![]() He was also a diplomat and a descendant of Athens’ aristocratic Benizelos family.īuilt in the first half of the 17th century, the family home in Plaka is the oldest surviving residence in Athens and one of a handful of similar townhouses that still exist in southern Greece. The library’s founder, Joannes Gennadius, she explains, was fascinated by the history of Hellenism through the ages and had amassed a very important collection on the subject comprising 26,000 volumes. “The history of Athens during the Ottoman period is of special interest to the Gennadius Library,” comments Maria Georgopoulou, the director of the library at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (ASCSA) and one of the authors of the book’s introduction, which is co-written with Konstantinos Thanasakis, a scientific adviser at the Aikaterini Laskaridis Foundation. But educated Ottomans knew of Athens as an ancient city with a classical legacy,” he adds. Its Muslim community was very small and consisted mainly of the Acropolis guard and a handful of families. “What made it stand apart, and also one of the main reasons why it remained in relative obscurity during Ottoman times, was that it was on the fringes of the empire but also that it was inhabited almost exclusively by Christians. “During the reign of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent (1520-66), Athens had an estimated population of between 8,000 and 15,000 citizens, making it the third largest city in the Ottoman Balkans, after Adrianople and Thessaloniki,” says Kolovos. It also provides researchers and the public with valuable insights into this rich yet relatively unknown period of history, stretching from the 15th to the 20th century. The book, he says, makes an important contribution to efforts to study the city’s history during medieval, modern and pre-revolutionary times. “Ottoman Athens was an important city that was renowned for its antiquities, had splendid monuments and an interesting way of life,” historian and expert on the Ottoman era Elias Kolovos tells Kathimerini on the occasion of the publication of “Ottoman Athens: Archaeology, Topography, History,” a collection of 12 studies – including one of his own – published by the Gennadius Library and the Aikaterini Laskaridis Foundation. According to historian and scholar Michael Critobulus, the sultan admired and praised what he saw. After all, even Mehmed the Conqueror – no stranger to the classics – had visited Athens in the latter half of the 15th century to explore the city he had read so much about. Celebi was able to admire the mosque he had read so many accounts about and describe it in laudatory terms nearly two decades before the destruction wrought by Francesco Morosini.
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