Representing Classical Sites in the Ottoman Aegean: Artifice, Absence, and Heritage in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Western European Travelogue Illustrations

In the Ottoman Aegean, repurposed classical sites generated legitimacy from physical continuity with antiquity. These heritage sites were often illustrated in western European travelogues, whose images act as useful windows into their authors’ imperialist worldviews because they depicted Ottoman space as their author saw it, or rather how they wanted to see it. Despite their high value for the study of the physical reception of classical ruins, these travelogue illustrations have received little in-depth analysis. The images represent the travelogue authors’ aim to claim these classical heritage spaces for themselves, and this paper categorises the different visual techniques they used to marginalise Ottoman claims to classical heritage. They stretched reality to depict Ottoman figures as shadowed, lowly, and isolated in contrast to an elevated and gleaming classical past, and they obscured and removed Ottoman buildings or regulated them within classical frames. This paper considers these images in situ alongside the travelogues’ text to prove that these techniques were intentional strategies to de-Ottomanise classical ruins, and highlights evidence from Ottoman Athens, Samos, and Corinth to demonstrate that this trend is consistent throughout the Ottoman Aegean. This widespread campaign of visual de-Ottomanisation is highly pertinent to our understanding of the reception of physical remnants of classical civilisation beyond the page. The authors used visual marginalisation of Ottoman buildings and bodies to justify physically claiming heritage spaces themselves and extracting their artifacts. These images were weapons in an imperial conflict over classical heritage ownership, in which the battlefield spoils were the antiquities themselves.