Western travel and collecting classical antiquities in the nineteenth century informed European understandings of Greece's past and present, and enriched private collections and museums. Travel and collecting have typically been studied separately by literary scholars, historians of archaeology, and historians of the Ottoman Empire and modern Greece. Similarly, publications have largely prioritised evidence from and about elite social groups.
This book breaks new ground through its interdisciplinary approach, its insistence on the interweaving of the phenomena of travel and collecting, and its emphasis on marginalised perspectives. Contributors drawn from art history, classics, history of architecture, Ottoman history and modern Greek history foreground diversity and small-scale engagements with the landscape and material past of Ottoman Greece. The book explores the perspectives of both foreign travellers and local inhabitants through case studies, keeping a sharp focus on ethnicity and social status. Diaries, visual art, and rich archival material are analysed, often from a novel perspective, to give voice to a range of people including English servants, Albanian peasants, an illiterate Greek fighter, and the Ottoman Sultan. The result is a micro-cultural history of travel and classical collecting which expands existing narratives. As such, it changes the simplistic dichotomy between collecting as 'pillaging' or 'saving', and nuances the important current debate surrounding repatriation.
Travel and Classical Antiquities in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Greece addresses scholars in the areas of classical reception studies, classical archaeology, material culture studies, nineteenth-century studies, Ottoman studies and modern Greek studies. It will also appeal to a broader audience of people interested in travel writing, the history of archaeology and the history of Greece.
Alexia Petsalis-Diomidis is Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of St Andrews. She researches classical material culture in the Greek world, and its reception in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The body and travel are major themes in her work. She searches out marginalised voices and explores intimate, small-scale encounters with objects. Her publications include Drawing the Greek Vase (co-editor C. Meyer, Oxford University Press,2023), The Classical Vase Transformed. Consumption, Reproduction, and Class in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain (with E. Hall, Oxford University Press, 2020), and Truly beyond Wonders. Aelius Aristides and the Cult of Asklepios (Oxford University Press, 2010).
