“What does this relic of slavery under the Parthenon need?” Answering the question of time, Pavlos Nirvanas, defending the Tsitaraki mosque in Monastiraki, which was at the center of the controversy about its salvation in 1912, wrote in his journalistic vignette: “… if we Greeks start blowing up infidel mosques to shake off the our imaginary nightmare, even unbelievers can blow into the air every dome of a Christian church, on which the Gyurid cross once shone.”

Finally, the symbolic mosque in the center of Athens, built by the Ottoman city guard Dizdar Agas in the 18th century, was saved. This began in 1915 the scientific study of Ottoman monuments in Greece by the then young Anastasios K. Orlandos, a leading figure in Greek archeology and restoration, who proceeded to map and reconstruct them. “It is especially interesting that since these are Muslim monuments, such remnants of the Ottoman past appear on the fields of ideological and political confrontation. For the Greeks, as well as for our Christian Balkan neighbors, they were in the past, and sometimes in the present, an “undesirable” legacy,” says Ilias Kolovos, assistant professor of Ottoman history at the School of Philosophy at the University of Crete. , “K” and co-curator with his colleagues Yorgos Pallis and Panagiotis Poulos of the collective project “Ottoman monuments in Greece. Inheritance under negotiation” (ed. Kaplun).

As he explains to us, in the Ottoman years the cities were divided into mahaladas, quarters and parishes; spatial and social units that developed around a dense network of buildings and public spaces: mosques, churches, synagogues, places of pilgrimage, cemeteries. . After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and at the height of the modernization of cities in the Balkans and Greece, these spatial units were erased or only partially preserved.

“For the Greeks, as well as for our Christian neighbors in the Balkans, they were an ‘undesirable’ heritage,” says Ilyas Kolovos.

“Many buildings from the Ottoman past function today as “memory grabbers” against the oblivion of time,” comments Mr. Kolovos. For example, during the war that followed the disintegration of Yugoslavia, the mosques of Bosnia and Herzegovina were attacked by the Serbs and were largely destroyed, but today they have been restored. In Greece, “where we have an excellent archaeological service that needs to be maintained,” he stresses, many Ottoman monuments were declared protected and remain so. Some of them have been exemplarily restored, as was recently done with the Fethiye Mosque inside the Roman Agora, and some are still waiting to be saved.

In this particular project, scholars have chosen the designation “negotiation heritage” for the Ottoman monuments to show both their contested nature and the ongoing debate about their identity. As the three editors of the volume point out in the introduction, this characterization does not refer to their institutional and legal status, which was secured by appropriate procedures in the past, but to their position and attitude towards them in the collective consciousness of the Greeks. In a more general sense, all monuments are circulating heritage, even ancient monuments. However, the Ottoman monuments, like the Christian monuments in Turkey, stand out mainly because they seem to be potential bargaining chips in the politics of the two countries, as well as an occasion for the development of nationalist discourse on both sides of the Aegean. At the same time, even those who agree with their protection, both in Greece and Turkey, are involved in a great debate about their use.

“Certainly, it is good for our cultural heritage to continue to protect this sensitive heritage in Greece. Let’s save the buildings without silence, as witnesses to the complex history of Ottoman rule in Greece. This is a period when different religious communities – Muslims, Christians, Jews – coexisted for a long time, interacting with each other, ”says the historian. “We need in the modern world to emphasize this history of diversity, when indeed in modern Turkey a monolithic understanding of cultural heritage is being promoted: the recent conversion of Hagia Sophia into a mosque denies precisely that the monument was in its history a building of many different stories, since it was built as church. Sultan Mehmed II even admired his mosaics, which remained open for a century before they were covered, as is the case today.”