Events Calendar – British School at Athens

image: The Mani Promontory in the Southern Peloponnese. CORONELLI, Vincenzo. Description géographique et historique de la Morée … , Paris, Nicolas Langlois, MDCLXXXVII [=1687] 

Online Friends’ lecture

Elias Kolovos (National Hellenic Research Foundation), “How the Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi set foot on the Mani Peninsula, but left in a hurry… Ottoman imperial administration in the Greek lands and its limits”

Abstract: In this lecture, we will follow the famous Ottoman traveller, Evliya Çelebi, who joined a difficult Ottoman campaign against the Maniots of the Southern Peloponnese, Greece, in 1670. During this campaign, Evliya Çelebi contributed –albeit with great precautions and fear– to the registration of the Mani Peninsula in an Ottoman survey register (tahrir defteri).  Based on his account, and a study of several Ottoman survey registers (tahrir defterleri) in which the villages of Mani are recorded, we will discuss the limits of Ottoman imperial administration in the Greek lands and the opportunities for local autonomy for the Greeks. In the special case of the Mani promontory, to the south of the Peloponnese, local autonomy was popularised among an international audience by Western travellers of the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, and by Patrick Leight Fermor in his travel book Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese of 1958.

Bio: Elias Kolovos is Research Director, running the Ottoman History Program at the Institute of Historical Research of the National Hellenic Research Foundation. He is also the elected Secretary of the Board of the International Association for Ottoman Social and Economic History. In the past, he served as Professor in Ottoman History at the Department of History and Archaeology, Faculty of Letters, University of Crete. He has written, edited, and coedited 20 books and over 80 papers in Greek and international publications and journals. His research interests include the Mediterranean economic history, the history of the insular worlds, the history of the frontiers, rural and environmental history, as well as the spatial history and legacies of the Ottoman Empire. His last book, in Greek (Στους καιρούς των σουλτάνων. Οι κοινωνίες της ελληνικής χερσονήσου υπό οθωμανική κυριαρχία, 14ος-19ος αι. [The Times of the Sultans: The Societies of the Greek Lands under Ottoman Rule, fourteenth-nineteenth centuries], Asini, Athens 2023) discuss the Ottoman history of the Greek lands.

Online only lecture

To attend via webinar, please register here