Forlorn Folklore: Discovering and debating the vernacular architecture of Greece, from the Ottoman era to the Greek nation-state (ca. 1750-1920)

Abstract

The topic of this dissertation is the historiography of the vernacular architecture of Greece in the 18th and 19th centuries, i.e. from the Ottoman era to the first decades of the Greek nation-state. Its main aim is to challenge two historiographic assumptions: (a) that Greek vernacular architecture was “discovered” and appreciated only in the early-20th century, and (b) that until then, and throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, discourses about architecture in Greece were monopolized by classical antiquity, obscuring any other local idiom. To do so, I have brought together excerpts from a variety of English, French, German and Greek sources (antiquarian travel accounts, texts of architectural theory, works of literature, proto-ethnographic surveys, reform manuals, pamphlets, legal and bureaucratic documents, newspaper articles, and more), which demonstrate that there was a vivid preoccupation with the vernacular architecture of Ottoman and post-Ottoman Greece since at least the middle of the 18th century. These texts and preoccupations do not form one single and consistent discourse: They occur at the limits or the overlap of different discursive and epistemological frameworks. But they hinged on the same vernacular buildings. The dissertation is structured in three chapters, all of which span the same chronology (ca. 1750-1920) and deal with the same historical territorial, ideological, political and cultural transition, namely: The period in which Greece transformed from a Western province of the Ottoman Empire to a small nation-state at the Eastern end of Europe. And with it, the transition from Western antiquarianism and the “Greek Enlightenment” to classicist nation-building and state led rural and urban reform. Each of these three chapters, however, will focus on a different type of vernacular construction – the hut (i.e. a variety of ephemeral shed-like constructions), the house (i.e. the farmhouses and cottages of peasants and the urban working classes) and the mansion (i.e. the “αρχοντικό/konak” of the local merchants, pashas and land-owners) – and follow it through different images and texts, from established Western accounts on Greece to lesser-known Ottoman-Greek texts. The aim of the analysis will be to demonstrate that during this period, the meaning of these buildings was highly debated; so much so that it often bordered on polar opposites: The same buildings were seen, by different authors or in different historical instances, as both “ancient” and “modern”, “Greek” and “Turkish”, local and cosmopolitan, naive and sophisticated, pleasing and threatening. Going beyond singular, ontological questions such as ‘what is Greek vernacular architecture’, I will aim to show the numerous things that this architecture has been or has meant for different authors and in different historical and ideological circumstances. And rather than seeing the early-20th century as the moment in which the value of the vernacular was “finally recognized”, I hope to reframe it as the moment in which its meaning, cultural pedigree and epistemological framework were ultimately fixed. Devoting my attention to this long and often incoherent series of precedents, I hope to demonstrate (1) that before this moment of canonization, interest in and knowledge about what later came to be called “vernacular architecture [λαϊκή αρχιτεκτονική]” was dispersed over many different epistemes and intellectual debates; and (2) that the eventual canonization of the vernacular led to a reduction of its meaning, through a filtering out of many ideas and concerns, as well as through a marginalization of certain aspects of the vernacular itself (as it was forced to fit the framework of a national heritage and a modernist paradigm of design).