School Director Jack Davis spoke to a crowded house at the Consulate General of Greece in New York on October 26. His lecture was entitled “Restoring History to a Dark Age of Greece: the Peloponnese Under the Turks, 1500–1828.”

Professor Davis’s lecture shed light on a little-known period — life in the Peloponnese under the Turks— and provided a fascinating insight into the (sometimes serendipitous) way that “lost” information materializes.

In the decades preceding 1821 numerous travelers visited the Morea. Many of these visitors published memoirs, but, although these contain precious information about life in the Peloponnese under the Turks, their accounts, even the best of them, were sketchy and seldom described life outside major centers or in areas distant from the coast.

Until very recently, there were few other contemporary, primary sources available to scholars. In the past two decades, however, this bleak situation has begun to change with the opening to researchers of Ottoman archives in Istanbul. These records provide very detailed and spatially continuous information about the nature of life enjoyed by Greeks and others who lived under the Ottoman yoke between 1500 and 1828.

Professor Davis’ own investigations, which provide one example of what is possible, have succeeded in restoring a social as well as an economic history of the area of Pylos in the 17th and 18th centuries, while also defining in Laconia and Messenia more general political trends that presaged the Greek Revolution.

After the lecture, introduced by Consul General of Greece Aghi Balta and President of the ASCSA Board of Trustees Robert A. McCabe, there was a well-attended reception in the Consulate’s private quarters. The School thanks Kellari Hospitality Group and Gabriella Fine Wines for generously providing the evening’s food and drink.

Click on an image below to start the slideshow: