Around 1753, British antiquarians James Stuart and Nicholas Revett visited Thessaloniki in search of buildings that ‘would interest the lovers of art’, yet despite the architectural variety and rich history of this bustling Ottoman city, they claimed to have found ‘only one building’ that satisfied that criterion: the so-called ruin of the Incantadas, which consisted of five Corinthian columns supporting an entablature and that was topped with caryatid-like statues.¹ The ruin stood in the city’s Jewish quarter and was attached to a local house (Figure 1). Having no historical evidence besides the ruin itself, Stuart drew on his classical erudition to decipher its iconography and thus conjecture its original function. On one side he spotted ‘a Medea, perhaps, or a Helen, with a diadem and sceptre, a Telephus, and a Ganymede’ and on the other dancing Bacchante figures and a Leda. In his account, Stuart admits it was ‘difficult, if not impossible, to ascertain the species of building of which this ruin once made a part’. He suggests that the sculpted figures ‘would seem to be proper decorations for a theatre’, but since he lacked evidence to support this hypothesis, he abstained from further conjecture (1794: 53–54).

Figure 1: James Stuart’s depiction of the ruin of the Incantadas in the Jewish quarter of Thessaloniki (Stuart and Revett 1794: chap. 9, plate 1, digitized by Travelogues.gr /Aikaterini Laskaridis Foundation Library).

But Stuart’s account does not end there: he then goes on to reproduce what that the locals had told him about the monument, reporting that they called the building ‘Goetria [Γοητρία?] or the Incantada’ and that they ‘affirm[ed] it to have been the work of magic art’. When he asked them what they meant, they responded with a story:

When [Alexander the Great] was preparing to invade [Persia], he solicited the assistance of a King of Thrace, who [came to attend] in person, with his family, at the court of Alexander, where they … lodged in a sumptuous palace near his own, communicating with it by means of a magnificent gallery, of which these columns are the remains. The Thracian Queen, a lady of transcendent beauty, accompanied her husband on this visit. Alexander …, dazzled with such excess of charms, determined to violate the rights of hospitality, and seduce the Queen of Thrace. He contrived, by means of this gallery, to pay her frequent visits, though not so privily as to escape the notice of her husband, who… resolved to take a dreadful revenge on the deluder. He had in his train a skilful necromancer from Pontus, who … scattered his spells and charms throughout this gallery; … whoever should … attempt to pass [through it] would inevitably be converted into stone. Aristotle, a conjurer attached to Alexander …, discovered this danger time enough to prevent it: … Alexander was prevailed on to forbear for once his appointed visit. The impatient Queen […] sent one of her confidential servants to see if her lover was coming, and she herself soon followed. At this instant, the King, supposing the magic had worked all its effect, issued forth, attended by his conjurer, to feast his eyes with a sight of the revenge he had taken; when, strange to relate, both companies, those with the King, as well as those with the Queen, were instantly changed to stone, and remain to this hour a monument of vengeance on a jealous husband and an unfaithful wife. (1794: 54)

Like most Westerners, Stuart deemed this story a ‘vulgar tradition’ that was useless for his own antiquarian inquiry. He reproduced it only as evidence of the ‘propensity [of the locals] for the marvellous, and the facility with which, from a few given circumstances, they can make out a wonderful story’ (1794: 54). Despite Stuart’s patronizing framing, this story occupies twice as much space as the author’s own conjectures about the monument in The Antiquities of Athens, indicating that it was clearly an integral part of a local cosmology and lore that imbued the ancient building with socially relevant meaning. Most importantly, it was a story that the locals were eager to tell, not just to each other but also to foreign visitors. If we follow Yannis Hamilakis’s broad definition of ‘archaeology’ as ‘the discourses [or logoi] and practices involving material things of a past time’ (2011: 52), then there were certainly many different logoi on the material remains of the ancient past in the Ottoman world and many ‘local interpreters’ (Anderson 2015). And if classicism amounts to an embrace or interpretation of the classical ideal from a later historical and cultural standpoint, then there have been as many classicisms as there have been different standpoints. The history of the reception of ancient architecture ought to include these multiple receivers.²

Incantadas, the name that both Stuart and the local community of Sephardic Jews used to refer to the monument, means ‘enchanted ones’. This name suggests its connection to a popular belief in magic, animism and immanence shared by Jews, Christians and Muslims in the Ottoman world, who did not just interpret ruins through storytelling but also materially appropriated them through spoliation, in-situ veneration and other rituals and symbolic gestures.³ In the town of Lepsina (Elefsis), near Athens, for example, Christian peasants believed that a statue of Demeter they found in their fields possessed magical properties and made their land fertile. They received the blessings of the local priest to perform rituals whereby they covered the statue with manure and then deposited it on their fields (Clarke 1814: 772–73, 787–88; Hamilakis 2007: 70–74; Hamilakis 2011: 49–53). In his paper for this special collection, Faidon Moudopoulos-Athanasiou delves deeper into this story and demonstrates its various resonances with the rituals, agricultural practices and multiconfessional milieu of the Ottoman world.

Other examples of such religious appropriations and interpretations abound in connection with Athens’s most famous ancient sites. The Tower of the Winds – an ancient edifice that was documented by Stuart and served as inspiration for many classicist pavilions in European gardens – was occupied until the early nineteenth century by a group of Dervishes, who had turned this structure into their lodge, carving a mihrab into its inner wall and adorning it with Quranic inscriptions, ostrich eggs and other ritual objects (Loupis 2024). These Muslim mystics understood this ancient monument in a similar way to the famed Ottoman travel writer Evliya Çelebi who, when visiting Athens in the mid-17th century, called it ‘the tent of Plato’, referencing both nomadic Turcoman tents and the Islamic popular tradition that saw Plato as a figure who combined philosophy with the hypernatural (Loupis 2024: 18).⁴ In a nearby neighbourhood in Athens, local Christians venerated an ancient column they believed to have been built by Saint John the Baptist. They regarded the saint as a healer who had trapped various diseases under the column. And so they uttered prayers and placed votives on it by tying ribbons around it and fixing them to it with candle wax. Eventually, they built a small chapel around the column, nowadays known as the Church of Saint John at the Column (Άι-Γιάννης στην Κολώνα) (Kambouroglou 1990: 267–274). This is perhaps the only structure of its kind that survives today (on Evripidou street, in the centre of modern-day Athens), but it was not the only one historically: up until the 19th century, the city was full of ‘magic’ columns and other ancient relics that were believed to heal those in need or protect certain crossroads and city gates (Svoronos 1917; Zissis 2017: 93–240). Before the advent of academic, secular archaeology, antiquities were seen by many as material evidence of divine presence; they were revered as miracle-working objects and thus preserved.⁵

The sheer presence of the ruins also invited other interpretations by the local commonfolk. While unlike Western antiquarians and Ottoman officials, these ‘local interpreters’ (Anderson 2015), lived close to these antiquities and thus were quite familiar with them, their scale, often dwarfing their own houses and churches, had a sublime effect that led many to believe that the ancient ‘Hellenes’ were giants with superhuman strength. One of these stories, many of which Ioannis Kakridis has collected from old ethnographic surveys, refers to a marble column that lay broken by a country road in Kynouria in the Peloponnese and claims that this was the distaff of a giant Hellene woman (‘μια Έλληνη’) who dropped it there after she heard that her brother had died and had to run home (1997: 23, no. 20). The narrator of another story mentions to two ancient structures which stood several kilometres away from one another in Arcadia – the Temple of Apollo at Bassae and an altar of Zeus on Mount Lykaion – and imagines that they had been built by two groups of giants who were so strong they could lend their tools to one another by effortlessly throwing them over the hills and valleys that stood in between them (1997: 22, no. 14). An anonymous testimony from Thessaly emphasizes that

The old Greeks [οι παλιοί οι Έλληνοι] […] were not weaklings and deadbeats like us. […] [T]hey were tall like poplar trees [λεύκες], up to seven cubits high […]. They grabbed the tops of fir trees and tied them together with a knot to make their huts […]. (Kakridis 1997: 30, no. 47)

The scale and form of ancient ruins inspired local peasants to project architectural meaning even on nonhuman-made elements of the landscape such as trees. The material remains of antiquity conditioned local cosmology and lore in ways that went far beyond a Western, academic understanding of classical antiquity.

A drawing by painter Jean-Baptiste Hilaire published in Choiseul-Gouffier’s Voyage pittoresque de la Grèce (1782) captures the sociocultural context in which local lore about antiquities was cultivated (Figure 2). The subject of this picture is the ruined temple of Ares in Halicarnassus (modern-day Bodrum in Turkey). But what takes place in front of it is equally interesting: a group of Ottoman men smoke their pipes and contemplate it, while one plays the saz and sings, seemingly about the ruins that stand behind him.⁶ In the background on the right, two men approach the ruin and examine a peculiar detail: a broken column that nevertheless is still standing in place. Despite what Western antiquarians often argued, people who lived near such ruins were anything but indifferent or oblivious to them. They made stories and songs about them that they shared them with kin and foreigners. Unlike the thoughts of Western travellers, most of these oral traditions vanished or were actively marginalized, especially after post-Ottoman states adopted Western academic epistemes. Still, some of them hide in plain sight in the Western accounts that sought to marginalize them.⁷

Figure 2: Ruined temple of Ares in Halicarnassus (Bodrum) as depicted by Jean-Baptiste Hilaire for Choiseul-Gouffier’s Voyage pittoresque de la Grèce (Choiseul-Gouffier 1782: plate 99, digitized by Gallica BnF).

Ottoman elites and officials also responded in distinctive ways to local antiquities. As Edhem Eldem (2011) has shown, they received requests from and issued permits to Western travellers who wished to document and remove them. During the 18th and early 19th centuries, the Sublime Porte became increasingly aware of the importance of the antiquities for the West and their geopolitical implications, particularly during the Greek War of Independence (Eldem 2011: 295–312; Ilicak 2019; Kolovos, Ilicak and Shariat-Panahi 2021). Even if most Ottoman officials and governors showed little interest in the historical value of these ‘old stones’, they understood their exchange value and often used them as diplomatic bargaining chips during negotiations with Westerners (Eldem 2011: 289–291, 294). Some of the first governors of independent Greece did the same (Matthaiou and Hatzidimitriou 2022: 78–84). Some Ottoman elites made such bargains not only to obtain the good will of certain foreign states but also to obtain certain objects: when the voivode (governor) of Athens received a request from Edward Daniel Clarke to remove the statue of Demetra from Lepsina (Elefsis), he asked in return for and eventually received an English telescope (Clarke 1814: 784–785). Others made more sophisticated use of local antiquities: as Emily Neumeier has shown, Ali Pasha of Tepelena, who governed most of modern-day Albania and northern Greece, symbolically and materially appropriated local antiquities after leading numerous excavations in Epirus and elsewhere at the turn of the 19th century, deploying ancient spolia, for example, within his own built projects in an attempt to present himself as an heir to the ancient King Pyrrhus and thus legitimize his local rule (Neumeier 2017a). Ali’s son, Veli Pasha, likewise undertook archaeological excavations in the Peloponnese during the early 1800s and often directly competing against Western antiquarians (Neumeier 2017b). In her contribution to this special collection, Amanda Kelly shows how Mehmet Ali Pasha of Egypt sought to channel ‘the imperial weight of both Rome and Venice’ by making use of the remains of an ancient water infrastructure to construct an aqueduct in Crete.

This engagement of Ottoman elites with antiquities predated the ‘rediscovery’ of Greek antiquities by Western travellers. Long before Stuart and Julien-David Le Roy set foot in Athens, Çelebi and other Muslim elites had visited the Parthenon and developed elaborate interpretations of its architecture (Fowden 2019; Kolovos 2023: 192–196), while local Ottoman erudites had written the ancient history of the city (Tunali 2019). In this special collection, Elizabeth Key Fowden and Elias Kolovos demonstrate that the discovery of and organized response to the material remains of antiquity began long before what we nowadays define as archaeology. They do so by looking at the case of the correspondence between local authorities and the sultan’s council that was triggered by the accidental discovery of an ancient mausoleum in the 16th century near Macedonian Pella, the birthplace of Alexander the Great.

Greek intellectuals of the late 18th century – the era of the so-called Greek Enlightenment – made their own claims on local antiquities. Their writings about ancient Greece were obviously influenced by Western thought, but the way they mapped local antiquities was often at odds with the Western antiquarian project. In their 1791 Γεωγραφία Νεωτερική (Modern geography), one of the first comprehensive geographies of Greece, Daniel Philippidis and Gregorios Konstantas explain that they undertook the work so that

when we want to learn about any part of our country, we no longer have the need to go and read into foreign books in foreign languages [ξένα και αλλόγλωσσα βιβλία]. Oh, what a great shame it is for us, the descendants of Hecataeus, of Strabo, of Ptolemy, of Pausanias and other such men, to [need the help of] the descendants of the Scythians, the Celts and the Goths in order to learn something about our Greece! (1791: 107)

Being local – on a national but most importantly a regional scale – was important for these authors. Philippidis and Konstantas wrote in great detail about their native region of Pelion in Thessaly, and they urged others to do the same in connection with their own native lands (1791: 213–214). One of the most famous representatives of this wave of Greek Enlightenment was Rigas Feraios, who also came from Thessaly. Rigas was not a systematic antiquarian, but his relationship with the antiquities of his native region was very intimate. On the last pages of a Greek translation of Jean-Jacques Barthélemy’s Voyage du jeune Anacharsis en Grèce, published in Vienna in 1797, we find an ‘announcement [είδησις], given [to the editor] by Rigas’, describing the whereabouts of an obscure piece of ancient marble:

In Iolkos of Magnesia in Thessaly, in the place nowadays called Lechonia [Λεχώνια], when passing the bridge that goes to Volos, below the street and towards the sea, no more than five steps away from the bridge along the right bank of the river Anavros, the earth has been washed away and a piece of marble has appeared, on which are carved three persons, visible from the waist up; the one in the middle wears a helmet and a royal crown and bears the following inscription: Ελπίς Αχιλλέως Ήρως χρηστέ χαίρε. The local inhabitants, who are Turks, have smashed this in two. Before the [carved] faces are also destroyed, we urge any philologist [ed: i.e., anyone interested in ancient history] that lives in Magnesia to go there and draw them, and to send these to us to be printed. (Karaberopoulos 2006: 362)

Rigas goes on to describe the location of another equally obscure piece of ancient marble in a different part of Thessaly near Larissa. He begins with a philological note but quickly delves again into a local history and topography.⁸ At the time he published this translation, he was living in Vienna and had been exiled from Thessaly for about twenty years, and so his knowledge of the antiquities he mentions either derived from a memory from his youth or from information sent to him by a local. While his detailed description of their whereabouts was printed in Vienna in a book aimed for the Greek diaspora in Europe, it was clearly written for local readers, as they were the only ones that would have understood his obscure reference points. For Westerns like Stuart and Le Roy (whose work had obviously inspired Rigas), these isolated pieces of marble would have been too insignificant to be worth the travel to Thessaly. But for local communities, they were precious finds that put their hometowns and villages on the broad map of a diasporic Greek nation and history.

Peasants and commoners were also aware of the increasing interest of Western travellers in these local antiquities. Just as they mythologized the giant ‘Hellenes’, they told stories about the mysterious ‘Franks’ and ‘Mylords’ (as they called Western antiquarians) who came from faraway places looking for ‘hidden treasures’ (Kakridis 1997: 37–40). A Chios islander told a story about how ‘two Mylords’ came and took ‘a treasure hidden since old times’ on Daskalopetra beach near an ancient sanctuary of Cybele:

They knew where this treasure was from the old books they were reading in their homeland; they also possessed the Key of Solomon, and so they found it. My brother was there when they were removing this treasure – he was a kid, not older than fifteen. The Mylords beat him and shooed him away, so that he would not tattletale on them. But he got a glimpse of the glass pot in which lay the treasure before they took it away. (Kakridis 1997: 40, no. 72)

While the story may be exaggerated in certain respects, in its broad outlines, it offers an accurate account of the early days of Western antiquarianism and looting of antiquities. Another story from the region of Phocis near Delphi further burnished this portrait of the ‘Mylords’, claiming that these foreigners had local roots:

The Mylords are not Christians; no one has ever seen them cross themselves. Their nation stems from the old pagans, the Adelphiotes [Αδελφιώτες], who kept their fortune in a castle that was called Adelphi [Αδελφοί, i.e. Delphi] […]. When Christ and Holy Mary came to these lands and everyone around here became Christians, the Adelphiotes decided it was best for them to leave; and they left for Frankland [Φραγκιά, i.e. Western Europe] and took all their wealth with them. These Mylords are descended from them, and that is why they come here nowadays and worship these stones [προσκυνούν αυτά τα λιθάρια]. (Kakridis 1997: 39, no. 70)

Western antiquarians’ keen engagement with these ancient remains was thus interpreted as ‘worship’ and the long travels they undertook to be near them as a form of pilgrimage. What is most striking here is that the detailed knowledge of Greece these foreigners had led the locals counterfactually assume that the ‘Mylords’ were in fact returning to their ancestral place – and perhaps that they themselves were the foreigners. These locals were perhaps unwittingly commenting on how Western intellectuals looked for the roots of their modernity on Ottoman-Greek soil as well as voicing a genuine fear of being displaced, a fear provoked by the growing interest of foreigners in their land that they witnessed. These locals were not just passive observers of early archaeological excavations; they were directly involved in them, earning their living by labouring at sites (or by selling ancient finds or information about them). At times they also sabotaged such operations: After Lord Elgin removed one of the caryatids of the Erechteion, the locals started spreading rumours that the ‘sisters’ of the abducted statue were heard crying all over the city (Kakridis 1997: 39, no. 71). Around the same time, a crowd of workers in Elefsis refused to help antiquarian Edward Daniel Clarke move an ancient statue to a boat bound for England because a bewildered ox had appeared and this, according to them, was a bad omen (Clarke 1814: 787). Western antiquarians whose operations were hindered by these rumors dismissed them as ‘superstition’. Recent scholarship, however, has shown that it is possible to see such instances of locals spreading rumors and refusing to heed foreigners’ demands as forms of protest or even resistance (Hamilakis 2011: 49–55; Moudopoulos-Athanasiou in the present volume).⁹ Demetra Vogiatzaki’s contribution to this special collection explores a series of cases in which islanders of the Aegean archipelago shared information about local antiquities with Western antiquarians but in doing so often also lampooned and misled them, even making fun of them while giving them guided tours in ‘ancient’ caves in their islands.

Both the Bavarian-ruled Greek state that was founded in the 1830s and the Ottoman Empire in the wake of the Tanzimat reforms adopted Western archaeological episteme as their official policy and developed their own archaeological projects and bureaucracies (Hamilakis 2007: 57–123; Bahrani, Çelik, and Eldem 2011; Eldem 2011: 312–320). Egypt followed a similar path (Reid 2002; Colla 2007: 121–165). These Ottoman and post-Ottoman states emulated Western mindsets and ideologies, but they also used them to cultivate their own (often anti-Western) nationalisms or more specific, regional identities. In her contribution to this special collection, Belgin Turan Özkaya considers Dimitri Efraim Danieloğlu, an Anatolian native whose antiquarian travelogue of the region was one of the first to be written from an explicitly local perspective. Within the newly founded archaeological services of these late- and post-Ottoman states there were also many local autodidacts who merged Western academic methods with local traditions, creating hybrid archaeologies, such as Kyriakos Pittakis, a self-taught archaeologist who rose to the position of general ephorate of the antiquities of Athens in the 1830s (Kokkou 2009: 164–166, 168–169; Tsouli 2019).¹⁰ In his attempt to clean the terrain of the Acropolis from rubble, store valuable pieces, and prevent those pieces from being stolen, Pittakis built a peculiar wall of spolia along the perimeter of the plateau (Figure 3), more akin to vernacular practices of spoliation than to archaeological reconstruction (Magouliotis 2025). The wall, visible to any visitor to the Acropolis, remained in place until 1888, when it was disassembled.

Figure 3: A part of Pittakis’ spolia wall on the Acropolis, photographed by Félix Bonfils in the late 1860s (image digitized by Gallica BnF).

The foundation of the Greek nation-state ushered in another Western transplant: the architecture of neoclassicism. This became the official style of sociopolitical elites, which resulted in centuries of Ottoman building traditions being pushed aside. Gradually, elements of classicist architecture and decoration trickled down to the poorer neighbourhoods of Athens where they merged with local vernaculars and produced what in Greek bibliography has often been described as ‘popular [λαϊκός] neoclassicism’ (Philippidis 1984: 98–103; Loyer 2017: 197–216). As Amalia Kotsaki has recently shown, neoclassicism was adopted and adapted by working-class migrants who settled in the new capital of Athens during the 19th century. Local craftspeople catered to their taste and budgets by creating affordable imitations of marble mouldings in plaster (Kotsaki 2024). Dimitris Philippidis has written extensively about the process through which classicism was vernacularized in Greece (1974; 1984: 98–103; 2019: 128–175). For his contribution to this special collection, he revisits the topic, placing particular emphasis on its linguistic and discursive dimension and its reception by local intellectuals.

Neoclassicism also spread to the rural periphery of Greece, where it was adopted by local craftspeople and merged with a variety of local idioms (Philippidis 1974; Makris 1986). One characteristic example of this is the iconostasis in the church of Agios Athanasios in the village of Ambelakia (Figure 4) that was made by anonymous Thessalian craftspeople in the 1850s. Even though at this time, Thessaly was still part of the Ottoman Empire its inhabitants were evidently aware of the neoclassical architecture that had proliferated in Athens. The architects of the young Greek state were not active beyond its borders, but their formal repertoire travelled far and wide, whether through craftspeople or through prints. Another, later example is a small room painted by the famed folk artist Theophilos Hadjimichael in 1928 (Figure 5). Originally part of the Zolkos house in the village of Klomidado on the island of Lesbos, it is now on display at the Museum of Modern Greek Culture in Athens. This modest but vividly painted interior demonstrates the autodidact Theophilos’s assimilation of the neoclassical architecture he saw in local mansions (see the painted rustication at the bottom of the wall) and his merging of it with a popular national iconography that he copied from prints: ancient figures like Alexander the Great, heroes of the Greek War of Independence of the 1820s, and local flora, landscapes and customs.¹¹ Theophilos is often branded as a genuine folk artist, whose work was unaffected by academic currents and fashions. In reality, his work shows that the assimilation of classicism continued well into the 20th century and yielded all sorts of vernaculars. Thomas McQuillan’s contribution to this special collection shows that such unconventional interpretations and appropriations of ancient forms and images often feature in the artistic experiments of canonical figures of modernism.

Figure 4: The iconostasis of the Church of Saint Athanasios in Ambelakia, Thessaly, made ca. 1850 (photograph by the author; permission for publication obtained from the ephorate of antiquities of Larissa).

Figure 5: A room from the Zolkos house painted by Theophilos Hadjimichail in 1928, as exhibited currently in the Museum of Modern Greek Culture, © Museum of Modern Greek Culture/ Hellenic Ministry of Culture, object inv. no: 18695 (photograph by the author).

The contributions that make up this special collection aim to demonstrate that there is ample evidence for a history of Indigenous and vernacular receptions of ancient architecture in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman world. Many instances are recorded as marginal anecdotes in Western travel literature of the 18th and early-19th centuries. As Michael Herzfeld has shown, in the latter half of the 19th century, Greek folklorists documented a number of these popular traditions and who tried to present them as proof of a grassroots national conscience (1986). In the second half of the 20th century, Ioannis Kakridis (1967; 1997) offered a more critical and nuanced account of the same material by disentangling local lore from the nationalist narrative that came to surround it and revealing the ‘otherness’ that antiquity often represented for those that lived near it. More recently, Yannis Hamilakis (2007; 2011) has set new standards by using the term ‘Indigenous archaeology’ to describe the Greek context and by examining this material through the lens of post- and decolonial theory. Benjamin Anderson (2015) has also helped bring these local interpreters of the Ottoman world to the fore, and other historians have done the same for Egypt (Reid 2002; Colla 2007).

Significant ground has also been covered by edited works such as Scramble for the Past: A Story of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire, 1753–1914 (Bahrani, Çelik, and Eldem 2011), Antiquarianisms: Contact, Conflict, Comparison (Anderson and Rojas 2017), Ottoman Athens: Archaeology, Topography, History (Georgopoulou and Thanasakis 2019), Cities as Palimpsests? Responses to Antiquity in Eastern Mediterranean Urbanism (Fowden, Çağaptay, Zychowicz-Coghill, and Blanke 2022), and Imagining Antiquity in Islamic Societies (Mulder 2022). Many of these works express an urge shared by many historians in recent years to highlight the voices of Indigenous and subaltern peoples in different historical contexts. As David Graeber and David Wengrow put it, we ought to seriously consider ‘contributions to social thought that come from outside the European canon, and in particular from those indigenous peoples whom Western philosophers tend to cast either in the role of history’s angels or its devils’ (2021: 5). Graeber and Wengrow revisit a series of well-known 18th-century Western accounts about the Americas and demonstrate that Indigenous voices often hide in plain sight within colonial discourse; they simply need to be deciphered and read against the biases of the authors that documented them (2021: 27–77). The example of Stuart and the Incantadas shows us that the same is true in the Greek and Ottoman context.

Most of the examples I have mentioned thus far come from the fields of archaeology and anthropology. The aim of this special collection is to relate the insights offered by these works to the history of architecture. This requires going beyond conventional narratives about the ‘discovery’ of antiquity in Greece by Western antiquarians in the 18th century or its ‘systematic protection’ by the Greek state in the 19th century. It also requires that we define architectural history more broadly: not as an enterprise whose sole purpose is to document authored projects but as one whose provenance encompasses any interaction with the built environment from its literal construction through the rearranging of materials to the shaping of its meaning though storytelling and lore, whether written or orally transmitted. Indigenous archaeologies, the contributors to this collection argued, developed in tandem with the vernacularization of classicist architecture, producing different idioms and hybrids. The material itself also demands that historians treat the line between archaeology and architecture as fluid. For most of the protagonists of these stories, the distinction between the excavation and examination of ruins and their use (as inspiration or as actual matter) for new constructions would have been irrelevant.

Notes

1. For more on the history of this monument, see Solomon and Galiniki 2021. [^{^}]
2. Here I draw inspiration from the work of Yannis Hamilakis. He has not only emphasized the importance of acknowledging multiple perspectives but also of referring to such local, nonacademic ways of relating to the material remains of the past as ‘archaeologies’ (2011: 61; see 61–64 in general). I also draw inspiration from the introduction to Scramble for the Past: A Story of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire in which Zainab Bahrani, Zeynep Çelik and Edhem Eldem remind us that archaeology was not born with Western modernity at the turn of the 19th century: ‘Learned interest in the remains of the past is as old as the world’s historical record. The ancient Egyptians, Babylonians and Assyrians excavated and preserved traces of the past that they found buried of their already ancient lands; the ancient Greeks and Romans too had well-known antiquarian interests and often wrote about ancient monuments and architecture’ (2011: 16). [^{^}]
3. For more on such topics, I refer the reader to the ERC-funded project Ghost (Geographies and Histories of the Ottoman Supernatural Tradition): Exploring Magic, the Marvelous, and the Strange in Ottoman Mentalities, led by Marinos Sariyannis at the Institute for Mediterranean Studies in Rethymno, Crete. Much of the work produced by this project has been published in the journal Aca’ib: Occasional Papers on the Ottoman Perceptions of the Supernatural, which is available at https://ghost.ims.forth.gr/acaib/. [^{^}]
4. For more on Islamic perceptions of ancient ruins and antiquities, see Colla 2007: 72–115, Fowden 2019, and Mulder 2022. [^{^}]
5. Let us not forget that the Parthenon itself was once a church and then a mosque and attracted numerous pilgrims from various distant places over the centuries (Kaldellis 2009; Fowden 2019). [^{^}]
6. In 19th-century Athens, there were folk songs about the ‘thirty-two columns [32 κολώνες]’ of the Temple of Olympian Zeus (Kambouroglou 1990: 295–297); it is likely that there were similar ones about the Temple of Ares in Bodrum. [^{^}]
7. Choiseul-Gouffier, in whose book this image is published, is less generous than Stuart: he made a number of observations on the Doric order and proportions of this monument (1782: 161–163) but does not mention the scene taking place in front of it and the local culture surrounding it. Evidence of this survives only thanks to Hilaire. [^{^}]
8. ‘Souidas’, the author of an encyclopaedia known as Suda, written in the 10th century CE, ‘informs us that Hippocrates died at the age of 104 in Larissa in Thessaly. Now, when passing the bridge over Pineios that leads to Tyrnavos, on the right side of the forest road, among the graves just over the outer borough [τον πέραν μαχαλέ] is the stone that covered [Hippocrates’] grave[.] It has been brought there by the Turks from the old city of Larissa and placed upright on a certain grave. We urge any notables and doctors that are there to copy its inscription and to send it to us to be printed’ (Karaberopoulos 2006: 362). [^{^}]
9. Local beliefs about antiquities could contribute to their not being removed in more indirect ways. As Edhem Eldem has shown, in negotiations over the removal of certain pieces of porphyry (probably Byzantine columns) from Istanbul, both the English Lord Elgin and the sultan were concerned that if they were removed in plain sight from Istanbul, it would trigger ‘gossip’ among the local population, who believed in the apotropaic properties of these stones, and possibly lead to protest (2011: 289–291). [^{^}]
10. There were also other, lesser-known autodidact archaeologists like Panayotis Stamatakis, who worked side by side and often against foreigners like Heinrich Schliemann (Konstantinidi-Syvridi 2019). [^{^}]
11. For more on how Theophilos assimilated the neoclassical iconography of the 19th century through gravures and other print material, see Moschou 2016. [^{^}]

References