently authoritative printed works reported, been destroyed by the Turks, an error prolonged by the business practices of the printed book industry that encouraged the copyright holders of the printers’ guilds to reprint old texts long after they had been factually superseded.³ William Lithgow, for example, who visited Athens in 1609, felt the need to assure the readers of his book that ‘Athens is still inhabited.’⁴

The Acropolis physically dominated the cityscape and the surrounding landscape as far as the eye could see in all directions, as it had done since ancient times. Surrounded by steep cliffs and walls on three sides, the single entrance to the Acropolis was on the west side and although built for an era long before gunpowder, in the eighteenth century it was still formidable. Since almost all the military works and walls round which the fighting occurred during the Greek Revolution were removed in the nineteenth century, we are now mostly dependent on written historical accounts and on pictures made before the removals.⁵ The picture shown as Figure 2.2, for example, made shortly before the Revolution, shows how a complex of walls and outworks offered a sense of impregnability.

Figure 2.2. The Acropolis of Athens from the west, by Heinrich Hübsch, 1819. Tinted aquatint published in Denmark with commentary in Danish.⁶

The castellations on the ancient walls gave it a western European appearance, like many of the Crusader Castles of the Levant and the Middle East, a fortress implanted into the landscape not for the defence of the local population but as a means of domination.⁷ The castellations had mostly been added by the Frankish princes who took control of Athens from the local Byzantine archbishop as part of the spoils after the Fourth Crusade destroyed Constantinople/Byzantium in 1204, and by their successors.⁸ They were to be used in the Revolution, both as firing and as lookout points, but were taken down soon afterwards as part of the Hellenizing of the view.⁹ Visible on the left of the image is the tall structure, now known as the Frankish Tower, that had been built at some time, now thought to be during the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries, to give the defenders of the Acropolis a longer view and therefore more notice of impending danger than was available from standing on the tops of the ancient buildings. It was to be removed after 1874 as part of the transformation of the Acropolis from military fortress to heritage site.¹⁰ This image, taken with that shown as Figure 2.1, and many others, reminds us that in antiquity, as in the long eighteenth century, the Parthenon was not visible from the parts of the town where most daily life took place. It could be seen from far away, both locally in Attica and from other acropolises, notably that of Corinth, from the temple on the heights of Aegina, and from far out to sea. But it was only visible from close up to those who were able to visit the Acropolis. In ancient times, this occurred mainly when they were participating in festivals.¹¹

It appears to have been as recently as 1805 that the Ottoman authorities completed the defensive works on the walls and the ground level outworks that had been made necessary by their experience of the temporary loss of the Acropolis to a western army led by General Francesco Morosini, in 1687–1688.¹² A marble inscription in Ottoman Turkish claiming the credit for Mustapha Effendi was identified in 1924 as having been carved on a slab that had once been part of the Erechtheion architrave.¹³ Another Ottoman inscription that declared that the Giaours, that is, the Christians, would never again possess the Acropolis was set above the outermost of the three gates on the road from the town. I only know of it because it is mentioned by an American linguist, Henry M. Baird, who spent a year in Athens in the 1850s, travelling with a Turkish interpreter.¹⁴ In the eighteenth century the Muslim population of Athens and elsewhere in Greece spoke Greek as their first language, and few would have been able to read it.¹⁵ Although these public inscriptions were designed, composed, and placed with the specific intention of influencing every visitor to the Acropolis, they had little power to prime the minds of viewers, either local or visiting. They were still there, being seen but not viewed, mute stones with no-one to voice them, long after the other more conspicuously visual markers of the former Muslim presence, such as the minarets of the mosques and the gravestones in the Muslim cemetery, had been destroyed or removed.¹⁶

Figure 2.3 shows the entrance to the Acropolis on the eve of the Revolution.

The picture shows the then disdar (military commander of the Acropolis), accompanied by a holy man (‘dervish’) and a servant. As can be seen within the image, a number of small artillery pieces were mounted on the walls. Another gun is recorded as placed on the wall overlooking the Serpenji where the main water cistern was located, making altogether ‘four miserable guns’ in the phrase of a visitor in May 1812.¹⁷ However, on the eve of the Revolution, any hostile force approaching along the paved way to the main entrance gate could have been stopped by a single piece of ordnance and a few men with muskets or swords. The glimpse of the Frankish Tower shows one of its roles, as a prison with a grilled window. And the figure carrying a jar, perhaps a slave, reminds us of how dependent the Acropolis was on supplies brought from outside with the help of human and animal power. The drinking water was taken up daily in earthenware jars strapped to horses and donkeys.¹⁸

Figure 2.3. ‘View of the West front of the Propylaia at Athens’. Copper engraving. Published in 1830 from a drawing made in 1818 by the architect William Kinnard.¹⁹

It may not always have been so. Evliya Çelebi, author of a long book of observations of the Ottoman Empire, known as Seyahatname, who visited in 1667, twenty years before the Parthenon was damaged, noted that: ‘when rain falls on these marble roof-tiles [of the Parthenon], it runs off by cunningly incised channels into a cistern […] so there is plenty of fresh cold water for the thirsty congregation.’²⁰ Other eyewitnesses also record seeing the marble plates, although among those accounts that are at present known, only Evliya mentions the purpose of collecting rainwater.²¹ Although, as has been remarked by a modern editor, Evliya had a ‘vivid and colourful imagination’, and is recorded as suggesting, for example, that the Bosphorus was a canal built by Alexander of Macedon to connect the Black Sea with the Mediterranean, he had on his extensive travels visited seven thousand Ottoman fortresses and taken part in many campaigns. He may therefore have been more aware of the military importance of access to water than the local authors and western topographers who recorded what they saw in Athens before 1687, and understood that marble plates would enable water to be collected.²² If the commissioners, architects, and builders of the classical Parthenon had found ways, however expensive, of making the Acropolis more self-sufficient in water than it had previously been, they had gone far to cure a weakness that had caused the fortress to be captured more than once in what to them were earlier years. In ancient times an acropolis without water was almost a contradiction, like an acropolis without walls, scarcely an acropolis at all. We may also have here a contribution towards an answer to a question that has seldom been asked in modern times. Why did the builders of the classical Parthenon choose to flaunt a story of the lack of potable water on the Acropolis on the most visible of all the stories in stone presented on the building, the west pediment?²³

During the Ottoman centuries when the Acropolis was home to Ottoman soldiers and their families the non-potable water that was available at some times of year on the summit probably provided the place for the ritual washing that was required of Muslims before taking part in the rituals in the mosque. The non-potable water also seems to have supplied a cesspool on the north slope where archaeologists in the 1930s found over 1,500 Ottoman era coins, each a misfortune for somebody who had taken down his or her baggy trousers at the allotted place.²⁴

Haseki’s Wall and Siege Warfare

In 1778 the local authorities of Athens decided that the town needed greater protection against the increasing raids by marauders arriving by land or sea. Haseki’s wall, as it was called locally from the name of the Ottoman governor (voivode) then in power,²⁵ was thus hurriedly erected. This fortification was nearly four English miles in circumference, eight feet high, and included six gates that were normally left open even at night. About twenty towers, mainly made of wood, set at intervals within shouting distance of one another, were about twice the height of the wall.²⁶ In times of danger, they could be climbed with ladders and be used as viewing stations from which to look outwards in all directions. If an attempt at an incursion seemed imminent, the towers could be employed as command centres from which operations could be directed by, for example, rushing men to the threatened sections of the wall and mobilizing women and others to carry baskets of débris with which to fill in any breaches. For the few local inhabitants, almost all Muslims, who were legally permitted to have firearms, or to whom firearms could be issued in an emergency, enfilade fire could prevent marauders from approaching. And, even if some managed to enter the town by breaching the wall, if the townspeople held together, it was impossible for them to get out again, let alone to carry away any booty they may have seized, whether provisions, weapons, or persons. In some places the wall was set forward from the built-up area, leaving open spaces available for the cultivation of crops and the grazing of animals, and so providing a measure of food security in case the town was cut off.²⁷ According to a British army officer who visited Athens a few years after the wall was completed, it was intended to defend the town ‘from the irruptions of the Albanians, who are ever ready for a revolt, and have several times plundered the town.’²⁸

Haseki’s wall, built by forced labour, was adequate in a situation where the only weapons available to marauders were swords, daggers, pikes, and a few muskets. Walls of this kind, which accorded with a standard Ottoman pattern, were a cheap way of improving internal security in the provinces of the Ottoman Empire where lawlessness was endemic. Against armies, Haseki’s wall was less effective. Unsubstantial though it was, however, a few defenders could still prevent any breaches from being exploited at least for a while. When the Ottoman army under the command of Reschid Mehmed Pasha (Reşid Mehmed Pasha), the Seraskier (Ottoman military commander) often known in Greece as Kiutahi from the place of his birth in Asia, arrived outside Athens in 1826, it took thirty-four days during which the wall was bombarded with artillery by day, making breaches that the defenders filled in by night, before the town was eventually captured.²⁹

This form of slow siege warfare was not much different from the practice of western European armies in western Europe during the early modern period, for example, in the sieges of towns in the Netherlands by Spanish armies. Success was normally as much a matter of the length of a time a blockade could be sustained as of military strength and fighting ability, a trial of the logistics as much as of weaponry and trained manpower. Success was dependent too on access to food and fodder for the haulage animals, as well as to drinking water, to firewood, and on taking measures to contain the risks of epidemic illnesses to which all sides in a conflict were often exposed.

In the spring of 1818, just three years before the outbreak of the Greek Revolution, there was earth heaped against Haseki’s wall at various places to help people scramble across, as well as ‘a large hole … through which a short man might walk upright.’ When, in that year, news arrived that a plague was raging in Thebes to the north and later in Megara to the west, the voivode refused repeated requests from the populace and the foreign consuls to shut the gates, close the gaps, and to post guards. When the death rate rose to eighty a month, and the situation presented itself as a choice between maintaining the economy or reducing the expected mortality level, the voivode declared that anyone who set up a guard at the town gates would be shot and that any shopkeeper who closed his shop would be bastinadoed. Only after the epidemic had been experienced for over a year, and following an intervention by the voivode of Negropont in whose jurisdiction Athens lay, guards were posted at the gates of Athens to turn away visitors from the infected areas, although western visitors were exempted.³⁰

In some places Haseki’s wall followed the course of earlier walls, with the builders making use of any materials that lay to hand, including pieces of ancient carved marble.³¹ In the early 1830s when de facto independence had been secured, the wall was soon being despoiled of the cut marble and dressed stones that were useful for the rebuilding of the town. By June 1834, just over a year after the last Ottoman soldiers left, the wall had ceased to exist.³² Occasional survivals, found in later archaeological excavations, such as that shown in Figure 2.4, confirm how insubstantial it had been.

Figure 2.4. Remains of Haseki’s wall, south slope of the Acropolis. Author’s photograph, 2018. CC BY.

What may be other remains of the wall can be seen near the entrance to the Acropolis as shown in Figure 2.5, although they may have been built later to prevent stones from being taken for reuse locally or, in the case of choice pieces of marble, for sale to foreign collectors and local agents.

Figure 2.5. Possible remains of Haseki’s wall. Author’s photograph, 2014. CC BY.

Athens and its Fortifications at the Time of the Revolution

During most periods in its history, Athens had been vulnerable both to sea pirates landing on the Attic coast and to bandits arriving by land. On the many occasions when the town had been threatened, some inhabitants had sought refuge in the Acropolis, but others had gone to the island of Salamis or to the caves in the mountains nearby in hope of sitting out the crisis. Lookouts on the Parthenon could see possible invaders before they reached the town from any direction, but could also see the places to which the people, when they had warning, had been able to flee.³³ Thucydides in the fifth century BCE had speculated that it was because the Acropolis lay a few miles inland that it had been chosen for human colonization at some remote age, a suggestion that archaeological findings from Neolithic times have tended to confirm.³⁴ At the time of the Greek Revolution, the local geography and the local micro-climate still imposed many of the same limitations, and offered some of the same opportunities, of ancient times.³⁵

Haseki’s wall incorporated Hadrian’s Gate, one of the ancient monuments of Athens that were architecturally largely unchanged since they were first built. A door was fitted and there was a platform for a lookout guard. A watercolour, initialled ‘A.M. 1821’, the year of the outbreak of the Revolution, made by an unidentified amateur British artist, is reproduced as Figure 2.6.

Figure 2.6. Hadrian’s Gate, 1821. Amateur watercolour.³⁶

During a war in 1808 between the Ottoman Empire and Russia, when Hadrian’s Gate was closed at night, a resident of Athens who found the door shut simply kicked it down.³⁷ In 1824, when Athens was temporarily in the hands of the Greek Revolutionary forces, the wall was sketched from a distance by another amateur, Archibald Black, a British naval surgeon, as shown as Figure 2.7.

Figure 2.7. ‘View of the Acropolis from the banks of the Illysus, Sep^r 1824’. Chromolithograph from a contemporary amateur picture.³⁸

This image brings out the military importance of another wall that ran up the Acropolis on the south slope, enclosing the area occupied by the ruins of the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, a site that had long been identified from remarks in ancient authors but had not yet been excavated. The ‘Serpenji’, as this enclosed area at the left of the picture was called, included wells from which poor-quality water could be extracted during some seasons of the year, plus a few cisterns, built centuries before, where the water could be stored. Enough vegetation grew in the Serpenji to enable animals to survive at least for a while.³⁹ Also visible in this image are the two ancient columns that stand above the Monument of Thrassylos, and the caves below, all accessible on foot.⁴⁰ During the Revolution, much of the fighting, including sorties, sapping and mining, and attempts to climb over the walls with ladders, as well as artillery bombardment, musketry, and hand-to-hand fighting with swords and daggers, was a struggle for control of this area of the Acropolis slopes.

Pictures made on the spot by amateurs sometimes record features that professional stay-at-home artists, trained in the conventions of the western topographical and picturesque traditions, tended to omit. Much the actuality was also lost in the transfer from an on-the-spot sketch to a monochrome line engraving prepared by the skilled men and women who produced the final version that circulated most widely, and who had their own professional ideas of how ruins should be visually presented. Black’s picture, for example, presents the sky over Athens in a pale shade of violet. Whether knowingly or inadvertently, Black’s picture celebrated Athens as the ‘violet crowned’, a phrase that Pindar had popularized in his celebration of Athens in the fifth century BCE.⁴¹

Haseki’s wall enabled the authorities in Athens to monitor and to tax commercial traffic in and out.⁴² His many acts of arbitrary, unfair, and cruel government made him rich enough to buy the well-watered estate at Patissia, but his rule led to an exodus of the population, complaints to Constantinople, and demands to have Haseki removed from office. He was later put to death by the Ottoman authorities and his head displayed on the imperial gate at Constantinople.⁴³ Under the Ottoman system, it was possible for Orthodox communities to appeal against local officials, both directly and through the intervention of the Patriarch, with some prospect of success, but the process was time-consuming, presumably expensive, and complaining about maladministration was risky.

Views and Maps of the Acropolis Before and During the Revolution

Before the Revolution those allowed to visit the summit found a small town, with gardens, home to the families of the soldiers. According to Hugh William Williams, an artist whose account of his visit in 1817 four years before the Revolution reports no pre-rumblings of the imminent shock, the buildings and houses on the Acropolis summit were constructed with clay and marble, ‘the marble looking doleful through the mud.’⁴⁴

The commandant’s house can also be seen in a view of the summit by Edward Dodwell c.1805 reproduced as Figure 2.7. This picture, made before the Greek Revolution when many of the houses were damaged by bombardment or stripped of their wood for making fires for cooking, and when the trees were also cut down, is among the fullest images known of the Acropolis when it was still a living town.

Figure 2.8. ‘The West Front of the Parthenon and the Erechtheion’. Coloured aquatint from a drawing by Edward Dodwell. Wikimedia Commons, public domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_west_front_of_the_Parthenon_and_the_Erechtheion,_from_the_Propylaea_-_Dodwell_Edward_-_1819.jpg

Another view, made before Elgin’s removals that began in 1801 is reproduced as Figure 2.9.

Figure 2.9. ‘View of the Eastern Portico of the Temple of Minerva, at Athens, called the Parthenon’. Copper engraving.⁴⁵

The chimney-like structures to be seen on top of some of the houses, a common feature across the Middle East, were designed to catch any breezes, draw the air down, and to help to cool the interiors.

Figure 2.10 shows another view of the town on the Acropolis, taken in 1765 that gives a reasonably realistic view of the east end of the Parthenon before the removals by the agents of Lord Elgin. According to Sir Richard Worsley, who published the engraving in his book, when he visited in 1785, ‘no further dilapidations had taken place.’⁴⁶ From this picture it emerges that at the east end of the summit, the furthest from the entrance gate, were some substantial buildings that, from their design, predated the Ottoman takeover in the fifteenth century, including what are probably stables.⁴⁷ There were however more houses than were needed by the garrison, some of whose members lived in the lower town when not on duty, and many houses on the Acropolis were untenanted.⁴⁸

Figure 2.10. ‘View of the Parthenon, shewing the situation of the sculptures of the metopes and the frieze’. Copper engraving.⁴⁹

In 1825 or 1826, when Athens and the Acropolis were under the control of the Greek insurgents, and an attack by the Ottoman army was expected, the local commander, Yannis Gouras, commissioned an experienced French officer to prepare a military map of Athens that is also helpful in understanding what happened in Athens and its monuments during the Revolutionary War. A copy is reproduced as Figure 2.11.

Figure 2.11. ‘Plan d’Athènes levé en 1826 par ordre du général Gourrhas. Par J.F. Bessan … donnant l’emplacement précis des ruines antiques existantes à cette époque et les constructions nouvelles qui ont été faites pour sa défense’. Lithograph, hand-tinted at the time it was made.⁵⁰

A detail showing the Acropolis is at Figure 2.12.

Figure 2.12. Detail from Bessan’s map (Figure 2.11 above), showing the Acropolis.

From the numerous accounts by eyewitnesses, we can say with confidence that much of the detail is not accurate. Anyone with military knowledge understood that in any siege it was vital to ensure that the gunpowder magazines were protected from hot shot aimed at igniting them. The Propylaia had been badly damaged in 1640 in time of peace when the gunpowder stored in the building was ignited apparently accidentally by lightning.⁵¹ The Parthenon, which had previously been structurally complete since ancient times, had been reduced to a ruin in 1687 when a mortar bomb fired by a besieging force penetrated the roof, set off an explosion, killed many people, and caused a fire that the besieged army, with little water, had no means of extinguishing. When the invading western army of General Morosini heard that the Parthenon was being used to store explosives, it had needed only ‘a small number of shots’ to hit the Parthenon with a mortar.⁵²

With two ancient buildings destroyed by gunpowder explosions, the third and last, the Erechtheion, had been adapted into a gunpowder magazine by the Ottoman forces at some time before the Revolution. Since the whole Acropolis was within range of artillery shelling from the hills that lay just outside the town wall, and the Ottoman army, famed for its modern artillery, was able to send shots into defended structures, it was vital to protect the magazine.⁵³ The careful precautions against the risk of the gunpowder being set alight by accident or by bombardment, that involved enclosing a chamber in the Erechtheion with marble blocks, so that it offered only one small entrance, and how the magazine was further protected by a brick vault of uncertain age within, were described by the British architect Joseph Woods in a letter written during his visit in 1818.⁵⁴ The gunpowder magazine was still in use when Edward Blaquiere visited the Acropolis on 24 July 1824, with the Greek Revolutionaries who were then in possession, having not yet found a safer place.⁵⁵ There is a report that the magazine was moved, although where it was located during the months of bombardment of 1826/27 is not known.⁵⁶

The map also shows many more cannon mounted on the battlements than were ever deployed there during the Revolution.⁵⁷ The water cisterns on the summit, that Yannis Gouras had had cleaned and filled in the years between 1822 and 1826, are marked as larger and more numerous than they were, and the map gives no indication of the more important water cisterns on the slopes within the Serpenji that were also brought back into use at that time. The location of the commandant’s house on the Acropolis, that Gouras took over from the Ottoman disdar, in modern terms the command-and-control centre, appears also to have been misplaced.⁵⁸

The map, therefore, cannot be trusted. It is as if it were intended to mislead both friends and the enemies about the military strength of the Acropolis. Whatever its exact status and intended viewerships, with its picturesque vignettes of the ruins of Athens, mostly copied from eighteenth century engravings, the map is, if not a ruse de guerre, certainly a document of persuasion, aimed both at local participants in the war and at philhellenic viewers in France and elsewhere who supplied armaments, money, and military expertise.

Unusually, however, we also now have a map prepared by the Ottoman authorities during the Greek Revolution.⁵⁹ The main inscription reads: “This is a Map of the Castle of Athens including the city and the protective wall, conquered with the help of Almighty God”. This is followed by the date 11 Zilkade 1242 Hegira year, corresponding in the western European calendar to 6 June 1827, the date on which the Acropolis was surrendered to Reschid’s forces. There is however also another date, the Ottoman equivalent of 13 October 1826, that implies that the map was prepared earlier, during the period when the Acropolis was in the hands of the Greek Revolutionaries. What relationship the Ottoman map bears to that prepared by Bessan is not yet certain.⁶⁰ It too appears to show more cisterns and mounted artillery than was ever there. But by contrast it shows no interest at all in the ancient monuments. On the eve of the Greek Revolution, to the western visitors, and increasingly to the leaders of local Orthodox population, the Parthenon was a ruin inside which the Muslims had built a mosque. To the Ottomans it was a mosque surrounded by the ruins of a building constructed long ago by an idolatrous people whose civilization the Christians had superseded.

Places of Worship and Greek Cultural Heritage

In 1809, thirteen years before the outbreak of the Revolution, Athens was said to contain one Greek Orthodox cathedral (the ‘little metropolitan’), plus thirty-nine churches and over eighty Christian chapels, including several in the caves on the Acropolis slopes, that were only occasionally in use.⁶¹ According to an English churchman who made inquiries on the spot in 1818, there were thirty churches with their own priest, and around three hundred chapels and shrines.⁶² There were eleven mosques including some with minarets, a small mosque that had been built in the early eighteenth century inside the recently ruined Parthenon, and numerous Muslim shrines. In 1678, Evliya had counted four ‘Friday mosques’, that is, mosques in regular use for weekly services, including the small one built inside the ruined Parthenon, seven neighbourhood mosques, one religious school, three primary schools, three dervish convents, and three Turkish baths.⁶³ The tallest working building in Athens, which dominated the skyline of the lower town, was the mosque known as Fethiye, that had been adapted from a Christian basilica at the time when Sultan Mehmet the Second came to Athens in 1456, after his armies had taken Constantinople in 1458 and who had guaranteed the position of the Orthodox Church. It survives today, although desacralized and without its minaret. A new mosque was built in central Athens in 1759.⁶⁴ From viewing stations inland, many of the dozen or so monuments surviving from antiquity were visible among the domes of the churches and the minarets of the mosques.⁶⁵

The visual influence of places of worship extended beyond the buildings themselves. An industry producing visual images for display in Orthodox Christian churches and in private homes had existed in and around Athens for centuries before the Revolution, part of a network of picture-makers that served Orthodox communities in the eastern Mediterranean region.⁶⁶ With few exceptions, the only forms of image that the Orthodox ecclesiastical authorities permitted were in two dimensions and the only allowable content were stories of the early history of the religion and of its saints, martyrs, and heroes, which their viewers easily recognized by standard markers whose conventions, learned as part of childhood education, were shared by consumers and producers.

Within some churches, or in the entrance chambers, it also became a custom to display images of sinners suffering in hell alongside the anti-heroes of the religion, such as Judas Iscariot who had betrayed Jesus, and the Byzantine Emperor Julian who had tried to reverse the policy of Christianization of the Emperor Constantine, who had led a successful rebellion by marching an army into Rome and defeating the sitting emperor at the battle of the Milvian bridge in 312 CE.⁶⁷ Some entrance chambers pictured persons whom they regarded as contemporary adversaries of their community such as the ‘schismatic’ Roman Catholics who had broken away from the Orthodox church, and occasionally Muslims.⁶⁸ On the Princes Islands in the sea of Marmara, within sight of the minarets of Constantinople, the French countess Isabelle de Ferté-Meun, who wrote a book about her life there in 1816 and 1817 during which, as the wife of an affluent Frank, with diplomatic privileges, she explored the churches and former churches, reported seeing dragomans in the picture of hell.⁶⁹

During the long eighteenth century, the painters of Athens appear to have been organized, as elsewhere, into guilds that regulated entry to the industry, supervised the training, settled internal disputes, and generally managed standards, prices, and production. As is a feature of guilds, perhaps the commonest form of industrial organization in most societies before modern times, the membership appears to have included a large hereditary element as boys learned their trade from assisting their fathers and uncles in their workshops, while those who showed unusual promise were apprenticed to experienced masters beyond the family. The guilds maintained the prototypes or patterns (‘anthibola’), a system of pictorial control inherited from the time of the Byzantine Empire, explicitly recorded as early as 1436 in one of the few non-ecclesiastical primary contemporary texts surviving from that time, the will of the painter Angelo Acontato.⁷⁰ Since the painters were exclusively drawn from the Orthodox community, and their main customers were those who had responsibility for church buildings, they were, in practice, forbidden to produce non-religious images except in territories outside the Ottoman millet system—a system in which the Muslim, Orthodox, Armenian, Coptic, Maronite, Jewish, and other religious communities were accorded a large degree of autonomy under the supervision of their religious leaders.⁷¹ The guilds can thus be regarded as a branch of the Orthodox jurisdiction in pre-Revolutionary Ottoman Greece. El Greco, for example, often regarded as a painter in the western sense of the Spanish school, produced images in both traditions.⁷²

Many of the pictures to be seen in Athens before the Revolution were produced in workshops on church-owned premises, such as monasteries in the hills or in small offshore islands, where valuable materials, such as gold leaf, could be kept secure from theft by outsiders, and to a lesser extent, embezzlement by insiders. The industry, whose customers were also its regulators, enjoyed a monopoly guaranteed by the Ottoman state and controlled both the stock of fixed capital and the human resources employed, so enabling the authorities of the guild to regulate the output, the pricing, and the visual content. For many centuries before the Greek Revolution, the only non-ecclesiastical visual images that the local Orthodox population encountered were those made by foreigners. In a few locations, notably Athens, foreign artists were frequently to be seen making the sketches that, when worked up in studios and workshops abroad, would become paintings and engravings^.73

The changing religions of the city’s population were also reflected in the use, reuse and disuse of some of its buildings. Figure 2.6 shows how the alterations made to Hadrian’s Gate and the nearby section of the town wall had included blocks of finely cut marble. They had been recycled from the small classical-era building now known as the ‘Ionic temple on the Ilissus’, that had been situated in what was then open country nearby, close to the river of that name. That temple had been converted into a church in the early Christian centuries, but had fallen into disuse as the population of Athens had shrunk. It can be seen in the picture shown as Figure 2.13.

Figure 2.13. ‘The Ionic Temple on the Ilisus’. Copper engraving.⁷⁴

The men pictured are the voivode and his party on a hunting trip, an event that might have happened in ancient times, an example of a long continuity that convinced eighteenth-century visitors to Athens that the ‘Nature’ they found in Greece was largely unchanged since antiquity. Although the strangely shaped building had long ago been identified by western visitors as among those described by the ancient author Pausanias in the second century CE as a fine classical-era building that had been in active use for over two thousand years, the engraving is the only picture ever made.⁷⁵

Figure 2.13 also brings out how, at some time after the end of antiquity, more than a thousand years earlier, the Orthodox Christians who had been accorded a formal monopoly over religious practices in the Byzantine Empire visually asserted the drastic change from ancient Hellenic practice. By adapting the architectural design from walls, columns, and lintels made of marble, to the shape of a domed basilica made in part from bricks and tiles, they had transformed a sacred building in whose vicinity in ancient times ceremonies involving the killing, roasting, and eating of animals were performed by participants in the open air, into an indoor darkened space within whose walls Christian rites were performed by professional priests in the presence of a congregation of the local community. As with the Parthenon on the Acropolis, so with the Theseion in the town, and other ancient temples turned into churches elsewhere, the leaderships of the Christian theocracy had brought religion indoors.⁷⁶

With the slow decline in the population of Athens, the church of ‘St Mary on the Rock’, as the adapted Ionic temple was called, had ceased to be in regular use by June 1669.⁷⁷ It was dismantled in the late 1760s by order of the Archbishop and Orthodox authorities of Athens, the money raised from the sale of the building materials being used to finance the construction of churches within the town.⁷⁸ Richard Chandler, whose main purpose in visiting Greece was to report on how far any monuments from antiquity still survived, predicted in 1765 that it would soon be gone altogether as ‘the materials will be removed, as wanted.’⁷⁹ When Baron Riedesel visited Athens in 1768, all that remained was a single column with its Ionic capital.⁸⁰ What little then remained was demolished by Haseki to provide materials for the town wall.⁸¹ The church was replaced by a small chapel where, on the saint’s day, a detachable icon was set up and removed after the ceremonies were over.⁸²

At the time of the abandonment and demolition of the Ionic temple, there was evidently little sense among the Greek Orthodox population of Athens that the ancient building had any claim to be preserved, let alone that their contemporary identity was related to the ruins of ancient Hellas.⁸³ Scattered evidence has been found of a memory of the pre-Christian past persisting among the country people who had little contact with the foreign visitors and whose opinions may therefore have claims to have been indigenous in the sense of being uninfluenced by intellectual developments in western Europe, and may possibly be indications of continuity. The tombs disturbed by the ploughs of the country people were said to be those of legendary, semi-supernatural giants, as tall as poplar trees, of ‘Hellenes’ who could leap across rivers in one stride, and pick up marble blocks with one hand and throw them from island to island. The epic poem Erotokritos, written in the early seventeenth century and evidently reflecting the official ecclesiastical teaching and implicit censorship of that time, noted that the ‘Hellenes’ had not been Christians, and their religion had neither roots nor foundations.⁸⁴ In 1809, John Galt, who drew his information from Padre Paolo, the superintendent of the building belonging to the Roman Catholic Capuchins, who had lived in Athens for decades, recorded that the Albanians who did most of the agricultural work frequently came across pieces of sculpture that, in accordance with their religion, they always destroyed, ‘believing them to be works of the devil, framed in order to tempt mankind to return again to idolatry’. Galt, as a member of the Scottish Presbyterian Church whose members had destroyed many images at the time of the Protestant Reformation, fully approved.⁸⁵

The loss of the Ionic temple was referred to by Lord Elgin as evidence of the alleged indifference of the people of Athens to the ancient monuments at the time his agents were active, and as an assessment of local Orthodox attitudes in the middle of the eighteenth century, it may have been fair.⁸⁶ Nor is there any reason to doubt Elgin’s claim that the Archbishop of Athens cooperated in allowing Elgin’s agents to search church properties for ancient sculptures and inscriptions built into the walls (‘spolia’), and that he had had the Archbishop’s authority to remove them.⁸⁷ Many others were allowed to take away antiquities, statues, inscriptions, painted pottery, coins, and other antiquities, including jewellery and other grave goods without restriction, although gifts were normally given as part of the transactions.

A Changing View of the Classical Past

The first mention of the ancient monuments being invoked as symbols of a newly emerging nationalism that I have found in my research is in a petition made to the Russian Empress Catherine by a number of overseas Greeks in April 1790 asking for Russian help in throwing off Muslim rule: ‘our superb ruins speak to our eyes and tell us of our ancient grandeur.’⁸⁸ However, a few decades would pass before these views took root, as both the Orthodox Church and the Ottoman rulers held very different views of the Classical past.

From its earliest stirrings, Enlightenment-inspired talk of ‘liberty’ arriving in Ottoman territories from the time of the French Revolution had been condemned by the Orthodox patriarchs as ‘an ambush of the Devil’ designed to lead the people to destruction by enticing them from their lawful, that is, their Ottoman, rulers.⁸⁹ The Ottoman Empire, Patriarch Anthimos declared, had been created by the Christian god to protect the true, that is, the Orthodox, Christians from the schismatic Roman Catholics who had broken away from the Church in 1054 CE.⁹⁰ In 1793 and again in 1798, the Patriarchate of Constantinople condemned the importation of western Enlightenment ideas and the printed books that carried them. In deciding to take up arms, the insurgents of 1821 were therefore in revolt not only against the Ottoman Empire, but they were defying the leadership of the institution on which their identity had been re-founded and preserved for around fifteen hundred years. Even in 1828, when Greek national independence had been secured in all but name, the Patriarchate of Constantinople was demanding that the Orthodox return to their allegiance.⁹¹

As for the Ottoman attitudes to the ancient ruins, the official Muslim discourse was that all representational images were forbidden and ‘idolatrous.’ In this regard the Muslims followed the texts of the ancient Jewish and Judaeo-Christian bibles, among the most influential of which were the reported opinions of Paul of Tarsus, whose speech in Athens was repeated and built on by many early Christian writers.⁹² In the Koran (‘Qur’an’), the Prophet drives out the idolaters from Mecca and destroys their idols, just as in early Christian writings Paul and Philip are said to have destroyed the idols of Athens, and other saints, notably James, are said to have done the same in other Hellenic cities such as Ephesus. In the Koran there are other similarities with the early Christian discourses, including the association of statues with ‘demons’ and the ‘filth’ that refers to the ritual slaughter of animals and the spreading of the blood and some of the inedible parts for the gods.⁹³

It was possible, perhaps even common for Muslims, to claim to admire the works of some of the ancient Hellenic writers, notably Plato, while simultaneously condemning Hellenic visual images. So the firman⁹⁴ arranged by Elgin in 1801, a formal document that we can take as an example of official Ottoman and Muslim mainstream discourse at that time, of which I offer a new transcription and translation in Appendix A, refers to the Parthenon both as a place of the ‘philosophers’ [good] and as a temple of ‘idols’ [bad]. Evliya, in telling a story of how the Ottoman naval port of Negropont (Chalcis or Egriboz) was founded in the fifteenth century, describes the naval commander as acting ‘with the genius of Aristotle’, in cutting a way through the strait, capturing ten Venetian ships, and returning to Constantinople,’ having overturned the idols of the infidels, with their crosses.’⁹⁵ In these respects formal Islamic discourses had much in common with Christian discourses at the time of the Revolution. In practice, however, since many ancient buildings had been transformed into churches or mosques, as was the case with the Parthenon, they were religious buildings under Ottoman state protection as part of the millet settlement.

The Philhellenes and Their Influence

Philhellenism, the nexus of ideas that asserted the identity of the present day with the ancient Greeks, had made much progress, both in western European countries and among the Greek diaspora, during the eighteenth century. By 1763, perhaps as part of the modern European Enlightenment, we hear the beginnings of a local discourse of ‘our ancestors’, although at that time neo-Hellenism was still more of a literary movement led by foreigners and by westernised Orthodox Greeks living outside the Ottoman territories, mainly in Paris, Vienna, and Venice, than a local political or revolutionary project.⁹⁶

There are occasional indications of changes of attitude on the way. We hear, for example, of a deputy Pasha of the Morea who in 1809 ordered that a translation of the ancient Greek travel writer Pausanias into Romaic (modern Greek) should be made and who personally visited Athens, ‘in order to see, as he declared, himself, those remains and monuments which attracted so many Europeans so far from home.’⁹⁷

In 1813, however, as an example of the rapid progress of the idea, a number of prominent Athenians established the Philomuse Society that aimed to improve local education in the ancient Greek classics and to study and preserve antiquities.⁹⁸ It quickly established a library of about forty volumes, mostly about Greece, that visitors could use by paying a subscription. Four years earlier John Galt, who had brought no books with him, had lamented that he had had to rely on his memory, for ‘books are not to be purchased here.’⁹⁹

After the successful effort made in the century after independence to make the Athenian Acropolis the symbol of the new nation of Greece, and the constructing of a national history that used the ancient monuments as a heritage that connected the modern with the ancient Hellenes, it still comes as a surprise to discover how recent the change in attitudes to the monuments had been.¹⁰⁰ Immediately after the end of the Revolutionary War, for example, Ioannes Makriyannis, one of the most famous of its heroes, in memoirs begun in 1829 but not printed till 1907, is said to have told some soldiers who were about to sell ancient statues to Europeans: ‘You should not let these leave our country […] For it is for these we fought.’¹⁰¹ The Greek soldier, Peter Mengous, who took part in many campaigns, and whose autobiography is less influenced by hindsight than the oral histories written down by famous commanders, records his searching for antiquities to sell to foreigners, including a marble bust of Socrates and a marble relief of three female figures. He writes of his business in matter-of-fact terms without any suggestion that he was caught in a dilemma, let alone that he was being disloyal to the aims of the Revolution.¹⁰²

One sign that Greek perceptions of identity before and during the Revolution were shifting was the growing practice of naming children after the famous men and women of ancient Athens rather than the traditional Orthodox Christian saints, a trend the Church authorities tried to halt. In 1818, for example, Demetrios Zographos, who gave lodgings to visitors from the West, had named his sons Miltiades, Themistocles, Alcibiades, and Pericles, and his daughter Aspasia.¹⁰³ Koraes himself, however, one of the intellectual fathers of neo-Hellenism, never called himself a Hellene, nor did he use ‘Hellenes’ except when referring to the ancients.¹⁰⁴ In the Revolution many insurgents called themselves ‘Hellenes’ from the start, so distinguishing themselves from their Orthodox co-religionists, using language to splinter off a component of the previous identity.¹⁰⁵

The Acropolis as a Symbol of a New Greek Identity

Before the Revolution the Acropolis, as an imperial military fortress, was administered direct from the court in Constantinople, formally the sultan himself through firmans sent by the grand vizier, the highest official of the Empire. The commander of the Acropolis, the disdar, a low-ranking officer of much the same military status as a sergeant in a western army, was not answerable to the local governors of the towns and provinces, the voivodes and pashas, but only to the military authorities. As part of his responsibilities, he ensured that nothing could be removed from the Acropolis or altered without specific authority from Constantinople. And if the fortress were attacked or besieged, without specific permission, it was not open to local commanders to make terms of surrender.¹⁰⁶ Apart from a few months in 1688/89, when the Acropolis had been occupied and then abandoned by a western army under the command of the Venetian general Morosini, its international legal status had not changed since it had been surrendered by the ruling Italian ducal family to the forces of Sultan Mehmet the Second in 1458, shortly after his army had taken Constantinople in 1453.¹⁰⁷ Already by the early modern period, with the arrival of gunpowder, firearms, and artillery in the form of cannon and later of mortars and howitzers, its military limitations had been exposed. But, while what is now called its ‘hard power’ had steadily declined, in the eyes of the arriving westerners its symbolic and cultural ‘soft power’ was on the rise.

From the reports of travellers we can detect a shift from maintaining the Acropolis as a fortress from which foreigners were excluded to exploiting it as an income-generating tourist attraction. Removals of antiquities, however, continued to be forbidden. In 1786, for example, Lady Craven, seeing the many fragments of sculpture from the Parthenon lying on the summit, was refused permission to take ‘even a finger or a toe.’ The disdar, even after a long negotiation, said that if he agreed he would have his head struck off.¹⁰⁸

The Ottoman documents that are now available relating to the firman that allowed a large part of Elgin’s collection to be exported from Ottoman jurisdiction in 1809 make no reference to the fact that the terms of the firman of 1801 were exceeded. Nor do they reveal any concern about the nature of the contents of the collection as pieces taken from ancient buildings. They treated the matter not as one of idolatry or incipient local nationalism, let alone as national heritage, but as foreign properties sequestrated during the recent war now being returned to owners as part of the peace settlement.¹⁰⁹

What is striking, at first sight, is to find in an intercepted letter to the sultan from Reschid Pasha, the Ottoman commander who besieged the Acropolis in 1826/7, that it was western philhellenes who had come to Greece to fight who are castigated as idolatrous, and the monuments of Athens the object of their idolatry. It was the Acropolis that brought them: ‘to fight with their Greek co-religionists and offer their impure blood in sacrifice to vile and dumb idols that they appreciate and worship in their deplorable ignorance.’¹¹⁰ Reschid writes like Paul of Tarsus, Augustine of Hippo, Tertullian, and the image-haters of the western European churches who had split from the Roman Catholics as part of the European Protestant Reformation who drew their ideas from the early Christian writings and re-performed them both in their words and in their deeds.¹¹¹ Reschid was, however, picking up on a more general point: the Muslims had their mosques, the Orthodox had their churches, and the Jews their synagogues. To the Franks from Europe, the Parthenon and other ancient buildings were being increasingly perceived and presented not quite as modern temples to modern gods but as ‘works of art’ to be ‘rapturously’ admired and adored in much the same language.¹¹²

The extent to which the Greek Orthodox population visited the Acropolis, except occasionally as workmen or as guides or servants of visitors, is hard to judge, but they had little reason to go there even if regular access had been permitted, as seems unlikely.¹¹³ Although all the inhabitants of Athens knew the ancient monuments of the town among which they lived, few would have regularly seen those inside the Acropolis. And it was only from outside the town wall that they saw the Parthenon, the distant and middle-distance view having apparently been those to which the ancient designers had given the highest priority. From the lands to the west, then mainly used for grazing, the west pediment was visible, as shown in Figure 2.13. However, it would have been difficult to make out much of the pedimental sculpture, from which the paint had long gone, even before it was damaged in the siege of 1687 and after almost all the remaining pieces were removed by Elgin’s agents after 1801. Although evidence is scanty, it seems likely too that, until the generation immediately before the Revolution, the ancient monuments were regarded by the Orthodox leaderships as of more importance to the Franks than to themselves. In, for example, the chronicle of the history of Athens until 1800 that was composed by the scholar Ioannes Benizelos at some time before 1821, he notes that the magnificent sculptures of the Parthenon ‘caused astonishment and admiration among all visitors’ without saying that he or other local people shared these feelings.¹¹⁴ And that appears to have also been the view of the Ottoman leaderships.

Elgin’s removals of pieces of the Parthenon and the other buildings on the Acropolis, made with the help of a team of about twenty locally recruited workmen, seem to have accelerated the change in local attitudes. According to Edward Dodwell, who had been present and who was generally well informed: ‘The Constantinopolitan patriarch has been induced by the Greeks, who are fondly anticipating the regeneration of their country, to issue circular orders to all the Greeks not to disturb any ancient remains; and neither to assist nor connive at their destruction nor removal, under pain of excommunication. The plunder of the Athenian temples was the cause of this necessary measure.’¹¹⁵ Since no text has been found and we only have a range for the date, we can only guess at the explanation that the Patriarch offered his subordinates, but we can be confident that he would not have publicly associated himself with talk of revolution.

The Ecosystem of the Acropolis 
Before the Revolution

Each year the hill of the Acropolis performed the regular cycle of the seasons. In the spring, its slopes blazed with wild violets, crocuses, and anemones, as it had done in ancient times.¹¹⁶ During the hot summer months, it appeared as a grey rock standing in a brown, treeless, dusty, landscape. This was still the same Athens, as the occasional tempests seemed to confirm, as had suffered a catastrophic flood in mythic times, one of the reasons why, as was reported by ancient authors, the first inhabitants had taken refuge in the caves of the Acropolis slopes.¹¹⁷

Athena’s owls, the main symbol on the coinage of the ancient city, still fluttered round the Acropolis.¹¹⁸ Snakes, another common symbol of ancient Athens, still lurked in the caves and crevices of the slopes, and the frogs still croaked ‘brek ek, co-ax, co-ax, co-ax’ as they had done in 405 BCE when Aristophanes had won first prize for his comedy, The Frogs. Thanks to the blog of Diana Gilliland Wright, you can now hear them too.¹¹⁹ During the summer months, Athens teemed with storks another continuity from ancient times. Their strange clicking noise, that you can also now hear, made a counterpoint to the Muslim calls to prayer from the minarets.¹²⁰

Before the Revolution, many families of storks arrived every year near the end of March.¹²¹ The domes of the mosques of Athens, crowned by the nests of the storks, were noticed by Chateaubriand when he caught his first distant sight of Athens in 1806. Having seen storks in his travels in Canada, they were, he concluded, a species, like the human, that was equally at home in all the continents and climates of the world.¹²² As he wrote: ‘In meeting with them again in another species of desert, on the ruins of the Parthenon, I could not forbear devoting a few words to my old friends.’¹²³ Chateaubriand’s mention of storks on the Parthenon makes him the only author since ancient times explicitly to notice them there, an example of the selecting eye eliding what the brain interprets as a an irrelevant or unwelcome intrusion. The storks of the Acropolis were, however, shown as incidental features in three engravings from sketches made on the spot by the young architect Charles Robert Cockerell in 1810. Two are reproduced, as they appeared in the book, slightly tinted, in Figures 2.14 and 2.15.

Figure 2.14. ‘North East Corner of the Parthenon’. Woodcut c.1831, Sargent del. Darin Smith sc. From a sketch by Cockerell, 1810.¹²⁴

Figure 2.15. ‘The Parthenon and Erectheum’. Woodcut c.1831 by J. Whimper, from a sketch by Cockerell, 1810.¹²⁵

The naturalist Sibthorp noted: ‘The domestic stork, a privileged bird, arrives regularly at Athens, sometimes in the month of March; and leaves it when the young are able to support the fatigues of a long flight, about the middle of August.’¹²⁶ According to the naturalist Frédéric Hasselquist, writing more than seventy years before, it was a capital offence for a Christian to kill a stork.¹²⁷ The storks of Athens, that were to be among the casualties of the Greek Revolution that was intended to restore the built heritage of classical Athens, had incidentally destroyed one of the features that some of the most highly regarded writers of that age, including Plato and Aristotle, had included in their world view and their understanding of the place of humans in that world.¹²⁸

Besides including the storks that other artists omitted, Cockerell gives us in Figure 2.16 a glimpse of how the little owls, that were even more central to the self-fashioning of classical Athens, were encountered as darting flashing pairs of eyes.¹²⁹

Figure 2.16. ‘The Parthenon from the East End’. Woodcut.¹³⁰

During the recent centuries for which we have records, domestic animals, including dogs, goats, donkeys, mules, and horses were kept on the summit, as were domestic fowls, as well as human activities including burials, all of which helped to fertilize and deepen the soil and to encourage the insects on which wild birds fed.¹³¹ During the nineteenth century, as was estimated at the time, 120,000 cubic metres of earth was removed from the summit and dispersed, as the site was excavated down to the bedrock.¹³² How much of that earth had remained from what was there before the summit was first settled in Neolithic times and how much was later accumulations, cannot now be determined. In ancient times too, however, the Acropolis summit was evidently a green space, almost a garden town, where wild birds shared the natural environment for their food and the human built environment for their nesting sites, a fact that deserves to be included in any attempt to recover ancient ways of seeing.¹³³ The ecological destruction of the Acropolis is discussed more fully in Chapter 21. It could not have been foreseen by the inhabitants of Athens on the eve of the Revolution whose lives we discuss in the following chapter.