3. The People
© 2022 William St Clair, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0136.03
Population
In 1820, when the outbreak of the Revolution was only a few months away, Athens was estimated to contain 1,200 to 1,300 houses, of which about two thirds were occupied by Orthodox Christian families and the rest by Muslims.1 The total population living within the town wall was estimated at around 10,000, but many women, men, and children went out to the fields to work and people living in the villages in the countryside visited Athens in a typical rural economy of inter-dependent town and country.2
There were a handful of larger dwellings, mostly belonging to the foreign consuls and their families, many of whom were members of the Roman Catholic Church. In some cases, the consular families had held their offices in an unbroken, quasi-hereditary arrangement that went back to the seventeenth century. By the time of the Revolution, however, few consuls had direct personal experience of the European countries whose commissions they held. They were financed by governments, by chartered trading companies, and by fees they charged for consular services, including the procurement and sale of antiquities.3 Altogether the resident Europeans (‘Franks’) of Athens amounted to about a dozen families in all.
Government and Leadership
In Ottoman imperial and economic terms, Athens was a place of little importance.4 Of the two million or so Greek Orthodox who lived in the Ottoman territories, Athens and its province of Attica counted for only about 20,000.
At the time the Revolution broke out, all inhabitants of the Ottoman territories owed formal allegiance, through hierarchies of office holders that converged at the imperial court.5 And most senior officials, religious as well as political, obtained their offices by purchase, their personal incomes dependent upon what was left after meeting official expenditures and paying off the purchase price, from the amount of rents, taxes, tythes, and other contributions that they were able to raise from the local people in their jurisdiction.6 Since everyone belonged to a religious community, the millet system enabled the Ottoman Government to exercise some indirect control over, and also to tax, the inhabitants of the Empire down to the poorest peasant, although with a high proportion going to the intermediaries.
Themistocles Philadelpheus, who wrote a history of Athens in the centuries before the Revolution with the help of the chronicle of Benizelos and other local records, notes the names of many eighteenth-century voivodes, with dates.7 The fact that most are described as ‘rapacious’ may be more than a general anti-Ottoman comment. The voivodes, like the Orthodox archbishop, bought their office from the Ottoman leadership in Constantinople, including the Patriarch, either with wealth accumulated earlier in their careers or by borrowing, and they knew that they were likely to have only a limited time to recoup their expenditure with a profit. Such arrangements enabled the central government to draw revenues from their territories, much of which was devoted to display, and, in effect, discouraging investment and enterprise, except possibly in shipping that is hard to tax.8 A voivode whom Robert Master met in 1819, two years before the outbreak of the Revolution, was: ‘an old man of 77 who has been four years married to a young wife and has two or three children. His salary is very small and he could not live upon it but for the gratuities he receives from English travellers.’9 At least one voivode was an Athenian who, although necessarily a Muslim retained his Greek name.10 An Italian-speaking settler called Lombardi, who intermediated between the Franks and the local Ottoman authorities, was accepted as a Muslim and given the honorific title of Dervish.11
Local disputes between Christians and Muslims went before another Ottoman official, the cadi, the religious judge who administered Muslim sharia law, in the name of the sultan among whose many titles was Calif. In the century before the Greek Revolution apart from those holding the key offices, the Muslim population of Athens were not, however, dominant. According to Ioannes Benizelos, a member of one of the leading Orthodox families, whose history of Athens written before the Revolution is the fullest locally-written eighteenth century record whose text has come down to us, his own and the other families governed the town as a hereditary aristocracy.12 They met regularly as a council to conduct the business of the town, and every Monday at the ‘little metropolitan’ Cathedral, along with the Archbishop, they settled disputes. On Fridays, the Muslim Sabbath, the archons made a formal call on the voivode and on the cadi. According to Benizelos, the minority Muslim community, who owned almost no land, were generally poor and deferred to the archons.13 Nor was this a recent change. That the Muslims of Athens were an underclass had been remarked upon in the 1660s by the Ottoman traveller Evliya who described them as ‘a despised group, with no standing or dignity, because the Christians are great merchants who have business partners in Frankistan’ (western Europe).14 Statistics of the head tax collected by the government from all adult non-Muslims show that the non-Muslims of Athens paid only around three per cent of the amount paid by the non-Muslims of Constantinople alone.15
Incomes in Athens, if converted into western currencies, were small, but since provisions were cheap, and many families grew much of their own food, real living standards were higher than those in many places in the west, for example, in Ireland.16 During the eighteenth century, whatever benefits the Orthodox church may have brought to the souls of people of Athens, a high proportion of the local economic output went towards maintaining the clergy and the religious buildings.
Life for Christians and Muslims in Athens
To an extent not unusual in the Ottoman territories, the two main religious communities were largely self-governing. The Orthodox Christians had their own political leaders, courts, and prisons, and were able to appeal to the Patriarch of Constantinople, who had imperial responsibility under the millet system for the affairs of the whole Orthodox community. In modern political terms, the empire of the Byzantine theocracy had come to an end in 1453, when Constantinople/Istanbul was captured, but, for many regulatory functions, the Ottoman sultan simply replaced the Byzantine Emperor, and the Patriarch continued to exercise a jurisdiction over many aspects of the lives of his community much as before. The law applied among the Orthodox in Athens on the eve of the Revolution was Byzantine Roman, ancient customs, some codified in writing but mostly traditional, apparently in many respects much the same as it had existed long before 1456, the year when Athens and its Acropolis had been surrendered to the forces of the Ottoman Empire, and the privileged position of the Orthodox Church in relationship to its Roman Catholic rival, was formally guaranteed by the new rulers.17
In Athens, as elsewhere, among the features of the Byzantine theocracy that continued was ecclesiastical control over all visual images and of the locations where they could be displayed, a monopoly in one of the main instruments of government that was not formally brought to an end until the establishment of the nation state of Greece as a result of the Revolution. The patriarchal ban only applied to members of the Orthodox community, not to Europeans (‘Franks’) or members of the Roman Catholic community, with the result that, with no known exceptions, all pictures of Greece and its monuments including of the Parthenon, made before the Revolution, were composed by foreigners.
At birth, or soon after, the two main religious communities of Athens marked the hereditary religious affiliation of their children by the ceremonies of baptism and circumcision. But, for the most part, in Athens, the communities were not much separated in their daily lives. According to Evliya’s description of Athens in 1667, the Muslims then mainly lived in three areas of the town, but there were no physical barriers. Although there were different schools for Christians and Muslims, everyone drew water from the same public fountains and bought and sold in the same bazaar. The women of both communities bathed together in the same Turkish baths, one of the few places where they had any social life outside the family home.18 There were a few festivals, notably at the Muslim/Ottoman New Year, celebrated in March, that were confined to women of both of the main denominations, with all males excluded, even as spectators, but others, of which an image is given as Figure 3.2, involved the whole town.19 People congregated separately or together on plentiful open spaces within the town walls, some near the ruins of ancient buildings, for festivals, weddings, parties, dancing, and play. Although I have not been able to discover who formally owned these lands, they appear to have been in practice if not in law, open to the public and normally no new building or demolition was permitted.20
According to John Galt, a businessman who later became a prolific author, who visited Athens in the spring of 1809, a year of drought and food shortages, the town authorities arranged nine consecutive days of public prayers for rain, the first three conducted by the Muslims, the next three by the black population both free and slave, and the last three by the Christians. But the voivode also took practical measures, calling in the community leaders and arranging a subscription of money, to which he made a large starting donation, to be used to buy food from elsewhere to be sold at subsidised prices.22 F.C.H.L. Pouqueville, a French medical doctor who visited in 1815, another year of drought, described the Muslim ritual performed in the open ground around the columns of Olympian Zeus that differs in some respects. The leaders, according to Pouqueville, began by ordering their slaves to pray for rain, and if that produced no result, the children were ordered to join them, carrying on their heads vessels containing burning charcoal, and finally they brought lambs born that year. This ‘assembly of living things considered as the most innocent and guiltless’ pray towards the rising sun. ‘The old men commence a sacred hymn; the children raise their innocent voice, the slaves groan in silence, the lambs unite their tender bleatings.’23 As another western observer remarked, the Muslims, ‘unable to find the voice of innocence among men have recourse to the young of the harmless sheep to avert the wrath of heaven.’24 The collective prayers for rain were also described by Evliya.25 In ancient Athens too, there had been rituals of animal sacrifice and prayers of supplication to Zeus, the maker of the weather, and since there were harsh droughts every few years, it is possible that there had been a continuous tradition and not just a coincidence.26
After death, the inhabitants of Athens, including the expatriates, were physically segregated into cemeteries in accordance with their religious affiliation. The largest and most prominent was that of the Muslims that lay in front of the main gate of the Acropolis in the area where, in normal times, the tourist buses now drop off visitors.27
Cooperation between Christians and Muslims
In the years before the Revolution, except when it was caught up in wars or invasions, droughts, or extortionate local leaders, Athens was by common consent a pleasant place to live. On the eve of the Revolution, visitors remarked on how closely the communities co-operated even in their religious practices. For example, in 1820, at an Orthodox wedding reported by a visitor, it was the Muslim barber, with his looking-glass, who accepted the presents brought by the guests.28 To act as a bridge between communities and individuals as well as exchanging information was as much a part of the socio-economic role of barbers as the shaving of chins. At the Ottoman court, the Reis Effendi (Reis ül-Küttab) Halet (Meḥmet Saʿid Ḥālet Efendi) one of the highest officials, communicated with the sultan through the chief barbers, who were, in the words of Şükrü H. Ilicak, ‘customarily the Sultan’s confidants and major source of information from the outside world.’29
Attempts by the communities to recruit members from the others were forbidden, their leaders cooperating in enforcing a policy that helped to preserve inter-community peace. Unlike many empires, the Ottoman authorities did not attempt to assimilate the peoples whom they ruled either into their language or into their religion, although after their conquest of Constantinople in 1453, a high proportion of the previously Orthodox Christians of Asia Minor had chosen to become Muslim.30 An attempt in 1645 by western-financed Jesuit missionaries to establish themselves in Athens in hopes of recruiting members from the Orthodox to their religion had been quickly stopped.31 It was however allowable for someone born into the Orthodox community to become Muslim if he wanted to pursue a career in the Ottoman service.
Clothing
As elsewhere in the Ottoman territories, the peoples of Athens were differentiated by their costumes, an elaborate system of identity markers, as much social as religious, that were understood locally but not, with few exceptions, by visitors. Men of both main communities, for example, wore what many visitors called ‘turbans’, some coloured, some white, with different numbers of twists of the cloth, that were different from the turbans that only Muslims were permitted to wear, and there were other rules about the extent of embroidery, colour of slippers, and the hairstyles of women. At Carnival, for four days, the Greeks were permitted to dress as Turks or as Franks, although in 1818, it is reported that some were punished for wearing masks, so that they could not be easily identified. The Greek language teacher of the architect Joseph Woods, whom he described when he met him in 1818 as normally the ‘quietest, dullest, and meekest animal that ever existed,’ when complimented one morning on how confident he appeared when dressed as a Turk, answered that they should not ‘admire his assumed character which was little deserving of esteem, but that which he really possessed.’ In the afternoon he dressed as a Frank.
Farming, Diet and Health
In 1820, the year before the outbreak of the Revolution, the surrounding countryside, which consisted of around sixty townships, was thought to contain 100,000 goats and 60,000 sheep, and 3,000 oxen mainly employed in ploughing the heavy stony soil, not for milk or beef.32 In the production of food, the nature of the land imposed many of the same limitations as had existed in ancient times and had featured not only in the literary descriptions of classical Athens, but in the political economy of income redistribution and diet.33
Athenians were so healthy, it was commonly said, that doctors could not make a living and many people lived to the age of a hundred. And indeed, the sea breezes of the microclimate do seem to have protected Athens and its plain from some of the plagues that frequently struck other places in the Aegean Archipelago, including the provinces immediately to the north and south. Diseases of the eye were however common, caused by the particles of sand that occasionally blow in from the Sahara Desert across the Mediterranean, changing the light and leaving a fine dust.34 And some people were malnourished, their bodies further weakened by the long fasts enforced by both the Muslim and Christian religions.35
Ethnic Minorities and Slavery in Athens
Besides the Christians and the Muslims, there were a few hundred people of African descent, slaves, freed slaves, and their descendants, whose main occupations were as guards or personal attendants to the leading Muslims. Some women were members of harems but only a few of the higher-ranking Ottoman officials could afford to maintain more than one wife. Occasionally a foreign artist included a member of the black community in his work, as in Figure 3.3, a detail from a larger composition.
John Galt, visiting the Piraeus in 1810 saw only two ships in the harbour, one exporting antiquities for Lord Elgin, the other importing slaves from Africa.37
Travellers sometimes encountered itinerant slave merchants leading a few shackled women scarcely clothed even in winter, in the ‘khans’, the staging posts that were mostly open-air enclosures that provided basic accommodation and services, such as water and food, to be found all over the Ottoman territories.38 A scene of female slaves of African origin on sale in Pharsalia in Thessaly was caught in the picture at Figure 3.4 made in 1803 by Georg Gropius, the Austrian consul in Athens, who was to play a prominent role in the Revolution.
From conversations with a trader whom a British resident met in the hinterland to Smyrna in 1826, an area not much affected by the Greek Revolution, the slaves were bought at the market in Alexandria in Egypt, escorted by land to be sold at the market in Constantinople, at a gross margin of one hundred per cent. Most came from east Africa but some, from west central Africa, a huge inland area that also supplied the European transatlantic trade, had been led across the Sahel to Timbuktu and on to Alexandria.40
An instance of a female being sold at Patras in 1817 is recorded by an eyewitness41 and we have a rare record of the voice of one such slave overheard in Athens: ‘About a week ago, a black girl brought a duck to our convent for sale, and the friar [Padre Paolo] asked her how she came to be made a slave. She gave a shrill ludicrous laugh, and said that she was taken by the catchers while she was at the well for water. She was born in Egypt and caught in the neighbourhood of Alexandria.’42
Besides the slaves, who were estimated at that time to number about two hundred, thirty families of African origin were employed in Athens as blacksmiths.43 Although the ‘Moors’ as they were called locally, had no religious buildings of their own, and were largely assimilated into the identity of their Muslim masters, they had their district near the Areopagus hill, known as Karasouniyou, ‘the Place of the Blacks’, a term sometimes applied to the hill itself.44 They seem to have maintained some of the customs of the societies in Africa from which they or their forebears had come or been taken as slaves, who were released by their masters, for example in their wills.45 A visitor in 1819 who had lived in exile in the United States, who met some black-skinned people in the street, gave an account, now little known, that deserves to be quoted in full.46 Their presence reminded some classically-educated westerners that in ancient times ‘the Athenians were always great slave mongers.’47
As elsewhere under the millet system in the Ottoman territories, in Athens the status of most individuals, women as well as men, was made clear by their dress.48 J.L.S. Bartholdy, who, unusually, was more interested in the people than in the monuments, noted that in Athens, as in comparable towns, the music that the voivode arranged to be played every afternoon at the hour of prayer, was provided by the people now called Romany, who in the west were known as gypsies or Bohemians.49 The reed instruments, with which they made music, were heard all over Athens.50 In one of the few locally composed accounts we also hear of twenty-five Romany families who made straw hats.51
Members of the Jewish community, who were also, like the Muslims and Orthodox, officially acknowledged by the millet system, were not allowed to live in Athens. Although Jews are recorded as living there in Roman times, for example in the first century CE by the author or compiler of the Acts of the Apostles, they appear to have been legally excluded from Athens since some time unrecorded long before. Why that ban was allowed to continue after the Ottoman takeover in 1456 has not yet been explained: in the whole of the Ottoman territories, there was only one other town from which members of the Jewish millet were officially excluded.52 As an organised community, they were prominent at Negropont (modern Chalcis) to the north, a town that, in the eighteenth century and for centuries before, was a base for the Ottoman fleet and for sea communication to Constantinople and elsewhere. Salonika (modern Thessaloniki), not then regarded as part of Greece, had one of the largest Jewish populations of any city in the world.
The Residents of the Acropolis
As for the people who lived on the Acropolis, the garrison was said by an eyewitness in 1810 to have consisted of 120 soldiers and its armament of twenty-seven cannon, of which only about seven were serviceable. Count Forbin, who visited in 1817, put the number of soldiers at sixty.53 Others record smaller numbers, perhaps because the size of the garrison may have changed, but more probably because some gave the size of the total force and others the number on duty.54 As for their families, the women and children, with any slaves they might have included in their households, may have amounted to a similar number, as would be consistent with figures we have for 1822 when many lost their lives.55 The soldiers in the Acropolis, who were mostly Muslim Albanians, and who were more a gendarmerie than a military force, seem to have had a separate hereditary community. The ‘castrioti’, the ‘castriani’, the ‘castle people’, were occasionally mentioned on Ottoman public inscriptions, such as one carved on the columns of the Theseion, that many saw but, as with the other Ottoman inscriptions in Athens, only a few could read or understand: ‘The evil death came in 1555 and thousands of the people and of the Castrioti died.’56 Their pay was low, less for a year than a western visitor might typically pay for a day’s visit to the Acropolis.57 By the time of the Revolution, the tourist expenditure that the ancient monuments brought to Athens was already a large proportion of the local economy from which a high number of the inhabitants benefited—and the influence of classically-educated visitors to Athens is the subject of the next chapter.
1 ‘The present state of Attica’ summarised from surveys said to have been made in 1820 printed in Müller, Karl O., Athens and Attica; an inquiry into the civil, moral and religious institutions of the inhabitants, the rise and decline of the Athenian power and the topography and chorography of ancient Attica and Athens, translated from the German of K.O. Müller, Grotefend, and others by John Ingram Lockhart (London, Oxford, and Cambridge: Groombridge, 1842), 191–94. Both the Orthodox and the Muslims included some who were Albanian by ethnicity and by language.
2 ‘10,000 Greeks and 2000 Turks at the utmost.’ Douglas, Hon’ble. Fred. Sylv. North, An Essay on Certain Points of Resemblance between the Ancient and Modern Greeks (London: Murray, 1813), 45. ‘ten or twelve thousand, about a fifth part of whom were Turks.’ Fuller, John, Narrative of a Tour through some parts of the Turkish Empire Not Published (London: Printed by Richard Taylor, 1829), 542. See also Walsh, Residence, i, 123. Different estimates are given of the size of the Muslim population of Athens before 1821, including ‘10,000 Greeks and 2,000 Turks’ by Douglas, 45, but ‘an eighth’, the figure of Raybaud, ii, 70, who arrived after the first hostilities, is too low.
4 Leake, Researches, iii.
5 The figure of three hundred Muslims given by Chandler in the first edition of his book in 1776 was an error that was put right in a the subsequent revised edition of 1825 in which Nicholas Revett corrected the figure to ‘near one third of the inhabitants, which may be reckoned at five or six thousand.’ Chandler (1825) ii, 149.
6 See, for example Speros Vryonis, Jr, ‘The Greeks under Turkish Rule’ in Diamandouros, 55.
7 Philadelpheus, Ἱστορια των Αθηνων ἐπι Τουρκοκρατιας ἀπο του 1400 μεχρι του 1800 ὑπο Θ.Ν. Φιλαδελφεως. (Athens: 1902), especially at ii, 79–84.
8 The technologies of display and performance, preferred to those of inscription, are described in Chapter 6.
9 Master, MS journal, British Library, 35. It is likely that it was this voivode, whose name I have been unable to discover, who is mentioned in Chapter 2 as having resisted measures to isolate the town of Athens from new of the plague of 1818. He is said by Woods to have commanded the respect of the population.
10 Philadepheus, ii, 84.
11 Chandler (1776 edition), 26. The history of the Gaspary family in Athens is summarised by Sicilianos, 226–27. Pierre Gaspary, a consular official at the time of the Revolution and later, makes frequent appearances in the notebook of Burgon, and in the papers of Fauvel, including those printed by Clairmont.
12 They are often referred to by visitors as ‘archons’, an ancient Greek word that suggests an emerging philhellenism, but that was probably anachronistic.
13 Summarised from Benizelos’s history by Sicilianos, Demetrios, Old and New Athens (London: Putnam, 1960), 360.
14 Evliya Çelebi, An Ottoman Traveller, Selections from the Book of Travels of Evliya Çelebi, translation and commentary by Robert Dankoff & Sooyong Kim (London: Eland, 2010), 287.
15 Eton, 45–49.
16 Noted by, for example, Douglas, 67.‘They have abundance of all things, requisite for the sustenance of humane life.’ Lithgow, 67.
17 Discussed in the context of women and property by Dexiades, Evdoxios, ‘Legal Trickery, Men, Women, and Justice in late Ottoman Greece’, Past and Present, 210, February 2011, 129–55.
18 Clarke, Travels, part the second, section the second, 1814, 590.
19 Cockerell, 47.
20 The public open spaces included the area round the ancient Temple of Olympian Zeus, the area near the Theseion which belonged to the Orthodox Church, and the Pnyx, whose status I have not been able to discover.
21 Collection of the late Rodney Searight, present whereabouts unknown. First reproduced with his permission by St Clair, Lord Elgin and the Marbles, second edition, 1983.
22 Galt, Letters 226.
23 Pouqueville, F.C.H.L., M.D., late Consul-General of France at the Court of Aly Pasha, of Janina; Corresponding Member of the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles Letters in the Institute of France; of the Ionian Academy of Corfu, &c. &c., &c., Travels in Southern Epirus, Acarnania, Aetolia, Attica, and Peloponesus, or the Morea &c. &c., in the years 1814–1816 (London: Sir Richard Phillips, 1822), 89.
24 Voyages and Travels of her Majesty, Caroline Queen of Great Britain … by One of her Majesty’s Suite (London: Jones, 1822), 445, perhaps derived from Pouqueville’s account.
25 Evliya, An Ottoman Traveller, 289.
26 Parker, Robert, Polytheism and Society at Athens (Oxford: OUP, 2005), 417. In ancient Athens all public prayer was accompanied by ritual sacrifice.
27 A view of the Muslim cemetery shortly before it was removed after the Revolution is at Figure 16.2.
28 Laurent, i, 187. A picture of a wedding in Athens, showing a Muslim barber in Dupré, Louis, Voyage à Athènes et à Constantinople, ou Collection de portraits, de vues et de costumes grecs et ottomans, peints sur les lieux (Paris: Dondey-Dupré, 1825 but almost certainly worked up some years later). The image is also accessible in the heavily adapted edition in Greek with much additional information, and pictures of Greece by other artists, edited by Manoles Vlachos (Athens: Folio, 1994), opposite 140.
29 Ilicak, H. Şükrü, A Radical Rethinking of Empire: Ottoman State and Society during the Greek War of Independence 1821–1826. PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 2011, 52. Ambassador Strangford’s plan to bribe Halet, and his role in one of the firmans that saved the Parthenon, is noted in Chapter 6. Classicists may have recalled the much-repeated saying attributed to Archelaos, the ancient king of Sparta, who, when asked by his barber how he wanted his hair cut, replied, ‘in silence.’ Plut. Regum 25.2. The story has usually been understood as a joke against barbers but, to ancient ears, it may have carried a more serious message about the official civic values of Sparta, namely, that it was unnecessary, as well as unbecoming, and possibly a sign of distrust in his fellow Spartans, for a Spartan to listen to anyone from outside the military caste.
30 Speros Vryonis, Jr, ‘The Greeks under Turkish Rule’, in Diamandouros, 53.
31 Sicilianos, 168. See also Fleuriau, a Roman Catholic priest of the Jesuit Order, Estat des Missions de Grèce, Presenté a nos Seigneurs les Archivesques, et Deputez du Clergé de France, en l’année 1695 (Paris: Lambin and another, 1695).
32 Müller, Athens and Attica, 189–91, drawing on several accounts
33 Discussed in The Classical Parthenon, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0279. The cows shown on the Parthenon frieze that are due to be sacrificed and eaten, reminded viewers that beef, a rare treat, had mostly been specially bred to be used in festivals.
34 Mentioned by, for example, Pouqueville, Voyage, iv, 87.
35 The many severe and prolonged fasts, and their weakening effects, are described by Rodd, 51.
36 Detail from Stuart and Revett, Antiquities of Athens, ii, chapter ii, plate 1, published May 1789.
37 Galt, Letters, 127, Travels, 185.
38 For example, Pomardi, ii, 106, in December at Corinth.
39 From a picture by Gropius in Bartholdy, J.L.S., Voyage en Grèce fait dans les Années 1803 et 1804 Contenant des détails sur ïa manière de voyager dans la Grèce et l’Archipel; la description de la vallée de Tempe’; un tableau pittoresque des sites les plus remarquables de la Grèce et du Levant; un coup-d’ceil sur l’état actuel de la Turquie et de toutes les branches de la civilisation chez les Grecs modernes; un voyage de Négrepont, dans quelques contrées de la Thessalie, en 1805, et l’histoire de la guerre des Souliotes contre Ali-Visir, avec la chute de Souly en 180, traduit de l’allemand, par A. du C**** (Paris: Dentue, 1807), i, opp. 9. That Gropius was the artist is noted in the Preface, i, xi.
40 Arundell, Rev. Fr. V. J., British Chaplain at Smyrna, A visit to the seven churches of Asia; with an excursion into Pisidia; containing remarks on the geography and antiquities of those countries, a map of the author’s routes, and numerous inscriptions (London: Rodwell, 1828), 148.
41 . ‘…the melancholy spectacle of a young woman female exposed for sale. She was sold for 80 crowns; and a gleam of light passed over her dejected countenance at the idea of going to another master in a different part of the country. A fair, beautiful, young, and plump Circassian, has been known to bring 3000 crowns, and even more.’ Williams, Travels, ii, 226.
42 Galt, Letters, 128. Dated from Athens 8 March 1810. It is not known in which language the conversation occurred
43 Noted by Tunali, Gülçin, ‘Another Kind of Hellenism? Appropriation of Ancient Athens via Greek Channels for the Sake of Good Advice as Reflected in TARİH-İ MEDİNETÜ’L-HUKEMA‘, Inaugural Dissertation zur Erlangung des Grades einer Doktorin der Philosophie in der Fakultät Für Geschichtswissenschaft Der Ruhr Universität Bochum, 225, https://docplayer.biz.tr/643693-Another-kind-of-hellenism.html
44 Travlos, John, and Alison Frantz, ‘The Church of St. Dionysios the Areopagite and the Palace of the Archbishop of Athens in the 16th century’, Hesperia, xxxiv(3), 1965, 192.
45 ‘about two hundred black slaves’ Jolliffe, 155. People of African appearance are commonly shown in western representations of Athens and of elsewhere in Greece at this time and earlier, but I have been unable to discover much about their origins.
46 ‘Meeting in the streets [of Athens] some black people who appeared to enjoy themselves, and were dressed very clean, I asked them if they were slaves. They said they had been such, but they were now free. I queried how they had obtained their freedom. They answered that it was very common among the Turks, when slaves had served them a sufficient number of years, to compensate them for the price paid for them, and, if they have behaved well, to give them their liberty. Among these were several men and women under thirty years of age. They appeared well behaved persons. What an example is here given to Christian professors, by Turks! Such actions are very rare in our southern states. I had an opportunity of seeing, at Smyrna, a considerable number of slaves, lately come from the interior of Africa. They were left at liberty to go about in the streets or in the marketplace. Some of them were even asking persons if they would not purchase them. They are not treated as on the American shores, when landing from slave-ships, or when marched from one state to another, chained together, or shut up in jails at night.’ Grellet, 21–22. By ‘Christian professors’, I need hardly say, Grellet meant all those who professed to be Christians.
47 Galt, Letters, 128.
48 Many eighteenth century costumes seen in Athens were sketched by Thomas Hope (1769–1831) Pictures from 18th Century Greece, Texts Fani-Maria Tsigakou (Athens: Benaki Museum, British Council, Publishing House “Melissa”, 1985).
49 Bartholdy, J.L.S., Voyage en Grèce, ii, 232.
50 For their music and ‘Nubian’ dancing, Queen’s Travels, 423, that drew on other accounts.
51 Noted by Tunali, ‘Another Kind Of Hellenism?’, 225.
52 Trapezos. Noted by Sicilianos, 18.
53 Forbin, M. le Comte de, Voyage dans le Levant en 1817 et 1818 (Turin: Alliana, 1830), i, 46. The figures offered by visitors vary, perhaps because the actual numbers changed, but more probably because some gave the size of the total force and others the number on duty. The numbers do not appear to have varied much during the century. In 1738, for example, Lord Sandwich noted that the Acropolis was ‘defended by a few cannon, and a garrison of about three hundred men.’ Sandwich, A Voyage Performed by the late Earl of Sandwich round the Mediterranean in the Years 1738 and 1739, Written by himself (London: Cadell and Davies, 1799), 66.
54 In 1818 there was one guard on duty and ‘a few soldiers’ who spent most of their time in the town. Laurent, i, 190. Hanson in 1814 put the garrison at ‘ten to twelve men’, presumably those on duty in the Acropolis. Hanson, John Oliver, ‘Private Journal of a Voyage from Smyrna to Venice’, edited by Anghelou, Alkis, Annual of the British School at Athens, 1 January 1971, vol. 66, 13–48, 22.
55 See Chapter 10.
56 Sicilianos, 100.
57 Hobhouse, MS journal, 8 January 1810. Recorded payments made for access to the Acropolis in the years before the Revolution include: 1805, Dodwell. Visiting and drawing for several days with an artist, 80 to 100 piastres (£6 to £7). Dodwell, Classical Tour, i, 293, conversion rates from Angelomatis-Tsougarakis, Helen, The Eve of the Greek Revival, British Travellers’ Perceptions of Early Nineteenth Century Greece (London: Routledge, 1990), 164. 1809, Cazenove. Visit to the Acropolis ‘cost us a guinea’ [£1.2]. ‘Some had to pay 6 guineas [£6.6] for two hours’. Cazenove, A Narrative in Two Parts, Written in 1812 (London: privately printed, 1813), 217. In 1812, William Turner. ‘The customary present of five [Spanish] dollars’ [about £0.25] when accompanied by Elgin’s agent Lusieri. Turner, William, Journal of a Tour in the Levant (London: Murray, 1820), i, 326. In 1817, Hugh William Williams, a bargain that included the right to draw. ‘At parting, the amount of about forty shillings [£2] was put into his [the disdar’s] hand, for which sum we obtained permission to visit the Acropolis, whenever we might chuse …. The poor man’s salary does not exceed £10 a year.’ Williams, Hugh William [‘Grecian’], Travels in Italy, Greece, and the Ionian Islands In a series of letters, description of manners, scenery, and the fine arts. With engravings from original drawings (Edinburgh: Constable, 1820), i, 296. In 1820, Laurent. 20 piastres, 20 paras [about £0.33] for three university students, in total to the disdar, the guard, and the coffee maker. Laurent, Peter Edmund, Recollections of a Classical Tour through Various Parts of Greece, Turkey, and Italy, made in the years 1818 and 1819 (London: Whitaker, second edition, 1822), i, 206. In March 1821, Napier. ‘Parthenon £5/1/6’, note in the expense book of Charles James Napier, presumably a payment to the Ottoman authorities. Napier notebook, BL.