Representing Classical Sites in the Ottoman Aegean: Artifice, Absence, and Heritage in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Western European Travelogue Illustrations

Abstract

In the Ottoman Aegean, repurposed classical sites generated legitimacy from physical continuity with antiquity. These heritage sites were often illustrated in western European travelogues, whose images act as useful windows into their authors’ imperialist worldviews because they depicted Ottoman space as their author saw it, or rather how they wanted to see it. Despite their high value for the study of the physical reception of classical ruins, these travelogue illustrations have received little in-depth analysis. The images represent the travelogue authors’ aim to claim these classical heritage spaces for themselves, and this paper categorises the different visual techniques they used to marginalise Ottoman claims to classical heritage. They stretched reality to depict Ottoman figures as shadowed, lowly, and isolated in contrast to an elevated and gleaming classical past, and they obscured and removed Ottoman buildings or regulated them within classical frames. This paper considers these images in situ alongside the travelogues’ text to prove that these techniques were intentional strategies to de-Ottomanise classical ruins, and highlights evidence from Ottoman Athens, Samos, and Corinth to demonstrate that this trend is consistent throughout the Ottoman Aegean. This widespread campaign of visual de-Ottomanisation is highly pertinent to our understanding of the reception of physical remnants of classical civilisation beyond the page. The authors used visual marginalisation of Ottoman buildings and bodies to justify physically claiming heritage spaces themselves and extracting their artifacts. These images were weapons in an imperial conflict over classical heritage ownership, in which the battlefield spoils were the antiquities themselves.

Introduction: Ottomanisation and De-Ottomanisation of Classical Sites

The massive Olympieion in Athens (also known as the Temple of Olympian Zeus) finished by the Roman Emperor Hadrian suffered from earthquake damage in Late Antiquity and fell into ruin. Part of the ruins were used as materials for a nearby fifth- or sixth-century basilica, a small chapel of Saint John began to occupy a corner of the site, and over the next millennium, the Byzantines and the Duchy of Athens continued to quarry the ruins to use for new buildings.¹ When Cyriacus of Ancona visited in 1436 only 21 of the original 104 columns remained.² The Ottoman Empire captured Athens in 1458 and laid its own physical claim to the Olympieion ruins, changing the site into an open-air mosque by adding a mihrab, minbar, and low enclosure wall to designate the sacred space.³ They reused other ancient sites as well, converting the Parthenon into a mosque.⁴

The local population of Christians, Muslims, and Jews valued the ancient ruins as part of their continuous heritage. When the famous Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi visited the Olympieion mosque in the seventeenth century he incorporated the classical site within an Abrahamic vision of the past. Evliya wrote that the temple was built as a palace for Solomon and referred to it as the “Throne of Balqis” (the name of the Queen of Sheba in the Qur’ān).⁵ In a similar vein, the mufti of Athens Mahmud Efendi wrote the Tarih-i Medinetü’l-Hukema (history of the city of sages) in which he blurred together the “ancient past” and the “Ottoman present.” He incorporated contemporary Ottoman titles and practices in his account of ancient Athens and referred to the Olympieion as both the “Throne of Balqis” and the project of the king “Enderyanu” (Hadrian).

Both Evliya and Mahmud’s texts probably drew from local traditions and legends as sources.⁶ A similar attitude among the broader population of Ottoman Athens is apparent in Louis Dupré’s account of “Turkish, Greek and Albanian families, gathered around the temple of Theseus” “every year, at Easter,” with “music and dance,” and in the complaints that arose when a governor of Athens knocked down a column of the Olympieion, complaints so fierce that he faced heavy state fines as punishment.⁷ Ottoman Athenians incorporated the ancient sites into their traditions and daily life, and saw them as continuities with antiquity rather than cultural rupture.

The ‘Ottomanised’ Olympieion elicited striking visual representations in travelogues as well. Starting at the end of the eighteenth century, a wider market for travelogues expanded rapidly in western Europe. Images of places such as the Olympieion were a major part of their appeal. These illustrations “drawn in the field” brought aesthetic appeal and conveyed “authenticity” to an audience back in western Europe. Images were an important part of the growing genre and were advertised on the title page.⁸ The authors of the increasingly popular travelogue genre travelled through unfamiliar Ottoman territory, which placed their identity “at stake and subject to pressure.”⁹ Elizabeth Cohen suggested that many of these illustrations depicted the Olympieion from a distanced perspective with few or no Ottoman people so that the ancient ruin “culturally as well as physically dominate[d] the space” and marginalized its “Ottoman-ness,” to ‘de-Ottomanise’ the site.¹⁰

By visually rupturing the continuity between the classical past and Ottoman present, the authors could more easily separate out classical heritage and claim it exclusively for themselves. This was a visual ‘colonial tool’ to justify imperialism, one many of the travel authors acted on as they physically laid claim to classical heritage in the Ottoman Empire, the most famous example of which being the ‘Elgin Marbles’.¹¹ The Ottoman commander in chief Mehmed Reşid Paşa even wrote in an 1826 letter to the Grand Vizier that the western Europeans viewed the ancient monuments of Athens “as their own property.”¹² To invert this statement, Mehmed Reşid’s rhetoric depended on his and the Grand Vizier’s shared sense to themselves be the owners: the western Europeans’ ownership claims contested with an existing Ottoman claim.

These contesting ownership claims emerge in many illustrations from western European travelogues. The images are useful lenses through which to analyse their authors’ worldview, a unique way to glimpse how they saw the Ottoman Aegean, or rather, how they wanted to see it.¹³ Travel illustrations also give insight into how the Ottoman Aegean was represented to an increasingly wide audience of readers back in western Europe. One of the major patterns visible across travelogue illustrations is a wide array of visual techniques designed to de-Ottomanise classical sites. Other studies have examined anti-Ottoman sentiments in travelogue texts,¹⁴ but incorporating their accompanying visuals is critical. The illustrated travelogue is a genre in which the images and the text are mutually reinforcing and can only be fully understood with thorough analysis of both together. The images additionally provide an opportunity to examine how contesting ownership claims of classical sites played out in space, because they represent their author’s (often warped) spatial conception of the site. The illustrations also depict spaces which the authors often physically changed themselves by extracting artifacts, and as this paper argues, acted as a visual justification for this behaviour.

Despite the travelogue illustrations’ high potential as sources, scholars have not studied these visuals in great detail. Cohen only included a handful of illustrations and did not perform a thorough analysis of their compositions. Katherine Calvin, Wendy Shaw, and William St. Clair’s studies included more illustrations, as well as useful textual analysis of the travelogue authors’ mentalités, but as in Cohen’s article, they did not feature in-depth visual analysis.¹⁵ Like Cohen, Elizabeth Key Fowden identified the travelogues’ tendency to romanticise and to “isolate the ‘Classical’ moment” of the Athenian ruins, and how this contrasted sharply with the local conceptions of the sites.¹⁶ In her study of travelogue illustrations of Athens, however, she skipped from seventeenth century depictions to revolutionary Greek depictions of the city, passing over the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when this isolation of the ‘Classical moment’ became the most charged with meaning and aggressive in its de-Ottomanisation.¹⁷ The existing Aegean discourse also focuses almost exclusively on Athens, the city that features most frequently in published travelogue illustrations of Ottoman Greece.¹⁸

This article expands on these initial forays by contributing a visual, spatial dimension to our understanding of classical heritage conflict in the Ottoman Aegean. It provides in-depth analysis of a wide array of travelogue illustrations to identify and categorise the different visual techniques authors used to marginalise Ottoman claims to the Olympieion and the Athenian Acropolis. These techniques created a visual vocabulary of de-Ottomanisation, in which the artists stretched reality to depict the Ottomans as shadowed, lowly, and isolated in comparison to an elevated and gleaming classical past. They obscured or removed Ottoman buildings in classical sites and depicted Ottoman urban spaces regulated within classical frames or barely perceptible, blended into the natural hillside. Images often featured more than one of these techniques at once; they frequently worked in concert together to invalidate Ottoman presence. This article considers these illustrations in situ alongside the travelogues’ accompanying text to prove that these techniques were intentional efforts to de-Ottomanise the classical sites and contest the physical presence of Ottoman buildings and bodies in these heritage spaces.

Next, this article broadens the geographic focus, using the typology of de-Ottomanising techniques from Athens to compare and identify the same techniques in use across the Ottoman Aegean, from Samos to Corinth. Finally, this article demonstrates how the authors used their visual vocabulary of de-Ottomanisation to justify rupturing Ottoman claims to ownership over classical sites and to assert their own physical claim to these heritage spaces and their artifacts. This analysis focuses on the late eighteenth- to early nineteenth-century historical moment before the creation of an independent Greek state when this visual language crystallised, but it is important to add that visual strategies to de-Ottomanize classical heritage sites continued in the Ottomans’ remaining Aegean territories throughout the nineteenth century. The illustrations were typically created first in sketch form on-site by the author or supervised artists and worked up into their final version for print once the author had returned from travel. Some of the publications took years to be written and formatted for printing, which is why some of the images cited in this article date to during or slightly after Greek independence. But their choices about visual composition (and the de-Ottomanising effect that these choices created) were made in the on-site sketch dating to the earlier travel and can shed light on that historical moment.

These travelogue authors did not always depict ancient ruins with clear de-Ottomanising techniques, as their books were not exclusively dedicated to the purpose of contesting heritage spaces. In the section on “Motives and Mentalités,” this paper balances its analysis of deliberate de-Ottomanisation against the many other factors that went into the creation of these illustrations. The authors also showed an interest in the ‘exotic’ local populations, as well as data-driven studies of the classical architecture.¹⁹ They displayed the cultural influence of the Romantic era. They highlighted ancient materials because they learned their names by heart as school children, and western European elites heavily emphasised Classics in their cultural canon. Importantly, however, almost every author included overt de-Ottomanising techniques in at least some of their illustrations, as the copious examples in the paper (which represent but a fraction of de-Ottomanising images) demonstrate. Imperialism, orientalism, philhellenism, romanticism, Classics, and antiquarianism all swirled together and were often mutually reenforcing, especially among the diplomats who make up a high percentage of the travel authors.²⁰ In these travel illustrations’ de-Ottomanisation, one sees a visual weaponisation of the “collusion between Classics and empire” that Gonda Van Steen identified in the career of the Comte de Marcellus, travel author, diplomat, and extractor of the famous Venus de Milo sculpture from the Ottoman Empire.²¹

This study’s findings have wide-ranging implications for the physical reception of classical ruins. The travelogue authors were mostly elites or held an elevated standing due to an elite patron, and they read each other’s work, operated in the same social networks, and sometimes even travelled together.²² They often held official positions in the imperial hierarchies of western Europe, and so their travel sources provide a window on a shared western European imperial worldview, one that prized visual expressions of ownership over classical sites and justified their extraction of artifacts.²³ The authors were not classical archaeologists—the lack of stratigraphic analysis makes this evident—but they were all antiquarians.²⁴ They align with Alain Schapp’s definition that puts the act of collection at the centre of antiquarianism, including collection of physical antiquities and/or collection of experiences viewing antiquities through writing and illustrations.²⁵ This study’s findings are therefore useful for understanding the mentalité behind early classical archaeology and the history of the discipline.

Further, many of the authors published antiquarian research on classical sites, some of which contemporary classical archaeologists still rely on as canonical images, and so it is important to register that these images could be warped depictions of Ottoman spaces and to avoid taking them at face value. Finally, the travel writers’ jockeying to physically own the past informs the study of classical receptions and how it manifested in space outside the written page. Ancient ruins could become battlefields in which competing parties expressed contrasting claims to classical heritage spaces, a conflict in which travelogues and their illustrations functioned as weapons to justify the western European desire to own and extract the remains of classical civilization.

Impossible Shadows

This article begins with the case study of Ottoman Athens, the best place to establish a typology because of the abnormally large volume of illustrations depicting it. Before any discussion of the following de-Ottomanising techniques, it is important to discuss precisely whom the artists represented in these illustrations. What was it to be an ‘Ottoman’? Ottoman was not an ethnicity; all the local people were Ottomans in the sense that they were subjects of the House of Osman. Louis Dupré’s travelogue embodies the difficulty of western European travellers, brimming with philhellenic notions of “extract[ing] Greece from Ottoman history,” when they ran into the fluid reality of ethnicity and identity in the Ottoman empire.²⁶ Dupré populated his book primarily with portraits, and added ethnic-essentializing subtitles such as, “Souliote,” “Turk,” “Greek,” or “Armenian,” a common practice in these travelogues.²⁷ Yet in a cosmopolitan Ottoman Aegean where allegiances constantly shifted, a simple binary between Greek and Turk was not possible because the “Ottoman world […] contained them both and soldered them together.”²⁸ Indeed, some Orthodox Christian patriarchs argued against independence and preached that the Ottoman Empire was “created by the Christian god to protect the true, that is, Orthodox, Christians from the schismatic Roman Catholics,” a strong identification with the Ottoman state.²⁹ Many western Europeans were surprised to see the diverse complexions of Ottoman Greeks and had difficulty distinguishing ‘Greeks’ and ‘Turks.’ They sometimes draped classical garments on some parts of the population and placed “generic Oriental” garments on other parts of the population instead of their actual clothes.³⁰

The travel authors referred to both Ottoman Greeks and Turks as ignorant and apathetic towards the “skilled art of the classical remains” and “in general, towards the arts.”³¹ There were some differences in tone between accusations of ignorance applied to Ottoman Turks and Ottoman Greeks. Regarding the ‘Turks’, the authors displayed their anti-Islam bias. For example, Edward Daniel Clarke wrote that he expected ignorance from a “Mahometan.”³² Regarding the ‘Greeks’, Hugh William Williams wrote of “disappointment” that they did not live up to the ancient Greeks in his estimation.³³ These accusations of ignorance (regardless of their veracity) and western European’s counter-assertion of their own non-ignorance could justify antiquities exportation to western Europe.³⁴ This rationalisation targeted both Ottoman Turks and Greeks and continued during and after the Greek War of Independence; Gunning convincingly argued that accusations of the locals’ “ignorance” acted as a justification for the British Consular Service’s continued seizure of antiquities in Greece during and after Greek independence.³⁵ Though travelogue authors may not have always conceived of what they did as ‘de-Ottomanising’ with the specific label of ‘Ottoman’ in mind for the whole population of the empire, they levied accusations of ignorance against the whole diverse array of Ottoman subjects they encountered, the local people whom Mary Louise Pratt identified as “travellees.”³⁶ This paper uses the word ‘Ottoman’ to describe the “travellees” from the travelogues to avoid their rhetoric of ethnic essentialization, especially given the travelogue authors’ own ignorance of identity and culture within the Ottoman Empire.

The texts’ assertion of local ‘ignorance’ towards classical civilisation is legible in illustrations that included unnatural shadows that were not cast by any objects in the scene. Depiction of shadow was an object of western artistic interest and training at the time, one that could hold the connotation of a “bearer of the wrong knowledge” as in Plato’s cave, an indication of ignorance.³⁷ Darkness was also a visual aspect of contemporary staged depictions of the ‘Orient’ in Western Europe. In the 1802 opera Tamerlan, for example, the stage of the Paris Opera was kept darkened for the first scenes that were set in the interior of an Ottoman mosque. To use the darkness of a dimly lit performance hall to depict the Ottomans was a noteworthy choice because of how rare it was in operas at that time.³⁸ The shadows in the travelogue images of the Ottoman Empire are thus part of a broader western European culture of visual association between the darkness, ignorance, and the ‘Orient’.

Several of the illustrations feature physically impossible shadows that darken Ottoman faces and buildings to visually distinguish them from brightly illuminated classical ruins and thus divorce the Ottomans—whether ‘Greek’ or ‘Turk’—from their claim to classical heritage spaces. William Haygarth frequently used this ‘impossible shadow’ technique, for example in his drawing of the Acropolis and Pnyx for his book Greece, A Poem, based on an 1811 trip he took to Athens (Fig. 1).³⁹ The sunlight falls on the left side of the Acropolis towers and the Pnyx platform, implying the sun’s location to be on the left side of the image. Yet he drew all the figures at the bottom with faces covered in shadow, even the figure facing directly towards the left side of the image where the sunlight is coming from. This was evidently Haygarth’s deliberate choice, because to draw the scene this way he had to actively deviate from reality. The page facing this illustration describes the same scene in words that provide written evidence that this lighting effect was deliberate, as Haygarth saturates his lines of poetry with light-based imagery. He celebrates the “glitt’ring temples,” “the clear light/Of former ages,” and how Athenian eloquence on the Pnyx “lighten’d over Greece,” in contrast to the view today of “shatter’d wrecks […] Half-sunk in shadow.”⁴⁰

Fig. 1

“View of the Pnyx & Acropolis of Athens.” Haygarth, Greece (no. 4 above), facing p. 45.

Another illustration from Haygarth’s book makes his contrast between the gleaming classical past and the shadowy Ottoman present even more explicit. His image of the Acropolis and Olympieion also features shadowed Ottoman figures, and this time he completely shrouded the five Ottoman figures beneath the Olympieion in darkness (Fig. 2). The well-illuminated ground around them indicates that the figures would not have been completely shadowed in reality, and that this was a deliberate choice. The non-classical parts of the Ottoman city are either dimly lit or completely in shadow, and sharply contrast with the glittering Parthenon and Olympieion. The minaret to the right of the Olympieion and above the three reposing Ottomans is only faintly distinguishable because it is completely covered by a shadow, a shadow whose physical impossibility is underscored by the sun-lit building immediately to the left.

Fig. 2

“View of the Acropolis. Parthenon & Columns of Adrian from the Ilissus.” Haygarth, Greece (no. 4 above), unnumbered page facing p. 65.

The text on the facing page contrasts Athens’ “glitt’ring temples” with the Ottoman figures: “There at their base,/Unconscious of the majesty which frowns/Above their heads, and raising heavily/The sleepy eye, repose a Moslem band.”⁴¹ Haygarth explicitly established a visual vocabulary of light as classical erudition and shadow as Ottoman ignorance. His impossible shadows were an ideological device that argued Ottoman claims to classical ruins were as incongruous as light and dark, invalidating their claim to classical spaces like the Olympieion or Parthenon. For Haygarth, the ruins themselves seemed to “frown” at the Ottomans’ presence. Haygarth’s laudation of ancient Athens doubled as a demonstration of his own classical erudition, and he placed himself in a knowledge hierarchy above the reposing Ottomans in the illustration. He implied that he had a better claim to these ancient spaces than the Ottomans did.

One sees similar impossible shadows that rupture Ottoman claims to classical space in many travelogue illustrations. In Otto Magnus von Stackelberg’s sketch of the Acropolis he drew the Parthenon and its columns with two thirds of the column drum’s surface illuminated, whereas the Ottoman mosque inside only has one third of its surface illuminated (Fig. 3). One of the surviving walls of the Parthenon even appears to cast a diagonal shadow onto the lower half of the mosque, which would have been impossible in reality because the mosque did not stand behind the wall. Impossible shadows were not just confined to landscape illustrations, as Simone Pomardi’s depiction of the Parthenon interior displays similar techniques (Fig. 4). The sunlight comes from the top left of the image, as indicated by the shadow falling across the mosque. The Ottoman figure in the foreground, despite standing outside the mosque’s shadow, has a darkly shadowed face and even the top of his head, which the sun should have been illuminating from the top left. The figure on top of the Parthenon is entirely silhouetted, again despite the position of the sun over him. One may ascribe the contrast between the shadowed mosque and well-lit Parthenon to the time-of-day that Pomardi took the illustration, but the fact that the Ottoman figures are both unnaturally in shadow indicates that this was, as in Haygarth and Stackelberg’s images, a deliberate light-versus-dark contrast to invalidate Ottoman claims to the space.

Fig. 3

Detail from “Athènes du coté du midi” (Athens from the south side). Stackelberg, La Grèce (no. 71 below).

Fig. 4

“Interno del Tempio di Minerva” (interior of the temple of Minerva/Athena). Pomardi, Simone. 1820. Viaggio nella Greicia fatto da Simone Pomardi negli anni 1804, 1805, e 1806. Arricchito di tavole in rame, vol. 1. Rome, Vincenzo Poggioli Stampatore Camerale, right after p. 120.

Vertical Domination

The verticality of classical ruins was charged with a similar meaning, a visual dichotomy of high and low resembling the previous example of light and shadow. The text of John Cam Hobhouse’s travelogue essentially provides the reader with a key to interpret this dichotomy in his illustrations. From his perspective the ancient buildings “towe[r] from amidst their own ruins, and the miserable mansions of barbarians.”⁴² In Hobhouse’s estimation the Ottoman structures were on the same symbolic level as the base ruins over which the lofty ancient structures towered. This text establishes a bifurcated visual language of Ottoman structures vertically dominated by classical architecture, imagery that Hobhouse also used in his illustration of the Olympieion and Acropolis (Fig. 5). The angle of the image positions the nearby Olympieion’s height with exaggerated loftiness in comparison to the Ottoman buildings of the city. Hobhouse greatly exaggerated the size of the Parthenon, increasing the way it “tower[s]” over the shadowed Ottoman buildings below.

Fig. 5

“Ruins of Hadrian’s Temple, with a view of the south-east angle of the Acropolis and Parthenon.” Hobhouse, A Journey Through Albania (no. 4 above), plate facing p. 322.

Here Hobhouse also used the impossible shadow technique: shadows of the Olympieion columns indicate that the sun is on the left side, but the tallest Ottoman-era buildings are in the shade even though there is nothing actually casting this shadow. This artificial shadow obscuring the tallest Ottoman-built structures only increases the towering effect of the classical structures in comparison. When we place Hobhouse’s written description of Athens in dialogue with his illustration, it indicates that the composition of his painting deployed a visual vocabulary in which the exaggerated vertical position of ancient ruins divorced them from Ottoman space to de-Ottomanise them. Hobhouse’s efforts to vertically distinguish the two layers of history went so far that his illustration did not include any minarets, a vertical symbol of Ottoman presence, even though Haygarth’s illustration from the same place shows at least one of Athens’ minarets was visible from this angle (Fig. 2). Hobhouse’s illustration intentionally compartmentalised the Ottomans from the classical past using a combination of impossible shadows and exclusive verticality.

Hobhouse’s technique to vertically separate the Ottomans from their ownership of classical sites appeared in other sources’ imagery as well. Chateaubriand’s vivid visual description of the nearby ruins of ancient Sounion provides further written evidence of the vertical dichotomy. He conjured an image of columns isolated against the sky: “The columns of Sounion appeared more beautiful above the waves: one could perceive them perfectly against the azure of the sky.”⁴³ Chateaubriand used this image to conclude a contrast he made between the “ancient prosperity of Sparta and Athens” and their “current misfortune” under the ‘Turks’ who “delight in overturning the monuments of civilization and the arts” (emphasis added).⁴⁴ This passage establishes that Chateaubriand linked the image of visually distinct and elevated columns with a deliberate separation of ancient civilization and the Ottomans’ lower, ‘overturned’ level.

Haygarth too wrote about the ignorant Ottomans at the “base” of the Olympieion’s “majesty which frowns/above their heads,” another vertical image.⁴⁵ This adds another layer to Haygarth’s illustration on the facing page (Fig. 2), which used both impossible shadows and vertical dichotomy at the same time. In the image, lowly, shadowed Ottomans lie at the base of the gleaming Olympieion: an incompatible combination, so Haygarth would have us believe. His previous illustration heightened this vertical effect by placing the Ottoman figures at the very bottom of the image, where they stand shadowed, separated from the classical sites in their city (Fig. 1). In addition, he emphasised a dichotomy between the vertical columns and the horizontal Ottoman Muslims in their “sleepy […] repose,” whom he drew reclining beneath the Olympieion’s columns.⁴⁶

His effort to portray Ottoman Muslim horizontality in opposition to classical verticality drew upon the broader orientalising stereotype that Said identified which cast the “Oriental body” as “lazy,” a stereotype that Haygarth used to ‘compartmentalise’ them away from any claim to the heritage site.⁴⁷ This ‘horizontal’ versus ‘vertical’ categorisation would have held particular salience in the travelogue genre during a time of ever-rising nationalism, a genre which was often obsessed with describing the ‘national’ character of the different ethnicities within the Ottoman Empire. This ethnic categorisation was prominent in illustrations, such as Dupré’s essentialising images of different Ottoman ethnicities. When Haygarth combined textual castigation of Ottoman Muslims as horizontal with evocative images of the same theme, he communicated to a nineteenth century audience looking to understand the ‘national’ character of Ottoman Turks that they were, intrinsically, ethnically, distinct from the ‘vertical’ classical past and therefore (in his mind) fundamentally incapable of a true heritage claim to ancient spaces.

Isolated Ottoman Figures

Visual isolation of Ottoman figures was another part of the de-Ottomanising repertoire. One way to accomplish this was to warp the geometry of the ruins around them, as is visible in Giovanni Battista Lusieri’s 1802 painting “The Parthenon from the Northwest” (Fig. 6). He made this painting while in Lord Elgin’s employ, soon after he convinced Lord Elgin to remove the ‘Elgin Marbles’. Lusieri justified this seizure by arguing that the marbles needed protection from the “violent hands” of the Athenian Turks.⁴⁸ He had a clear motive to depict Ottoman figures in a visually subordinate way.

Fig. 6

“The Parthenon from the Northwest.” Lusieri 1802. Public Domain.

The lowest corner column drums of the Parthenon are approximately 0.95 metres tall.⁴⁹ Lusieri painted the two figures at the corner at a height of 1.5 column drums, or around 1.425 metres, an exaggeratedly short height well below average at the time. Further, it is impossible to see the underside of the architrave from that angle while also looking down onto the floor of the temple, as in Lusieri’s illustration. To view the architrave from that angle one must stand below the temple stairs as in Fig. 7, making it impossible to see the floor. Lusieri stretched reality so that the architrave underside looms over the human figures and we the viewer also look down on them ourselves, subjugating the Ottoman figures to visual domination. Nineteenth-century artists such as Lusieri could rely on the camera obscura to achieve perfect proportions in their illustrations.⁵⁰ To exaggerate and stretch the building so as to isolate the Ottoman figures in the lower corner was thus an active choice.

Fig. 7

Comparison photograph of the Parthenon. Kimberlym21, CC BY-SA 4.0 license.

Lusieri isolated these visually subjugated Ottoman figures against a solely classical architectural backdrop. There is no sign of the Parthenon Mosque, or any of the other Ottoman buildings that existed at the time. The artist removed the Ottomans from their full urban context, from the Acropolis’ full temporal context of two millennia of construction within and around the Parthenon. Built signs of Ottoman presence that indicate these figure’s belonging at the site do not appear. The ancient stones’ monochrome colour scheme makes the colourful Ottoman garments stand out as separate, split off from the ruin that leers over them. Lusieri’s image casts his intended western European audience as looking down on Ottoman figures isolated by massive classical forms stretching unnaturally around them. His warped geometry combined with his visual isolation of the Ottomans through temporal and chromatic dissonance acted as a deliberate way to de-Ottomanise the site and claim it for himself and his patron.

The visual isolation of the figures in Lusieri’s painting denied the Ottomans’ status as protagonists in the image and relegated them to the category of staffage so common in Romantic-era paintings. Romanticism was a major cultural influence on the travelogues, whose text and illustrations are saturated in Romantic literary tropes with which their audiences would have been familiar.⁵¹ Many of the authors were “driven by desires for change and heroic adventure,” restlessness, “or quests for origins, energies, and imaginative riches.”⁵² They quoted romantic literature, such as the poetry of Lord Byron, with whom Hobhouse even personally travelled.⁵³

Their illustrations drew from the wider contemporary trends of romantic painting, especially landscape painting, including staffage.⁵⁴ In the western European context, staffage presented an “illusion” of the rural European landscape as docile and “innocent of division.” It had a built-in aristocratic gaze that objectified the poor and denied their agency to mask the reality of the “violent agrarian unrest” of the era.⁵⁵ The visual removal of agency and aristocratic denial of violence was even stronger in landscape paintings of slave plantations.⁵⁶ This marginalizing function of staffage was also exported to the landscapes of the Ottoman Empire as they were depicted in western European travelogues.

A contrast of images is useful to demonstrate the marginalizing intent behind Ottoman figures isolated as staffage: illustrations of religious practices at the Olympieion before and after Greece became independent. Louis Dupré drew the Olympieion and Acropolis at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when it was still under Ottoman control (Fig. 8), and Amand Freiherr von Schweiger-Lerchenfeld depicted the Olympieion in the late nineteenth century, during an “Osterfest” (Easter festival) under the independent Kingdom of Greece (Fig. 9). The two images feature a completely different relationship between the people and the ancient site.

Fig. 8

“Le Temple de Jupiter Olympien et l’Acropolis d’Athens” (The Temple of Olympian Jupiter and the Acropolis of Athens). Dupré, Voyage à Athènes (n. 8 above), plate 22. Internet Archive, Public Domain.

Fig. 9

“Osterfest beim Tempel Des Olympischen Zeus in Athen” (Easter festival by the Temple of Olympian Zeus in Athens). Schweiger-Lerchenfeld, Amand Freiherr, von. 1882. Griechenland in Wort und Bild: Eine Schilderung des Hellenischen Königreiches. Leipzig, Heinrich Schmidt & Carl Günther. Public Domain.

Dupré’s image is rare in even including the Ottoman prayer at the Olympieion mosque at all. It’s inclusion, however, is not the primary focus of the image as the title demonstrates: “The Temple of Olympian Jupiter and the Acropolis of Athens.” The classical structures are the primary subject. In a book whose illustrations are mostly up-close portraits of diverse Ottoman subjects, it is indicative that one of the few images with classical elements is at a much larger scale. Although the Muslim population of Ottoman Athens was smaller than the Christian population that Von Schweiger-Lerchenfeld later painted, Dupré chose a more distanced perspective than Von Schweiger-Lerchenfeld, which heightens the Muslim figures’ isolation on the landscape. Further, while the minbar is present in the image, Dupré chose not to include the enclosing wall around the Olympieion mosque, a wall that denoted its sacred place and tied it firmly to the site.

In Dupré’s illustration, the Ottoman Muslims are thus incidental, impermanent parts of the classical landscape rather than its owners, never able to be more than staffage, never the subject like the Greeks in Von Schweiger-Lerchenfeld’s later illustration of independent Athens. Dupré nor any of the other travelogue authors included an image that centred the Ottoman religious rituals at the site as in “Osterfest;” instead they largely chose compositions that compartmentalised isolated Ottoman figures from classical remnants by relegating them to staffage, suggesting that this was an intentional tool to marginalize the Ottoman presence in classical spaces. The visually isolated Ottomans were not the owners of the landscape. Just like in other romantic landscape paintings with staffage, it was the western European aristocratic artist or patron who was implied to have rightful ownership over the land with classical sites.

This tactic to visually supplant Ottoman ownership of land was widespread. Edward Daniel Clarke also isolated his Ottoman staffage (Fig. 10). A few faint figures stand beneath the Olympieion’s columns, barely visible, and Clarke visually contained the most prominent human figures under an arch in the corner, quarantined from the rest of the drawing. Clarke, like the other travel authors, used shadows to express the ignorance of the current population, describing darkness on the landscape as “emblematical of the intellectual darkness now covering those once enlightened regions.”⁵⁷ These lower right figures are somewhat illuminated in order to render them visible against the dark background, but they are less bright than the ground next to them. Clarke’s illustration presented the classical site as a separate world from the modern Athenians by relegating them to a shadowed, lower corner. The image cuts up Ottoman Athens into chronological registers of ancient and contemporary, and isolates the latter in a shadowy corner while placing the ancient in a dominant and distinct visual position.

Fig. 10

“Magnificent remains of the Temple of Jupiter Olympius, at Athens, looking towards the Sea.” Clarke, Travels in Various Countries (no. 5 above). Public Domain.

Staffage figures differed in depictions of ruins inside and outside the Ottoman Empire. For example, John Harrison Allan’s illustration of the ruins of Agrigentum in Sicily is less visually hostile to the locals than his sketches with Ottomans (Fig. 11). Social class was always at play when elite authors added staffage to their illustrations, as indicated by the relish Allan took in recounting that the villagers of Taormina “collected to wonder and stare” at him and his travelling party.⁵⁸ But Allan’s sketch of Agrigentum did not shadow these figures.⁵⁹ This contrasts with his illustrations of artificially shadowed Ottomans at the Heraion on Samos, a site whose verticality he exaggerated by adding a thirteenth column drum that did not actually exist (Fig. 12).⁶⁰ The image used staffage in concert with the other de-Ottomanising techniques of impossible shadows and vertical dichotomy. Allan’s illustrations in the Ottoman Empire carry a far harsher visual connotation; they went beyond standard staffage vocabulary because they sought to fully dispossess the inhabitants of the Ottoman Aegean from classical antiquities.

Fig. 11

“Girgenti, Sicily.” Allan, A Pictorial Tour (no. 59 above).

Fig. 12

“Temple of Juno, Samos.” Allan, A Pictorial Tour (no. 59 above).

Inside the Ottoman empire, artists did not only draw local peasants as they might in Italy, they also included local elite figures as staffage, and subjected them to the same sorts of visual domination. Lusieri’s depiction of the Parthenon (Fig. 6) features three of the citadel’s soldiers and the dizdar (citadel commander) to their left. These Ottomans were not ‘rustic peasants’ by any means, and yet Lusieri treated them as such, as staffage within the vocabulary of romantic painting. In Ottoman spaces, many illustrators expanded the category of ‘rustic peasants’ to include the whole of Ottoman society, even local elite figures such as the dizdar, an expansion that allowed the whole of Ottoman urban society to be discounted as legitimate owners of ancient ruins.

There is a tension in Lusieri’s image, one present across all the travelogue illustrations, of inclusion versus exclusion of the Ottoman figures. They could not exclude them entirely from illustrations, because the texts that describe the authors’ journeys make frequent mention of the locals they encountered on their travels. Staffage was such a common feature of Romantic landscape illustration, and the travelogue reader would expect a visual sample of the ‘exotic’ population encountered. Yet the authors did not fully include the figures either; they isolated them, cast them in shadow, and did not represent them as legitimate claimants to the classical heritage. The irony was, in order for artists like Lusieri to actively exclude the modern inhabitants from the classical sites, they had to be included to be shadowed, isolated, and vertically dominated.

Obscuring or Removing Ottoman Architecture

The angle Lusieri chose for his warped Parthenon painting also blocked the view of the mosque inside, a common feature of illustrations of the Parthenon. Edward Blaquière’s travel narrative indicates why western European artists hid the smaller mosque structure from view. He described the mosque architecture as having “puerile design and barbarous taste” and called witnessing the Ottoman structure “humiliating.”⁶¹ To feel humiliated by something is to imply that one has a personal stake in it. The word choice indicates that Blaquière felt a personal identification with the Parthenon. He felt humiliated, violated by the mosque because he felt that the site reflected him, belonged to him and his civilization. Blaquière did not conceive of the Parthenon mosque as a continuation of the site’s heritage, as the Ottomans did. He expressed an imperial sense of ownership over the site in feeling personally humiliated by the mosque architecture, as if it was trespassing on a site that he already owned.

Many western European travel authors decided to hide the “humiliating” mosque that represented the competing Ottoman claim to the site, including one of Blaquière’s favourite artists, Hugh William Williams.⁶² Williams used similar language to describe Ottoman era constructions and express ownership over the classical site:

“The scene of desolation in the Acropolis is complete; the heaps of ruins of wretched houses […]. Vile nettles, higher than our knees, sting one when full of admiration, and not attending to them,—like the cursed government of the country, always ready to do mischief.”⁶³

“Within the temple, on the ancient marble pavement, where heathen worshipers have often trod, is now a wretched Turkish mosque.”⁶⁴

Williams used the word “wretched” to describe the Ottoman residential and mosque architecture. Even more tellingly, he equated the Ottoman government to “nettles” impeding his effort to express “admiration” for the Acropolis. For Williams, the Ottomans were an annoyance hindering his relationship with the classical site, incapable of having a relationship with it as he does.

Williams paired this textual contestation of Ottoman ownership over the Acropolis with illustrations that had a similar effect. Because he cast the Ottomans as “nettles,” Williams’ illustrations went one step further and completely removed the ‘weeds’ that were signs of Ottoman occupation of the site. His illustration of the Parthenon has an angled perspective (Fig. 13). Had he depicted the Parthenon from a position directly facing the façade, there would have been a clear view of the “humiliating,” “wretched” Ottoman architecture inside, but from an angled perspective this ‘nettle’ was invisible. Haygarth’s illustrations made a similar effort to hide the mosque; he depicted the Parthenon from three different angles, but all are perspectives that hide the mosque from view (Figs. 14, 15, 16).

Fig. 13

“Parthenon of Athens in its Present State.” Williams, Hugh William. 1829. Select Views in Greece with Classical Illustrations, vol. 1. London, Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green.

Fig. 14

(left). “The Parthenon from the west.” Haygarth, William. 1810–1811. ‘Collection of 120 original sketches of Greek landscape made in 1810–1811’. https://eng.travelogues.gr/collection.php?view=523.

Fig. 15

(right). “The Parthenon from the east.” Haygarth, 1810–1811 (footnote 14 above)

Fig. 16

“The Parthenon from the southeast.” Haygarth, 1810–1811 (footnote 14 above)

This pattern emerged in landscape views too. In both Williams’ and Pouqueville’s illustrations they placed one of the Olympieion’s columns in front of the Acropolis, covering where the mosque would have been visible (Figs. 17, 18). Haygarth’s landscape view altered the architecture of the mosque so that it almost looks like part of the Parthenon, with no features that distinguish it as a mosque (Fig. 2). Julien-David Le Roy artificially foreshortened the acropolis in such a way that the mosque was hidden, even though in reality, one could have seen the mosque from the place where he was drawing (Fig. 19). The efforts these illustrations undertook to block evidence of Ottoman presence in classical spaces are part of the travel authors’ agenda to invalidate Ottoman ownership of classical sites, to remove the “nettles,” and claim that ownership for themselves.

Fig. 17

“Temple of Jupiter Olympus.” Williams, Select Views in Greece (footnote 13 above).

Fig. 18

“Temple de Jupiter Olympien” (Temple of Olympian Jupiter). Pouqueville, Grèce (no. 23 above), page 188.

Fig. 19

“Vue des ruines du Pantheon bâti par Adrien à Athene” (view of the ruins of the Pantheon built by Hadrian in Athens). Le Roy, Julien-David. 1758. Les Ruines des Plus Beaux Monuments de la Grèce. Paris, H. L. Guerin & L. F. Delatour, just before p. 35.

Regulating Ottoman Buildings within Classical Frames or Fading them into the Landscape

The ancient buildings could also visually regulate Ottoman structures between frames of classical architecture. This too functioned to contain the Ottoman presence at classical sites to make it easier to claim them as exclusive Western European heritage. In Edward Dodwell’s travelogue he attributed an “uncivilized” or “frantic” pleasure to the Turks who reused blocks from the Acropolis ruins to build “miserable cottages” for the citadel’s garrison.⁶⁵ Dodwell’s illustrations of the Acropolis actually included the many Ottoman-built structures that filled the area around the Parthenon, such as the garrison buildings that Dodwell disparaged (Fig. 20).

Fig. 20

“View of the Parthenon from the Propylea.” Dodwell, Edward. 1821. Views in Greece, from Drawings by Edward Dodwell Esq. F.S.A &c. London, Rodwell and Martin.

Dimitris Karidis described this inclusion of Ottoman-era buildings as a “provocative subject,” but this is not really the case: classical architecture organizes the space of the two paintings to render these “miserable” Ottoman buildings less visible.⁶⁶ In Dodwell’s painting, there are three registers (Fig. 20). The walls and columns of the Propylaea in the foreground, the Ottoman structures in the midground, and the Parthenon as the elevated background. In the angle Dodwell chose, the two ancient buildings visually contain the “provocative” Ottoman buildings between them. The two Ottoman figures present are also relegated to the bottom right, shadowy corner. Dodwell defined the visual organisation of his image by the classical structures, not the Ottoman ones. Though the “provocative” Ottoman buildings are there, they are less visible due to the classical framing of the illustrations and thus pose less of a challenge to the authors’ claims to classical heritage on the Acropolis.

Haygarth took the effort to make Ottoman buildings less visible to the extreme (Fig. 21). His romantic book Greece, A Poem lamented the Ottoman conquest of Athens. He wrote that when the Ottomans “Pointed the minaret, and spread the dome./Ill far’d [sic] the beauteous city.”⁶⁷ When Haygarth drew Athens from afar, he included none of these domes and only the suggestion of a pair of minarets. The dark colour between them makes it seem at first glance that they are not minarets but just the outlines of another tree like the two trees to the left of them, and so they blend into the background. Indeed, the entire city beneath the Acropolis is more a vague suggestion of urban space with faint, sketchy lines and almost no individually delineated buildings. The city is mirage-like, almost vanishing as it blends into the natural hillside. There is no sign of the Ottoman buildings on top of the Acropolis that would have been visible from this angle.

Fig. 21

“Acropolis and the temple of Olympian Zeus.” Haygarth, 1810–1811 (footnote 14 above)

Notably, Haygarth’s minimization of Ottoman urban presence was not because he only wanted to represent classical-era buildings; he drew minarets. Just as with Ottoman figures, he included Ottoman buildings in order to actively exclude them. This image is as much (if not more so) about the contemporary as it is the ancient. The only detailed structures in his illustration are the Olympieion, Parthenon, and Erechtheion. These points of detail stand out from the urban mirage and define the space like the classical architecture in Fig. 20, only on a larger scale. They frame the whole of Athens as a de-Ottomanised space, a space as open as an untouched hillside to imperial intervention and recast as part of an owned European heritage space.

Similar Visual De-Ottomanisation of the House in the ‘Temple of Apollo’, Corinth

The supplantation of Ottoman ownership of classical sites was not isolated to illustrations of Athens; travel authors used these visual techniques on sites across the Ottoman Aegean, such as the ‘Temple of Apollo’ in Corinth. One cannot assign the temple to Apollo with certainty, but which deity was housed in the temple is not of great importance to how travel sources illustrated it.⁶⁸ The temple first saw Roman renovation then Ottoman repurposing.⁶⁹ By Stuart and Revett’s 1751 visit, the ruins were incorporated into an Ottoman house (Fig. 22). Clarke narrated that the governor destroyed four columns to use as materials “for building a house,” and his drawing from circa 1800 is the first to show an extension to the house that widened it into the space previously occupied by those columns (Fig. 24).⁷⁰

Fig. 22

“The temple of Apollo in Ancient Corinth.” Stuart and Revett, The Antiquities of Athens (no. 20 above).

This ruin-intertwined house was probably not the governor’s residence as some have suggested, or at least belonged to someone else by the time Stackelberg visited.⁷¹ Stackelberg wrote that the house belonged to “a particular Turk”; had the house belonged to the governor he probably would have specified this fact.⁷² During the Greek War of Independence, rebels captured Corinth in 1822, after which they demolished Ottoman buildings including this house.⁷³ Guillaume-Abel Blouet’s illustration of the temple taken in 1829 shows the site without the house and holes in the columns from wartime damage, a terminus ante quem for the house’s destruction.⁷⁴

The site’s first travelogue illustration was sketches and notes from architects James Stuart and Nicholas Revett’s tour of Greece in 1751, officially published decades later (Fig. 22).⁷⁵ Their illustrations of ancient sites were largely concerned with gleaning accurate architectural data, and as a result they were not as aggressive in their marginalisation of the Ottoman house. Their data-driven sketch forms a marked contrast to the drawing of the same scene by Le Roy, who visited Corinth after Stuart and Revett (Fig. 23). Instead of using foreshortening as he did in Athens, Le Roy pushed the Ottoman house far into the background of the illustration. He rendered it with lighter strokes of the pencil than the temple ruins so that it fades further still into the backdrop. A viewer unfamiliar with the site would get the impression that the classical and Ottoman buildings were completely distinct rather than intermingled at one site. As in Athens, this made incorporating the temple into a western European heritage narrative more convenient.

Fig. 23

“Vue des Ruines d’un Temple de Corinthe” (view of the ruins of a temple in Corinth). Le Roy, Les Ruines (footnote 19 above), just after p. 42.

Clarke’s illustration of the site cut off the column on the right so that not all of it is visible, leaving the view of the temple incomplete (Fig. 24). Yet to extend the image any more to the right would be to overtly include the Ottoman house. While the stone walls of the house do feature in the image, stone walls are generic enough features of ruins that they do not inherently imply Ottoman occupation at the classical site. Clarke’s desire to exclude the Ottomans from his relationship with the classical past is evident in his accompanying story describing his Corinth visit. The governor summoned him and asked why he was seen “picking up pieces of broken pots.” Clarke wrote, “it was so utterly impossible to explain to a Mahometan the real nature or object of such researches.”⁷⁶ This is another knowledge hierarchy akin to Haygarth’s verses about Athens to exclude the Ottomans from heritage sites, one in which Clarke presented Muslim Ottomans as incapable of the same classical erudition as himself. This anti-Islam exclusion visually manifests in Clarke’s exclusion of the main Ottoman residential building from his drawing of the Corinth temple.

Fig. 24

“Temple of Juno at Corinth.” Clarke, Travels in Various Countries (no. 5 above), just after p. 736.

Haygarth chose a similar angle in his close-up illustration of the building, and completely eliminated signs of Ottoman residency in his landscape view (Fig. 25). Stone walls from the house could be visible in his close illustration without being overtly Ottoman-era, but in a landscape, it would have been clear that they were connected to the Ottoman house. Haygarth’s landscape therefore removed everything except the ancient columns, despite the inconsistency this created between his two illustrations. Luigi Mayer’s illustrations are inconsistent as well (Figs. 26, 27). He wrote that the Ottomans reuse of classical sites was “ignoran[t] and indolen[t].”⁷⁷ It is thus unsurprising that in his first image of the site, although he included the Ottoman house, he pushed it into the background like Le Roy did in his illustration. With the house artificially ripped away from the temple columns, Mayer disentangled it from the story of the temple.

Fig. 25

“Temple of Apollo at ancient Corinth.” William Haygarth, 1810–1811 (footnote 14 above)

Fig. 26

“Ruins of an ancient temple near Corinth.” Mayer, Views in the Ottoman Empire (no. 24 above), just before page 23.

Fig. 27

“The City of Corinth.” Mayer, Views in the Ottoman Empire (no. 24 above), just after page 24.

Like Haygarth, Mayer removed the Ottoman building entirely from his landscape illustration. To elevate the visual impact of temple columns silhouetted against the mountainside Mayer altered the physical topography of Corinth in his illustration. He exaggerated the height of the temple by placing it on a tall hill that did not actually exist.⁷⁸ Just like the illustrations from Athens, Mayer stretched reality to establish a dichotomy between the Ottoman urban space below and an elevated classical past above, stripped of all architectural signs of Ottoman occupation at the site. The examples of Corinth and Allan’s illustration of Samos demonstrate that the phenomenon was not just relegated to Athens. Over in southwestern Anatolia, the inland city of Sagalassos received a similar treatment in F. V. J. Arundell’s travel book. Ebru Boyar identified the orientalising stereotypes of the reclined, pipe-smoking ‘Turk,’ but in addition the image displays the vocabulary of de-Ottomanisation with artificially shadowed Ottoman figures isolated on a cliff in the bottom left of the image, in contrast to a gleaming classical ruin.⁷⁹ There are many more such examples to choose from. In the Ottoman Aegean as whole and in inland Anatolia, western European travellers, eager to physically claim these heritage sites for themselves, strove to push Ottomans into the background of classical ruins’ history or render them absent altogether.

The travel authors’ fantasy of Ottoman absence at classical sites, a fantasy which required many of their illustrations to ignore reality, manifested most strongly in Robert Sayer’s sketches that combined different ancient sites to create imaginary classical scenes. In Sayer’s work, one can track the effect travel images had on their audience back in western Europe, because he never travelled himself. Two of the sites Sayer combined in his book were the temple from Corinth and the Tower of the Winds from Athens (Fig. 28). Sayer was a publisher referencing existing illustrations of classical sites; this depiction of the Corinth temple is essentially a copy of Le Roy. Even the figure with a walking stick is identical to the same figure in Le Roy’s illustration. Yet Sayer did not choose to copy the attached Ottoman building that Le Roy faded into the background, completing their divorce and thus fully removing any signs of Ottoman residency at the site.

Fig. 28

“Temple of Corinth, and Tower of the Winds.” Sayer, Ruins of Athens (no. 81 above).

Sayer did not provide any textual explanation for his combination of the temple and the Tower of the Winds.⁸⁰ An explicit textual explanation is not necessary; Sayer’s illustration wrested the two sites out of their Ottoman urban context, which in effect wrested them out of the historical timeline of the Ottoman conquest of Greece. He took the queue that Le Roy gave when he faded the Ottoman house into the background and entirely removed it. In Sayer’s copy of Le Roy, one can see the western European audience back home successfully receiving the de-Ottomanising message broadcast by the travel images.

Battlefield Spoils: Illustrations as Justification for Physical Extraction, Ownership

The travelogue authors did not just create illustrations to supplant Ottoman ownership of classical sites, they often physically enacted their sense of ownership by extracting artifacts from those sites that they depicted. This was spolia in the original Latin sense of the word. Lusieri convinced Lord Elgin to export the marbles.⁸¹ Hobhouse and Haygarth celebrated Lord Elgin’s seizure of marbles from the Parthenon and elsewhere.⁸² Marie-Gabriel-Florent-Auguste de Choiseul-Gouffier detached part of the Parthenon frieze before Lord Elgin.⁸³ Dodwell took a marble head from the Acropolis.⁸⁴ Clarke, despite his intense criticism of Lord Elgin, extracted a column from the Acropolis and pottery from Corinth.⁸⁵ The above illustrations were thus paired with textual accounts of artifact extraction from the Ottoman Empire. One must interpret the images within that context as vessels for an ideology that justified this sort of extraction by undermining Ottoman ownership claims over the sites and presenting them as exclusively western European heritage. This was a two-sided conflict; the Ottoman state was an empire making active claims to the sites as well and there is copious evidence of Ottoman resistance to artifact exportation.⁸⁶

When François-René de Chateaubriand arrived in Athens and slept on a cot in a room amidst ancient marbles and metals collected by the French consul Louis-François-Sébastien Fauvel, he wrote, “like a conscript who arrived at the army on the eve of an affair, I camped on the field of battle.”⁸⁷ Chateaubriand made a joke here, but the exportation of artifacts from classical sites was a “field of battle” between imperial powers, one in which invalidating Ottoman ownership in text and illustrations acted in concert with western European artifact extraction.

Battlefield similes that characterised antiquities in the Ottoman Aegean as violent conflict zones appeared in illustrations, such as James Duffield Harding’s drawing for Lord Byron’s poem ‘The Siege of Corinth’ (Fig. 29). Here the Ottoman warrior is mostly in shadow in contrast to the glowing personified figure of Greece. The Ottoman’s raised arm casts his shadow over all but one of the classical columns, as Lord Byron’s philhellenic poem calls for this shadow to be cast off. Here there is a twist on the shadow technique, in which the Ottoman figure is not only cast in shadow but seems to be the shadow, to cast the shadow over Corinth himself. The spoils from the ‘battles’ over classical sites in the Ottoman Aegean, whether these conflicts were physically violent or diplomatic, often were the antiquities themselves, shipped off to western Europe. By asserting their ownership of classical heritage spaces and rupturing the Ottoman claim, western European authors justified this extraction of the material remains.

Fig. 29

“The Battle Field.” James Duffield Harding, from Byron, George Gordon. 1849. The Poetical Works of Lord Byron. With notes, and a memoir of the author. Pictoral Edition. London, George Henry and Co.

The struggle over ownership of antiquities eschews a ‘west’ versus ‘east’ divide between western Europe and the Ottoman Empire. There was constant competition between the western European powers, Russia, and the new Greek state following its independence. When France acquired the Venus de Milo from Ottoman Melos, backed by a French warship in the harbour, they aggressively promoted the sculpture and dated it (incorrectly) to the classical Greek era to rival the British Museum and its ‘Elgin Marbles.’⁸⁸ Hobhouse invoked the competing power of France to justify Lord Elgin’s seizure of the Parthenon marbles, writing that the French “had even a plan for carrying off the whole of the Temple of Theseus!!!”⁸⁹ His italics and triple exclamation point display the ferocity of the Franco-British rivalry. In the parliamentary debate about whether to purchase the marbles from Elgin, fear that Russia would take Athens and gain custody of them instead was a major topic of discussion.⁹⁰ The famous hero of Greek independence, Ioannes Makrivannis, advocated against sale of antiquities to western Europeans, because it was “for these we fought.”⁹¹ To undercut Ottoman ownership of antiquities was thus to open up the battlefield to a range of other competitors.

Motives and Mentalités

In these travel illustrations, one must consider the other factors at play besides an explicit desire to supplant Ottoman ownership of classical sites. Not every illustration features the visual vocabulary of de-Ottomanisation. There are more factors at play in these illustrations and the worldviews of their creators. The authors often displayed feelings of temporal dislocation between antiquity and modernity. Khalid Chaouch dubbed Chateaubriand’s representation of Tunis a “dichotomized double locus,” in which he made “a neat distinction between two entities existing within the same space, modern Tunis and historical Carthage, while granting preference to the latter.”⁹²

This is similar to Medieval pilgrims from western Europe in the Holy Land, and the idea of the “contemptus mundi”: pilgrims almost exclusively described holy sites and their votive experience at them, leaving out references to contemporary Muslim, Jewish, and Christian circumstances in favour of an idealised, biblical view of the holy land.⁹³ Much as the medieval pilgrims in the holy land travelled “with the bible in hand,” these authors travelled the Aegean with Strabo and other classical texts in hand.⁹⁴ The travel authors even used religious language to refer to the classical past. For instance, Hugh William Williams called the marble of the Parthenon “sacred” while only mentioning pre-Christian Greeks who touched it as evidence for its sacral character.⁹⁵

It is also important to consider that the classical texts they travelled with were often part of their education as children, in societies that held the classical past in high esteem. For these voyagers, “every feature of the landscape had a familiar name, and each offered a story, often a succession of stories.”⁹⁶ This perspective could lead to celebrations and exaggerations of the achievements of ancient civilisation, an overemphasis on the signs of ancient geographies, and a sense of personal attachment to them. Under the influence of Romantic literature and art, the authors heavily emphasised these emotional attachments to the classical landscape.

A final complicating factor is that not all the travelogues were exclusively anti-Ottoman, and while most references to the Ottomans are deeply disparaging, there are a few occasional passages that express some sympathy towards them.⁹⁷ Likewise, not all the illustrations displayed the de-Ottomanising techniques identified above. Yet many of those seemingly Ottoman-sympathetic moments were tainted because they were either for rhetorical effect (i.e., even the Ottomans understand the removal of the ‘Elgin Marbles’ was wrong) and/or they were surrounded by other statements dripping with anti-Ottoman prejudice.

It is certainly true that contesting Ottoman ownership claims over classical sites was far from the only thought in western European travellers’ heads when they came to the Ottoman Aegean. Still, these different mentalités were not mutually exclusive, but often mutually reinforcing. They framed sites that the Ottomans thought of as places of cultural continuity instead as a “dichotomized double locus,” and this firm rupture between the classical past and Ottoman present made it easier to exclude the Ottomans from the narrative altogether. The past-versus-present dichotomies generated in the illustrations—the high, bright classical past versus the low, shadowed Ottoman present—all disparaged and excluded the Ottomans from classical sites. The travellers’ classical educations could become weaponised as knowledge hierarchies that justified supplanting Ottoman claims with their sense of ownership over classical spaces. Classicism colluded with empire.⁹⁸

Romanticism was weaponised as well. Ottomans never received the same treatment as Percy Shelley at the Baths of Caracalla (Fig. 30). Instead, they were included largely as props, ‘exotic’ staffage in the landscape. Even entire Ottoman urban spaces could be faded into the natural landscape. When one considers the romantic context, Haygarth’s poetic imagery of shadowed Ottoman Muslims “unconscious of the majesty” of the Olympieion takes on another level of meaning: he depicted Ottoman Muslims as incapable of understanding the same romantic vision of the classical past that he had, which in his mind rendered them unworthy to possess its remnants.⁹⁹

Fig. 30

“Shelley Composing ‘Prometheus Unbound’ in the Baths of Caracalla.” Joseph Severn, 1845. The Wordsworth Trust, CC BY-NC-SA license.

A telling visual example of weaponised romanticism appears in the decorative elements of volume 2 part 2 of Choiseul-Gouffier’s Voyage Pitteresque de la Grèce. Both the frontispiece and the cul-de-lampe that bookend the text are views of the Acropolis from different angles (Figs. 31, 32). These typographic ornaments were exercises in fantasy, with dreamy, cloudlike borders giving them a romantic, idealised effect. In both, there is no sign of the Parthenon mosque, despite its visibility from these two angles in reality. Part of the fantasy of these ornamental images is the visual absence of Ottoman presence, which Choiseul-Gouffier’s artists erased in favour of an idealised, romantic view of history that western Europe could exclusively claim.

Fig. 31

Choiseul-Gouffier 1822. “Le Frontispice” (the frontispiece)

Fig. 32

Choiseul-Gouffier 1822. “Le Cul-de-Lampe” (the cul-de-lampe)

As soon as independent Greece took control of Athens and Corinth, this romanticised fantasy became a reality.¹⁰⁰ Independence fighters destroyed the Ottoman house in Corinth.¹⁰¹ Under the new Kingdom of Greece, the state stripped the Olympieion and of the Ottoman mosque and garrison constructions. It is telling that no authority proposed to leave the Acropolis as it was, the debate was over how to remould it.¹⁰² The victors ripped out the Ottoman “nettles” that Hugh William Williams complained obstructed his relationship with the classical sites. The deconstruction actually went beyond the “nettles’” roots: the hill was stripped down to the bedrock, and the non-classical ‘Frankish Tower,’ which “dwarfed” the Parthenon and threatened its vertical supremacy, was torn down.¹⁰³ It became what Leo von Klenze dubbed a monument to the new King of Greece’s “glorious reign,” one that brought “the remains of the glorious past […] in new light.”¹⁰⁴ The most wild expression of the new kingdom’s efforts to recast the Acropolis heritage narrative was Friedrich Schinkel’s proposal for a marble palace on top of the acropolis, but it was rejected out of infeasibility.¹⁰⁵ Even in this moment of seemingly collective, philhellenic victory, however, tensions immediately bubbled up over the seizure of the ‘Elgin Marbles’ and western European artifact exportation; though the Ottoman Empire had lost its claim to the antiquities of independent Greece, the conflict continued.¹⁰⁶

Hélène Ibata argued that in nineteenth-century travelogues about journeys to the eastern Mediterranean, “the quest for past narratives within contemporary topography tended to attenuate cultural conflict by fusing it into a broader reflection about the passing of empires and human transience, wherein cultural difference was toned down.”¹⁰⁷ Yet this did not apply to the Aegean at all. The authors were obsessed with cultural difference, and with establishing dichotomies. The constantly changing borders of sovereignty in the contested region produced both literal battlefields and battlefields of identity, with every side claiming to be heir to the classical past. The contestation over classical inheritance visible in these illustrations continued after the 1830s in the territories that remained in the Ottoman Empire and in independent Greece.¹⁰⁸ Even if these authors were not actively militant in their thinking all the time, they were on a battlefield of identity, and one could not passively exist on this battlefield. Most fought on it consciously, as their accompanying text demonstrates, but even if they did not, the result was typically the same: wider, competing claims of western European sovereignty and artifact exportation.

Conclusion: Victori Spolia? (To the Victor, the Spoils)

On the “battleground of imperial memory” that was reused classical sites in the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ottoman Aegean, illustrations in western European travel sources were weapons that strove to supplant Ottoman claims to antique spaces.¹⁰⁹ The images deployed various techniques to sever the Ottomans’ relationship with antiquity. Visual dichotomies of the lofty, vertical, and glimmering classical past versus the lowly, horizontal, and shadowy Ottoman present, dichotomies that were often physically impossible or exaggerated, served to disconnect the illustrated Ottomans from classical ruins. The illustrations visually isolated Ottoman figures and regulated Ottoman constructions within classical frames. They obscured or removed Ottoman constructions in classical sites, and sometimes even blended Ottoman urban space into the natural hillside, an impermanent mirage to be plucked out like weeds on the Acropolis.

The authors expressed a sense of counter-ownership of classical sites, a personal ‘humiliation’ at the Ottoman’s presence. Between pages of justificatory illustrations that divorced the Ottomans from classical sites, the authors recorded how they acted on this sense of ownership, exporting or endorsing the export of antiquities back to western Europe. These illustrations provide a valuable insight into the spatial character of the conflict over classical heritage ownership, both in terms of how Ottoman spaces were conceived and warped within a shared western European elite worldview that propagated out to an increasingly wide audience back home and how those elites physically enacted their sense of ownership over the heritage sites that they illustrated. The warped nature of so many of these illustrations demands modern classical archaeologists who use them to proceed with caution. When the Ottomans lost control of these sites, the romantic historical narrative that these travelogue illustrations presented became a reality, and the Ottoman layers of history were physically expunged. The victors claimed, as their spoils, a continued competition between themselves to assert their heritage narratives over the ancient marbles.