Introduction

Since the 18th and 19th centuries, the era of the Grand Tour, Eleusis has played an important role in the quest to rediscover and unearth the important sites of Classical Greece. That is because of the importance of the city in antiquity, the myth of Persephone, the cult of Demeter and, of course, the Eleusinian mysteries (cf. Mylonas 1947; Clinton 2015). From the time of the Society of the Dilettanti and the British savant and traveller E. D. Clarke (1769–1822), the first person to extract antiquities from the site, to the present, the topography of Eleusis has thus been significantly altered. The Ottoman-era village was relocated to allow proper excavations to uncover the ruins of the ancient past, celebrated in both Ancient Greek mythology (for example, the Homeric Hymn to Demeter) and history. In a similar fashion to the fate of the village that was once situated atop Delphi, or the Ottoman-era Vrysaki neighbourhood in Athens, eradicated to reveal the ancient Agora (see Hamilakis 2013), the 17th–19th-century village of Lepsina, as Eleusis was then known, was removed to facilitate the discovery of the more important local ruins of the classical past.

This article seeks to metaphorically reverse this process by reconstructing the relationships between the Ottoman-era village and its surrounding landscape. Drawing on fragmented accounts that reference Lepsina and its inhabitants, this investigation attempts a ‘forensic’ reconstruction of a forgotten past. By tracing these fragments, the article explores how material remains and oral traditions once sustained vivid connections to the local landscape, offering an alternative view of Eleusis beyond its classical legacy. Inspired by Barrett’s (1994) call to understand ‘how other ways of seeing the world were once — and, one hopes, still remain — possible’, this study examines the archaeologies of Lepsina to recover marginalised histories and perspectives.

The Virgin of Mid-Sowing and an encounter with the Ottoman mansion: a methodological history

At the heart of Eleusis’ archaeological site, on top of the rough and rocky hill separating the Ploutonion from the Telesterion — two monuments central to the myth and cult of Demeter and Persephone — lies the church of Παναγία Μεσοσπορίτισσα, or the Virgin of Mid-Sowing. Her festival is celebrated on 21 November, marking a significant point in the agricultural calendar half-way, as its name suggests, through the sowing season. On this day, local people enter the archaeological site, cross the Propylaea and the other ancient monuments on their path, and ascend to the chapel, carrying with them offerings (πολυσπόρια — a mixture of boiled grains and legumes). During the ceremony, these are blessed by the priest with the Virgin’s grace to ensure a bountiful harvest. Conventional narratives highlight the veneration of the Virgin, or Theotokos, as a survival of beliefs and practices related to the ancient goddess Demeter, protector of agriculture and the city of Eleusis.

Today, Eleusis and the Thriasian Plain bear few traces of agriculture, which has been replaced by a heavily industrialised landscape. Consequently, such rituals, while reinforcing communal bonds in the present, serve as reminders of past practices and ways of inhabiting the landscape that have largely disappeared.

According to the conventional Greek periodisation, the chapel dates to the ‘post-Byzantine’ period, while its frescoes are a product of the 18th century. Descriptions making use of such conventional, vague terminology¹ detach monuments from their original milieu: the Ottoman era. Likewise, the Orthodox ritual of blessing the fields is equally decontextualised when framed as a survival of Ancient Greek practice and the worship of Demeter in Eleusis. Such tropes sideline the experiences of those not-so-distant ancestors who inhabited Lepsina between the 17th and 19th centuries. They were subalterns, Arvanite peasants who dwelled in a small village atop what is now the excavated archaeological site. They were sharecroppers, peasants cultivating fields owned either by Muslim landlords from Athens or the Orthodox monastery of Phaneromeni in Salamis. In the context of our story, both material traces and ritual emphasise continuities with a more distant past, in the process sidelining the Ottoman era as a time of cultural otherness (for aspects of the politics affecting periodisation, see Gkratziou 2023; Hamilakis 2007: 103–112; Kolovos, Pallis and Poulos 2023; Liakos 2008; Moudopoulos-Athanasiou 2022: 41–47).

To the north, beneath the hill of the Virgin of Mid-Sowing and within the archaeological site, lies the Ottoman mansion, one of few surviving examples of such vernacular architecture in Attica. During a field visit in 2015, an interaction with one of the guards highlighted the building’s marginalisation within the site’s heritage narrative. As students of an MA in Heritage Management, we were assigned an exercise to explore the values that different stakeholders attach to the site. When asked to name their favourite monument, the guard hesitated before pointing towards the Ottoman mansion. That answer was different from the others, which highlighted more majestic and ancient ruins (for example, the Propylaea, the Ploutonion, and the Telesterion). Subsequently, a request was made to photograph the guard pointing to the mansion for the project. They declined, explaining that it was ‘just an opinion’ and inferring that the ‘official’ values of the site differed from their view and aligned with the Ancient Greek monuments. Figure 1 was captured in spring 2015 as a photo commentary for our MA research. The Ottoman mansion stands largely unacknowledged behind closed doors, its stories locked inside. Tucked behind the celebrated ruins of antiquity, it functions as a storage room for the Ephorate of Antiquities. It does not appear on the official map of the archaeological site numbering the rest of the monuments,² and is located in a part of the site where access is restricted.

Figure 1: The Ottoman mansion is located in the background, hidden behind the ruins of the more ancient past. Its door is shut, and with it the stories it has the potential to tell. © Author, in the context of his MA in Heritage Management studies in Eleusina (2015)

This encounter exemplifies the hierarchies of monument valorisation, shaped by colonial and antiquarian gazes, early Greek-state archaeology, and 19th-century folklore studies. These forces prioritised the ancient past as a cornerstone of the modern Greek Nation State, erasing local voices and sidelining Ottoman-era narratives. By focusing on the neglected archaeologies of the early modern period, this article seeks indigenous perspectives (after Hamilakis 2011) and local interpreters (after Anderson 2015) through fragmented histories, oral traditions, and material remains. This methodology aims to uncover alternative ways of engaging with Eleusis’ past and to challenge the dominant heritage narratives that privilege antiquity over the Ottoman-era experience. To this end, the discussion of ‘indigenous archaeologies’ meets recent advances in the study of 19th-century travel and its relationship to local communities. In turn, fragments from such travel narratives and recordings of folklore are analysed in juxtaposition to the advancing body of knowledge from the field of Ottoman Studies — including both primary sources and anthropological insights — to bypass dominant discourses and unlock past local perspectives, a proposed methodology for which I outline elsewhere (Moudopoulos-Athanasiou 2024).

Glimpses of Ottoman-era landscape and dwelling extracted from E. D. Clarke’s imperial narrative

In 1801 Edward Daniel Clarke arrived in Ottoman-era Lepsina to visit the ruins of Eleusis, one of the most famous cities of the ancient world. He encountered a small village inhabited by mostly Arvanite-speaking peasants who arrived in the region during the 14th century, merging with the local population (Cosmopoulos 2015: 34). They were sharecroppers who, together with dwellers from neighbouring settlements, focussed on agriculture in the Thriasian Plain. These dwellers lived within the ruins of the classical past, which were woven into their everyday practices (Figure 2). In this context, Clarke discovered what he believed was a statue of goddess Demeter, which we now know is one of the two 1st-century BCE Caryatids of the Lesser Propylaea.

We found [the statue] … on the side of the road, immediately before entering the village, and in the midst of a heap of dung, buried as high as the neck, a little beyond the farther extremity of the pavement of the Temple³… The inhabitants of the small village which is now situated among the Ruins of Eleusis still regarded this Statue with a high degree of superstitious veneration. They attribute to its presence the fertility of their land; and it was for this reason that they heaped around it the manure intended for their Welds. They believed that the loss of it would be followed by no less a calamity than the failure of their annual harvests; and they pointed to the ears of bearded wheat among the sculptured ornaments upon the head of the figure, as a never-failing indication of the produce of the soil (Clarke 1814: 772–773, emphasis added. See Figure 3).

Figure 2: Bay of Eleusis, 1811, after Sir William Gell. Notice the arable fields around the village, situated at the centre of the map. Engraving, print from a portfolio © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license. https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/image/1051367001

Figure 3: The Statue at Eleusis by Sir William Gell; sheet 89 from sketchbook 13, 1811. Watercolour. © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license. https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/image/1010808001

The first part of the quotation above reveals Clarke’s description of what he believed to be the Statue of Demeter. We can infer his disgust that the statue of the ‘goddess herself’ — found at approximately the location where Demeter arrived at Eleusis in search of her daughter Persephone, according to the Homeric Hymn to Demeter — was buried neck-deep in dung. That fine piece of art, the driving force of romantic travellers, amateur 19th-century archaeologists, and colonial subjects, was almost incapable of breathing within this milieu! The sharp contrast between the perceived whiteness and its aesthetic significance as valued in the 19th century⁴ and the disappointing darkness of the manure delineates the opposing worlds of those foreigners who excavated and expatriated ‘white’ cultural objects into ‘clean’ museums and those ‘backward’ Ottoman-era peasants who entombed them in filth.

These events have been placed in the context of the colonial struggle for the appropriation of artefacts and the expansion of the Greek-speaking community of intellectuals endorsing Western ideals of Hellenism and glorifying classical antiquity (Hamilakis 2007: 69–71; 2008: 275–76; 2011: 51–53). Hamilakis notes that Clarke’s description permits an understanding of the non-Western values of ‘indigenous archaeologies of Ottoman Greece’. The stories of materiality in question, within the context of that emerging field, formed part of the inhabitants’ ‘fabric of everyday life’ (Anderson 2015: 456) and the ‘temporality of working and farming the land’ (Hamilakis 2011: 62), or aspects of what Ingold (2013) framed as dwelling. Indeed, this example foregrounds the people of Ottoman-era Lepsina, even though Clarke’s attitude towards them is, characteristically, overwhelmingly negative (König 2024), treating them as illiterate and ‘superstitious’ peasants.

Clarke’s description of the statue’s ‘veneration’ as a fertility symbol by the people of Lepsina was only made because it was the main obstacle in the way of attempts to remove it. On top of the difficulties caused by the ‘superstitions’ of the locals, other incidents ‘nearly put an end to the undertaking’. When the team arrived with the necessary permit from the Ottoman authorities for its removal,

… an ox, loosed from its yoke, came and placed itself before the Statue; and, after butting with its horns for some time against the marble, ran off with considerable speed, bellowing, into the Plain of Eleusis. Instantly a general murmur prevailed; and several women joining in the clamour, it was with difficulty any proposal could be made … (Clarke 1814: 787).

Here Clarke unconsciously recorded an ‘ominous occurrence’, as Podlecki (1967: 12) defines events not explicitly labelled as omens by either narrator or characters in Ancient Greek literature. And, while we might assume that Clarke could recognise most omens in the Ancient Greek corpus due to his educated background, he failed to see the analogy with the ox rushing towards that statue, even though the ‘general murmur’ and the ‘women joining the clamour’ played out in front of his eyes, rather than a distant past where, for example, Hector and Polydamas interpreted a snake being slain by an eagle as a bad omen for the defence of Troy in the Iliad. The Trojan omen, as well as the white Statue, were discursively (and ideologically) opposed to those rural communities resisting its removal, keeping it buried and dark in accordance with their ‘superstitions’. What Anderson (2015: 455) described as the ‘split between the ethnographic subject and the archaeological object’ is crystal-clear in this excerpt: Ancient Greek omens of the ‘white marble’ became ‘superstitions’ when placed in the context of the 19th century, where locals treated important artefacts in an ‘impure’ (non-white) fashion. Clarke continued:

It was late at night before these scruples were removed … [T]he people had assembled and stood around the Statue; but no one among them ventured to begin the work. They believed that the arm of any person would fall off who should dare to touch the marble, or to disturb its position. Upon festival days they had been accustomed to place before it a burning lamp. Presently, however, the Priest of Eleusis, partly induced by entreaty, and partly terrified by the menaces of the Tchohodar,⁵ put on his canonical vestments, as for a ceremony of high mass, and descending into the hollow where the statue remained upright, after the rubbish around it had been taken away, gave the first blow with a pickaxe for the removal of the soil, that the people might be convinced no calamity would befall the labourers (Clarke 1814: 788, emphasis added).

Upon removal, the statue was loaded on a ship sailing for Smyrna. The Princessa, an aptly named merchantman for transporting the relic to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, sank with the statue on board. Clarke noted in a footnote that the people of Lepsina, while observing the departure, ‘predicted the wreck of the ship … and it is a curious circumstance, that their augury was completely fulfilled’ (Clarke 1814: 790, emphasis added). It is important here to notice the change in wording. As soon as the incident affected the author’s positionality in a negative manner, the actions of the locals were upgraded to ‘augury’ from mere ‘superstition’, as in the context of the ox described above. Clarke was unable to shift positionality from his colonial vantage point to empathise with the ways locals dwelled in the Eleusinian landscape. He only managed to do so when his personal interests were affected.

Foregrounding local life among the ruins

Beyond the postcolonial critique, Clarke’s passages provide fragmented details that enable a ‘forensic’ reconstruction of local life. When analysed through the lenses of contemporary Ottoman Studies, critical folklore, and landscape archaeology, these details transcend mere descriptions of local ‘resistance’. Instead, they reveal how the relationships between the local community, the extracted monument, and their environment were deeply embedded within specific temporal and spatial contexts.

Locals in the Ottoman era were dwelling within the ruins, around and atop the contemporary archaeological site, as seen in Figures 2 and 3 and other sources.⁶ The statue was placed somewhere near the northern limit of the village, while Figure 2 above depicts in detail the arable fields that the statue protected. Together, Clarke’s testimony and the drawing are the only clues about the statue’s location.

Let us focus more on the location of the statue with the power to make the land fertile. It is well known in trans-disciplinary literature that such sacred loci were common in the post-medieval countryside, situated in liminal positions between the inhabited space and the broader landscape. Bound by supernatural values, they acted as landscape markers protecting the community in its interactions with the outside world and ensuring the fertility of the fields, provided that certain rituals were conducted. The veneration of ancient materials was quite common (see, for example, Svoronos 1917 for the worship of ancient columns in Athens), but the use of an ancient artefact in such a liminal position might be a unicum. In our case, the statue’s function is similar to liminal shrines (icon stands) or chapels, located around villages in the Greek countryside and woven within the relevant taskscapes: the agropastoral activities of locals performed in the broader landscape (Nitsiakos 2016; Nixon 2006; Vionis 2022). Regarding icon stands, folklore studies inform us that, besides lighting a candle, people left offerings relevant to sowing. In the case of the statue, Clarke above mentions the placing of dung (i.e., fertiliser), a material relevant to agricultural practice.

In some instances, trees and other physical markers fulfilled a similar function. Such trees, always placed in the context of a chapel or icon stand, are called vakoufika, a term originating from the legal Ottoman Turkish term vakif (Arabic waqf). Although, strictly speaking, vakif as an Ottoman legal term denotes property (land, buildings, etc.) belonging to pious foundations, in the Greek/Albanian countryside many minor locations survive with similar names: fountains next to chapels (Couroucli 2014), sacred spaces shared between Christians and Muslims (De Rapper 2012), as well as sacred forests or individual trees (Moudopoulos-Athanasiou 2023; Stara et al. 2016). Although such locations were not vakif in legal terms, as their importance was not sufficient to reach the centralised bureaucracy of Istanbul, communities and local religious authorities nonetheless preserved this status, treating them as symbols facilitating the reproduction of social practices, or as religious tools through which to manage common resources. In a similar fashion, the statue possessing the properties described by Clarke — namely its liminal location between the inhabited space and the rural landscape, and its value as protector of the fertility facilitated by the ritualistic placement of offerings (dung) — can be placed in the vague, albeit very relevant, category of unofficial vakif.⁷ Together with the numerous occasions on which antiquities played an important role in the everyday life of the Ottoman era, our story demonstrates the potential to reveal local interactions with materialities of the past, as well as their connection to the broader landscape.

Reading between the lines of Clarke’s description of the attempts to remove the statue offers more profound insights. The ‘ominous incident’ of the ox attacking the statue and subsequently disappearing to the (cultivated) plain of Lepsina at a time of emergency has an abundance of recorded parallels. For example, in cases when vakoufika sacred trees were threatened on both sides of the Greek–Albanian border, we encounter many instances of similar ‘divine interventions’ (Stara 2009; author’s fieldnotes from Zagori in NW Greece and Pogon in SE Albania). According to the narratives of locals, including many loggers, the night before they were about to cut vakif trees (consciously or unconsciously), the Saint Protector appeared in their sleep to deliver a warning. Those who decided to cut down parts of vakif groves apparently lost parts of their body in the process or died shortly after, and are commemorated as examples to be avoided. Similar fear overtook the locals of Lepsina in Clarke’s account, who feared for their arms should they remove the statue, hence eliminating its ability to render their fields fertile.

At this point in his narrative, it is important to notice Clarke’s change of wording and observe the different attitudes on display. The ‘Statue’ (always capitalised in his account) in the event of its extraction is reduced to its essence, demystified as ‘marble’. For the locals such a division simply did not exist, as the vakif entails spiritual, spatial, and material significance entwined with the practice of everyday life, transcending our contemporary heuristic division between tangible and intangible heritage.

Likewise, Clarke interprets the actions of the priest through his colonial gaze. It was explicitly the ‘entreaty’ and ‘terror’ of the Ottoman military personnel responsible for enforcing the permit for the statue’s removal that pushed the priest to strike the first blow, so that the rest of the peasants should follow. Once more, however, the local perspective offers a quite different understanding. Fearing the wrath of God invoked through the disturbance of the vakif (literally something that must remain unchanged over time), the locals who were supposed to remove the statue from the earth refused. The priest wore his most prestigious robes and ornaments (canonical vestments for high mass) and delivered the first hit with the pickaxe. In the relevant literature this process is known as ‘lifting’, a disenchantment procedure discussed in detail by Mihailaris (1997: 168 ff). The priest was entitled to carry out the disenchantment of the local vakif and the performative, ritualistic prevention (or lifting) of any potential punishment. Similar practices are well-documented in the context of the Sacred Forests of Zagori (Stara 2009: 190–94) where, although the lifting ritual was not specific, it had to be performed by the member of the clergy responsible for the area. The local priest’s actions are thus situated within the framework of an Ottoman-era ritual of disenchantment, following which locals were enabled to proceed and unearth, however reluctantly, the statue.

This reading reveals aspects of life in the Ottoman-era village of Lepsina through the reversal of a colonial narrative, using elements of Clarke’s written discourse. It allows the negotiation of details offered by a colonial subject to reconstruct local life and stories around a relic of the past playing a fundamental role in their community. Locals emerge as having an agency of their own in which rituals, agricultural practices, and non-linear time were woven in a multitude of relations between humans and their environment, bound by the context of everyday practice.

This is not to say that Clarke adopted a disenchanted rational attitude towards antiquities in contrast to the locals. For the Western traveller, the statue was not understood as one of the 1st-century BCE Caryatids of the Lesser Propylaea. Rather, it was deemed to be the statue of the goddess Demeter herself, in the locus where her mythological story unravelled. In other words, it is an imaginary melange involving a linear temporal connection between a vaguely understood (at the time) classical antiquity and the colonial present, reminding us of the invitation to reconsider the empirical rule of classical archaeology (Plantzos 2014). For Clarke, the metaphysical aspect was related to the imaginary genealogy of his imperial present, traced back to the goddesses of Ancient Greece; for the locals, their spirituality was woven with practice.

Lepsina between Modern Greek folklore and late-Ottoman hierarchies

The ‘father’ of Greek traditional folklore, Nikolaos Politis (1852–1921), recorded the same story as follows, using Clarke as his source:

At the village of Lepsina, in a threshing floor, there was a marble which looked after the village and with its help, the produce of the village was always good. In every celebration, villagers used to light a candle, as they did for the saint’s icon. Nobody could take it, whoever tried to move it from its place, had their hand cut off. … The day before [the British] took it, a cow got loose and rushed towards the statue and hit it with its horns, and then ran away towards the valley, screaming. The villagers understood that if they were to let it go, a big misfortune would hit them; that is why they refused to, and they said that their produce will be destroyed. But the English convinced them that nothing bad will happen to them; and the next morning the English asked the village priest with his gown on, to dig the soil around the marble. … The next year the yield in the fields was good … [t]hen, however, bad times came, and they all understood that it was because they let the statue go (Politis, quoted in Hamilakis 2007: 71–72, emphasis added).

In the passage above, we can trace the patterns Politis evoked to perform what Hamilakis identified as the ‘vernacularisation’ of the story. The folklorist grasped the analogy between the statue and the role of icon stands, thus adding the detail of the candle, while he staged the story on a threshing floor. Both aspects highlight Politis’ attempt to situate the incident within the context of traditional folklore, using timeless, familiar tropes. As his interest lay also in the relation of the story to the Ancient Greek past, the local mode of dwelling again remains concealed, though for different purposes (see below).

In contrast to the homogenising ‘vernacularised’ account provided by Politis, local life in Lepsina followed its own provincial cycles within the Ottoman world, and relevant sources assist in recreating its broader structural context from the late 17th to the mid-19th century. A series of Ottoman documents from the archive of the Phaneromeni Monastery on the island of Salamis, opposite Eleusis, enrich our account with contextual information. They contain titles of ownership and issues of taxation, addressing the village of Lepsina and presenting yet another perspective (Veltanisian 2018). Until the late 17th century, the farmsteads (çifts) of Lepsina belonged to various Muslim individuals from Athens, living in the neighbourhoods (mahalle) of Mustafa Efendi and Fethiye Mosque. At the turn of the 18th century, the monastery acquired these farmsteads when their Athenian owners sold all of the properties to the monk Laurentios. These properties included watermills, arable fields together with their attached households, domesticated animals, etc. It is noteworthy that the Ottoman landholders possessed full ownership of these properties (mülk, Veltanisian 2018: 188) and the transfer to the monastery rendered ownership of the estate (çiftlik) of Lepsina as a metochion, a dependency of the monastery of Phaneromeni.

The monastery subsequently profited from its legal rights over Lepsina and its sharecropper peasants, through fiscal or in-kind taxation and the right to sublease taxation rights (iltizam). In 1701 Phaneromeni subleased the taxation rights of the fields of Lepsina to a Muslim tax-farmer, Abdi Celebi, for 110 gurus (Veltanisian 2018: 1334). Such actions brought a stable income to the monastery but burdened the sharecroppers, as the tax-farmers greatly profited from over-taxation. Later in the 18th century the monastery lost its rights over Lepsina following a legal dispute between the monks and the Voevoda (governing official) of Athens (Veltanisian 2018: 175).

These accounts reveal yet another layer of local history: that of the internal dynamics of the Ottoman imperial context, in which the Arvanite sharecroppers of Lepsina remained subalterns to the local hierarchies. They practised agriculture dependent on tax-farming, being sharecroppers in arable fields managed by local estate holders, either a local Orthodox monastery, as we saw above (Kotzageorgis 2011), or Muslim agents. A ‘vernacularised’ narrative in this context however conceals the internal hierarchies within Orthodoxy, as early folklore sought to smooth class divisions within Orthodox communities, unifying them under a national narrative centred on shared religious identity. Consequently, the villagers of Lepsina are caught between Clarke’s Occidental narrative, the homogenising discourse of early Greek folklore, and the realities of the local Ottoman context.

It is important to note that Clarke was not the only one to excavate antiquities in Lepsina. The post-17th-century architecture of the Phaneromeni Monastery incorporates spolia from Eleusis (Veltanisian 2018: 565; Poulimenos 2007). Such observations reveal internal, localised forms of extractivism, where the monastery not only farmed the taxes of Lepsina sharecroppers but also relocated antiquities from Eleusis to Salamis for its reconstruction projects. These spolia may perhaps not have held significant cultural value for the local population, unlike the statue Clarke exported to Cambridge. However, these practices warrant further reflection and study, especially in conjunction with the broader 18th–19th century discourse on antiquities appropriation.

The intersection of colonial subjects’ ambitions to expropriate antiquities and similar, smaller-scale efforts within the local Ottoman context challenges us to reconsider the categorisations of indigenous and local archaeologies. In the face of these complex realities that include hierarchies internal and external to the empire itself, Clarke’s imperial extractivist project and the Phaneromeni Monastery’s post-17th-century reconstructions using spolia from Lepsina reveal shared patterns at diverse scales. In such a context perhaps Anderson’s (2015: 452) reluctance to use the term ‘indigenous’ when addressing the relationships of Ottoman-era communities with the materiality of their landscape, favouring instead the context of ‘local interpreters’, might be constructive, given the plurality of internal categorisations. ‘Indigenous’ would require the equal treatment of the Phaneromeni Monastery and the villagers of Lepsina, and that in turn would render Forbes’ (2009: 89–90) caveat — to pay close attention to historicity in the context of archaeological ethnography without de-valorising rural communities — fruitless.

Living with stories

The lore of Saint Demeter (Άγια Δήμητρα), who was responsible for ensuring the fertility of the fields in Ottoman-era Lepsina, was allegedly recorded by Lenormant in 1860, based on the account of an Arvanite peasant in the village. However, as this fact was never verified, the originality of the story remains questionable. Furthermore, scepticism prevails, because such accounts were treated as survivals from classical Greek mythology, through a selective reading of the content; that is, beliefs ‘distorted’ by the ‘inferiority’ of the postclassical inhabitants of the area, yet linking them to the roots of the glorious past (Herzfeld 1982). Let us turn to a summary of the story, following the ‘forensic’ approach we have employed thus far:⁸

Saint Demeter, an old woman of Athens, had a beautiful daughter. A Turkish lord versed in magic fell in love with the daughter and wanted to place her in his harem. He abducted the daughter with his black, flame-breathing horse, while Demeter was at church. Upon returning to the house, she found it breached, and her daughter gone. She began the quest to find her daughter. She asked her neighbours, the tree growing in front of her house, the sun, the moon, and the stars; none replied. Only the stork that nested on the roof of her house responded. The bird invoked their long and peaceful symbiosis and recalled Demeter helping when needed to drive away the bird of prey that would have carried off her nestlings. The two embarked on a quest to find the daughter. They arrived in Lepsina, where Demeter received the help of Marigo, the wife of Nicolas the kocabaşı,⁹ who took pity on her. The family had a handsome son, strong and brave, the finest in all countryside. He offered to take Demeter’s place and continue the quest with the aid of the faithful stork. After wandering for days, he arrived at the tower where the daughter was kept. There he faced the ‘Turk’ magician who had the power to transform into anything he chose. He changed successively into a lion, a serpent, a bird of prey, and fire. They battled for three days, and at the end of day two the magician killed the boy and cut his body into four pieces which he hung on the four sides of the tower. That night the stork flew a great distance and fetched a magic herb in its beak and rubbed the young man’s lips with it. He revived and attacked the magician invoking Panagia (the Virgin Mary), vowing that — if victorious — he would become a monk. His divine protection allowed him to throw his adversary off the tower. Then the stork attacked the fallen magician, plucked out his eyes, and pulled out a white hair conspicuous among his black curls. The magician’s life depended on that hair. The young man brought the girl back before leaving to become a monk. Saint Demeter, having received her daughter back, went away with her. Thanks to the blessing of the Saint, the fields have not ceased to be fertile ever since (after Lawson 1910: 79–98).

The beginning and the conclusion of the story, namely the abduction of Saint Demeter’s daughter (Persephone) and the blessing of the fields, might appear to the inexperienced eye as survivals from Ancient Greek mythology. Yet, even from these introductory and concluding remarks, folklore and religious syncretism are evidently being introduced through the Turkish lord versed in magic and Demeter’s blessing of the fields, performing a similar task to the statue discussed earlier.

Syncretism, and the influence of the Ottoman-era milieu, becomes more apparent as the events unfold. The stork’s role throughout the story is pivotal, as it empathises with Demeter and helps her to fulfil the quest, through knowledge (fetching the herb for the revival of the son) and wisdom (to terminate the powerful mage). In Greek folklore, storks are considered positive figures for their care of nestlings and role in agricultural life, walking ploughed fields to eat the pests turned up by the plough and hunting locusts across the fields, thus facilitating good sowing. Their habit of nesting atop belfries and houses associates them with piety. These traits evoke compassion, explaining half of the stork’s role in the story. In the Sufi Islamic context of the Ottoman-era countryside, storks are imbued with additional qualities. In mystic poems they are depicted as holy warriors, pilgrims, or symbols of love and wisdom (Oktay 2017: 159). In Ottoman calligraphy, bismillah (in the name of God) is represented in the shape of the stork (Figure 4), reflecting the bird’s piety and connection to pilgrimage (Schimmel 1975: 425). These attributes highlight the stork’s knowledge and wisdom in the story, particularly as a warrior of divine provenance defeating the mage. The stork’s narrative role can hence only be fully appreciated through a syncretic, multiconfessional perspective that reflects its values within the Ottoman-era milieu.

Figure 4: Bismillah written in the form of a stork. © Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

The mage is no less peculiar. A ‘Turk’ in the context of the story’s recording in the 1860s denoted religious (Muslim) and not national identity. Transformation into animals and elements of nature is common in the Sufi branches of Islam, and especially in tarikats such as the Bektashi order, which was very common in present-day Albania, where the inhabitants of Lepsina — including the person who narrated the story to Lenormant — originated from. The evil mage’s powers are reminiscent of those who opposed the hero of Bektashism, Hacı Bektaş, in the Velâyetname. There, Bektaş’ enemies variously attack him riding lions, using venomous snakes as whips, and by transforming into falcons (Saintly Exploits of Haji Bektash veli 2008). These symbolisms transcend the dichotomies of good–evil, as the lion in Bektashi culture is a symbol of Ali, the lion of God, while Hacı Bektaş is also saved by falcons in other exemplars of the same tradition. As for the evocation of the evil snake, let us not forget that in vernacular 17th-century art, storks are depicted killing snakes in both secular and Orthodox iconography.

Rather than interpreting this story as a composite of ‘ancient survivals’ and Islamic elements ‘blended’ into Orthodox Christian narratives, it is more insightful to consider how all these components held significance within a unified cultural context, much like the statue, a relic of the past that was an integral component of the Ottoman-era Lepsina community’s present, understood beyond a linear measurement of time.

In fact, there are many threads connecting the story with the statue’s role outlined above. Both revolve around the fertility of the fields, which is woven into rituals including material remains (Clarke’s statue) and narratives (Saint Demeter), in a context where life was cyclical, and time perceived in non-linear fashion. Embodiment deeply rooted in agricultural taskscapes and more-than-human encounters are abundant in both instances. Manure collected from household animals within the farmsteads of Lepsina was used to cover the statue in a fertility ritual that would ensure a productive farming season. Equally, the stork ensures twofold fertility for the fields of Lepsina, through its folkloric role of ridding arable fields of pests and locusts, and through its role in the quest to recover the Saint’s daughter, which in turn led to the blessing of the fields. Such entanglements are deeply rooted in habitual practices and inseparable in this analysis.

Consequently, all aspects of these narratives are connected to dwelling and the landscape. The two towers of Saint Demeter’s story, the house of the Ottoman dignitary (kocabaşı) and the tower of the Turkish mage, are no exception. The kocabaş lived in a tower inside the village that was literally ‘rooted’ in the stories of the ancient site, built atop the ancient wall, incorporating it as its foundation. Within the 19th-century context of Lepsina this dwelling would have been understood as placed within the habitual, domestic space of the village: the perfect fit for the welcoming of St. Demeter to Lepsina. West of Lepsina lay the ruins of a 14th-century Frankish tower, situated at distance from the settlement and its fields. Lurking beyond the inhabited space of the village, locals could visually relate to that tower, knowing that it was outside their area of daily mobility (Figure 5). Hence, despite its provenance, this tower would seem like a setting in the broader landscape reminiscent of the realm of the mage.¹⁰

Figure 5: Eleusis, 1811, after Sir William Gell. Notice the interplay between the two towers (foreground left and background right). Engraving, print from a portfolio © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license. https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/image/1051359001

The tale of St. Demeter exemplifies how diverse cultural, religious, and historical elements were seamlessly integrated into a unified context in Ottoman-era Lepsina, reflecting a non-linear understanding of time woven through practice. Characters like the stork and the mage draw upon both Orthodox Christian and Islamic traditions, demonstrating the syncretic nature of the narrative, in a cultural milieu that was never singular. Moreover, the story is deeply entwined with the physical and social landscapes of Lepsina, from the towers to the agricultural practices, anchoring the narrative in the community’s everyday life. Moving beyond simplistic interpretations of ‘ancient survivals’, this tale embodies the lived experiences and shared values of its storytellers. Ultimately, the story invites further exploration of how local narratives mediate shared identities in syncretic, multiconfessional communities, revealing the dynamic interplay of tradition and lived reality.

Lives within ruins, cancelled

The systematic excavation of Eleusis began in 1882. Through funding from the Athens Archaeological Society, the houses of Lepsina standing at the core of the contemporary archaeological site were expropriated and demolished, allowing excavations to unearth the classical past to begin (Cosmopoulos 2015: 37). Alongside other Ottoman-era inhabited spaces (for example, the Athenian Agora, discussed by Hamilakis 2013), Lepsina was treated as a terra nullius concealing the treasures of a more glorious past, ancestral to Western civilisation and key to the European future of the newborn Greek Kingdom (Herzfeld 1987: 17 ff). Tremendous amounts of work were necessary to remove the soils related to the Ottoman-era past, that ‘wretched’ layer of history from an Orientalist perspective, to unearth the desired past (Figure 6).

Figure 6: The Telesterion during the excavations in the 1930s. © The Archaeological Society at Athens

Thus the Ottoman-era village of Lepsina passed into oblivion. At first, the locals were deprived of the material culture that shaped their lived space through the extractivist endeavours of the Western traveller Clarke and the local minor Ottoman elite of the Phaneromeni Monastery. Finally, the Greek Kingdom expropriated the village, erasing it from history together with its stories and the fragile local archaeology.

The logic of excavation and the preservation of artefacts in a national museum, locked behind the sensorial barrier of vitrines, took precedence. It overshadowed the lived, sensory experience of dwelling at Lepsina within the ruins themselves and their stories, as discussed above. Further ‘forensic’ observations on material culture manifest this, through the comparison of the two Caryatids (Figure 7). The contrast in their state of preservation reveals the difference between the effect that living within ruins has on a statue (left, Clarke’s Statue), in sharp contrast to the significantly less eroded excavated counterpart (right) that was buried and preserved for centuries closer to its original form. Clarke’s heavily eroded statue from Lepsina reveals the texture that it got through being a significant part of the everyday life of the Ottoman-era village milieu, exposed to the weather and the practices of the locals. Contrastingly, the excavated Caryatid placed in the Museum of Eleusis, ‘pure and perfect’, would have been the ideal finding for Clarke’s extractivist idiosyncrasy …

Figure 7: The two 1st-century BCE Caryatids of the Lesser Propylaea (left: the statue removed by Clarke, now at Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; right: the excavated Caryatid, now at Eleusina Museum). © Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

In fact, living within ruins in the context of the archaeology of Eleusis is not a phenomenon peculiar to the 17th–19th-century Ottoman era, but stretches back to the earliest histories of habitation on this site. After the abandonment of the Mycenaean building known as ‘Megaron B’ (believed to have housed the first rituals on site), a ceremonial pyre (Pyre A) was operating for a little more than 200 years (late 8th century–580 BCE) to the west of that structure. This pyre was established and placed ‘in a landscape with clear and visible remains of the past’ (Cosmopoulos 2015: 162), an ingredient with omnipotent power to ignite stories through various mnemonic strategies, parallel to the Ottoman-era examples shared above. In a similar fashion, on the southern slope of the archaeological site, archaeologists discovered a ‘sacred house’ constructed at the end of the 8th century BCE, which included three rooms with remains of sacrificial pyres. Excavations adjacent to the building revealed a burial including the remains of a male individual, covered by a mound surrounded by sacrificial pyres, which was part of an earlier structure destroyed to make way for the aforementioned ‘sacred house’ (Cosmopoulos 2015: 136–37). Until the 6th century BCE, this location functioned as a place of an ancestor, or hero, cult until its destruction and replacement by an adjacent small temple.

This reality of living within ruins in ancient Eleusis changed drastically from the 6th century BCE, when Athenian influence started defining the monumental characteristics of the landscape. In the period of Solon, the first Telesterion was constructed on top of Megaron B, while during the reign of Peisistratus (mid-6th century BCE) it was expanded in size. It was during the same period that the ‘sacred house’ was also destroyed, replaced by the temple.

It seems that, in the longue durée of the history of Eleusis, significant recalibrations of local life within ruins occurred when equally significant external forces expanded their influence on the local landscape. In the case of antique Eleusis, it was the rising power of Athens that renegotiated local and small-scale rites within sites connected through memory, resulting in the political incorporation of Eleusis as one of the demoi of Athens. In the case of 19th-century Lepsina, it was the dominant discourses of the Western savant and the search for a homogenising national identity that altered this local landscape once more.

Interestingly, these ancient and 19th-century dynamics met around the mid-20th century. The search for Eleusis’ glorious past intensified after 1922, when Konstantinos Kourouniotis took over the excavation following his return from the Greek military campaigns in Asia Minor. This occurred in the wake of the collapse of the expansionist ‘Great Idea’, a vision ended by Greece’s defeat in the Greco–Turkish War of 1922. This coincided with large-scale industries taking over the broader Thriasian landscape, beginning with Titan Cement (1902); such endeavours expanded after the arrival of Asia Minor refugees at Eleusis (1922). This process continued throughout the century, transforming communities of farmers into industrial workers.

Modernity, in the form of industrialisation, came together with the quest for the glorious past, in a dialectic so well captured by the lenses of Henri Cartier-Bresson in 1953 and Andreas Embirikos in 1955. The images visualise excavated antique material culture structured in the balcony of the modern museum while the chimneys of industrialisation smoke in the background. These two, only theoretically opposing, forces mutually displaced a different past. The industrial chimneys in the background symbolise the disenchanted Lepsina, replacing the one thing that had survived through the millennia as a staple cultural practice weaving together myths, local beliefs, material culture, and narratives: the relation of the inhabitants with the cultivated space, and by extension the material remains of the Ottoman-era countryside.

Concluding remarks

For a brief time in history, the Ottoman mansion at the archaeological site of Eleusis metaphorically opened its gate; it hosted us in its guestroom and shared its stories. These fragments of memory, tied to both place and practice, evoke the layered and contested histories of Eleusis, where classical past and Ottoman narratives once coexisted in the daily lives of its inhabitants. This article has shed light on the community of Lepsina that once lived among and within the ruins. The focus on the Ottoman-era village highlights the dynamic interplay between material culture, ritual, and landscape in shaping local identities. The narratives of Lepsina’s subaltern inhabitants reveal how the ruins were not merely vestiges of a distant past, but integral elements of a lived landscape, rich with meaning and purpose.

The erasure of Lepsina reflects broader patterns of cultural and political prioritisation. From the classical domination of Athens (6th century BCE) to the 19th-century colonial and nationalistic agendas, the site has been repeatedly redefined to align with external ideologies, marginalising the voices and practices of the initial, local dwellers. This exploration underscores the need for an inclusive archaeology that embraces multi-layered histories and challenges linear narratives. By integrating diverse temporalities and cultural layers, we can understand Eleusis not as a monolithic monument but as a living landscape of the Ottoman era, continuously reshaped by human interaction.

Since 2019, the art platform SYN+ERGASIA has conducted the international Amoli project (αμολή) in the town of Aspropyrgos, located in the Thriasian Plain next to Eleusis. This project raises awareness about the remaining agricultural heritage of Arvanite-speaking peasants in the area. Two centuries earlier, these individuals would have shared the same culture and agricultural traditions with the subaltern sharecroppers of Lepsina. SYN+ERGASIA aims to raise awareness of the value of arable land in this brutally industrialised landscape near Athens, where most fields were transformed into industrial centres during the 20th century, and the current trend is to replace hungry industries with expanding logistics companies. The workshops aspire to educate students and farmers on energy and culture, highlighting the regional rural culture and identity, contributing to the sustainability and resilience of a rural community against, perhaps, the ‘E. D. Clarkes’ of the 21st century. It seems that these marginalised but resilient narratives are still present in fragmentary rituals, material remains, and oral traditions rooted in the land resisting complete obliteration.

Tarragona, 10 January 2025

Acknowledgements

I extend my gratitude to the Guest Editor, Dr. Nikos Magouliotis, for kindly inviting me to contribute to this special issue. His comments, along with the reviewers’ suggestions, significantly improved the article. I am also thankful to Elias Kolovos for drawing my attention to research on Ottoman sources of the Phaneromeni Monastery. Fieldwork related to this article was undertaken in 2015–2016 with Rae Rippy during our studies in the now-discontinued MA in Heritage Management programme in Eleusis. The comparative material on the vakif and the Sacred Forests is taken from the author’s ongoing research project ‘Under the Forest’ (HORIZON-MSCA-2023-PF-01-01-101155232), funded by the European Union.

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.