The Gennadius Library has recently received as a gift an archive of private and state documents donated to the library by descendants of the family of Louis Brest, who was French vice-consul on the island of Milos in the 19th century. The archive consists of letters and other material dating from 1770 to the early 20th century. The archive has been digitized, classified and catalogued by historian Anna Athanasouli, a doctoral student at the University of Crete.

This symposium will present this new archival material that sheds light on the realities of the Aegean world and will place it within the general research framework of the region in early modernity. 

The event will situate the Brest Family Archive within broader research on the early modern Aegean and the eastern Mediterranean and will serve as an occasion for discussion on consular institutions in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Greek Archipelago. The discussion will consider the role of consuls and vice-consuls, at once members of local notability and commercial and political agencies of different European powers in the early modern Levant.

Program

Maria Georgopoulou, Director of the Gennadius Library: From France to Milos to the United States and back: the Story of a Family Archive

Anna Athanasouli, PhD Candidate, University of Crete, & Eleftheria Zei, University of Crete: Consular Agents in 19th-century Aegean: the Brest family and its Archive

Fr. Markos Foskolos, Parish of Kioura Kardiani, Tinos: Πρόξενοι ευρωπαϊκών κρατών στην Τήνο και οι σχέσεις τους με τη Λατινική Κοινότητα κατά την Τουρκοκρατία | European Consuls on the island of Tinos and their Relations with the Latin Community during the Ottoman Period

Alexandre Massé, Université Toulouse: A ‘Kind of Consular Anarchy’ – The French Consular Agencies in the Eastern Mediterranean (1815–1856)

Discussion