The nineteenth century ushered medieval architecture into the halls of scholarship. Europe discovered its castles and cathedrals, but humble domestic spaces remained unnoticed until the twentieth century, which we should rightly call the first era of domestic focus. Whether motivated by Freud's private realms or Marx's class struggles, history recognized the house as a legitimate subject of research. The French Annales School incorporated new domestic realms in social history with magnificent conclusions glimpsed, for example, in the work of George Duby. Even more radical was the Processualist revolution of Anglo-American archaeology, which in 1968 brought scientific rigor to the analysis of settlements. Yet, the twentieth century seems to have skipped the study of medieval and post-medieval housing in Greece. Diverse theoretical armatures for domestic inquiries-from Amos Rapoport to Pierre Bourdieu-had a minimum impact on the Greek house.
Eleftherios Sigalos brings together the fragmented and disparate literature of the last century dealing with a subject that lacks a central discourse. The medieval and post-medieval house is like a child without a parent, claimed by multiple disciplines that care only marginally for its wellbeing. Thus, Sigalos' challenge was to comb the dissonant voices (archaeology, folklore, architecture, sociology, anthropology, textual history) and bring some order to the chaos. Although the final result seems as chaotic as its subject, this book deserves attention for compiling old data, presenting new evidence, and drawing important conclusions. Given the lack of available literature, it serves as a satisfactory introduction to the state of scholarship.
Housing in Medieval and Post-Medieval Greece is based on Sigalos' PhD thesis at Durham and Leiden Universities. Its publisher, British Archaeological Reports (BAR) is a unique outfit dedicated to the dissemination of archaeological research, a field of diminishing financial attraction to academic presses. The reader should be forewarned that many BAR monographs, present included, retain the quirkiness of archaeological dissertations replete with chapters that delineate the boundaries of the subject, review theories and historiographies, and conclude with appendices and pie charts. The rawness of presentation should be excused. Frankly, it seems more important for new research to be published expeditiously than languish in editorial purgatory. After all, the catalogue component (188 pages) exceeds the length of the interpretive prose (141 pages) and may, in fact, prove to be more enduring than the conclusions where most editorial attention was needed. Sigalos' compilation will be an important reference for future scholars since it includes previously unpublished material from central Greece and the Peloponnese. Sigalos was a member of the Durham/Cambridge Boiotia Project, a diachronic archaeological survey headed by John Bintliff (Sigalos' thesis advisor) and Anthony Snodgrass. The Boiotia Project operated for over two decades and is slowly seeing the light of print. The project's post-antique domestic architecture is nestled in Sigalos' greater study and should be read in conjunction with Joanita Vroom's ceramics volume, After Antiquity: Ceramics and Society in the Aegean from the 7th to the 20th Century A.C. A Case Study from Boeotia, Central Greece (Leiden, 2003).
Housing in Medieval and Post-Medieval Greece is divided into ten chapters and four appendices with maps, distribution charts, graphs and over 200 illustrations. The scope of Sigalos' book is not clearly developed at the beginning, but can be best glimpsed in the appendices at the end. His goal is to collect all the evidence of domestic architecture in Greece between the eighth and nineteenth centuries and to analyze its chronological, typological, geographical, and anthropological features with some quantitative rigor. The true subject of the book is visible in Appendix B, the catalogue of 104 houses. In addition to giving all the relevant information, Sigalos has here produced new AutoCAD plans, bringing to a common platform evidence that lies buried in archaeological reports. After surveying Appendix B, the reader is now prepared to start the book from the beginning.
The first three chapters are short (4-9 pages each) and mostly dispensable. Chapter 1, "What Can One Do with Houses," gives a fleeting introduction to the methodological possibilities. A longer treatment could have better situated the questions within their appropriate place in the history of ideas. Chapter 2, "Demographic and Economic Development of the Ottoman Empire," summarizes developments between the mid-fifteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, making a peculiar leap over the medieval period-the first eight centuries of the book's coverage. Byzantium is treated cursorily in the final page of the chapter. This chronological post-medieval bias reflects the imbalance of surviving evidence concentrated in the nineteenth century. Sigalos' treatment of social and economic history is heavily depended on the work of Halil Inalcik and Machiel Kiel, an autodidact activist historian who volunteered his services to the Boiotia Survey. Not being an Ottoman historian himself, Sigalos does not evaluate but overviews the salient trends (prosperity in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, decline in the seventeenth century, etc) whose relevance to the production of houses is not always clear. Similarly, Chapter 3, "Household and Gender," deals with domestic politics of wealth and gender in too general of a manner, depending heavily on the work of social historians such as Angeliki Laiou. The first three chapters (total of 20 pages) are impressionistic and seemingly intended for the non-specialist.
The bulk of the book begins in Chapter 4, the first substantial chapter (29 pages), which reviews the state of literature according to six regional units (Aegean, Ionian Islands, Peloponnese, Central Greece, Western Greece, Northern Greece). Having laboriously plowed through this tedious literature myself, I commend Sigalos for his assemblage of secondary literature in English, German, French, and Modern Greek. What is missing, however, is a grander narrative that explains the methodological peculiarities of each work. Romantic Historicism gave birth to the study of vernacular culture in the mid-nineteenth century. When it migrated to Greece during the early twentieth century, the study of houses served blatant nationalist agendas. It would have been enlightening, for example, to read about Georgios Megas' racist suppositions and the origins of his typological determinism. A historical framework would have allowed the reader to see the genealogical lineage behind the long list of scholars. Traditional architecture became an important element in the shaping of the Modern Greek nation-state directly through architectural education. It is important to note that scholarship grew from an architectural curriculum where influential faculty-Panagiotis Michelis and Charalampos Bouras in Athens, Nikolaos Moutsopoulos in Thessaloniki-trained every Greek architect in strict principals of documentation and aesthetic politics. Greek Traditional Architecture (Athens, 1983-90), the multi-volume study edited by Demetris Filippidis, is the result of such seminars. The much-quoted recent work on Pelion by Giannis Kizis, moreover, is also a product of the Athens Polytechic School, but it breaks away from the typological mold of the last three generations and should be thus singled out as exceptional (E pelioreitike oikodomia [Athens, 1994]). Greater historiographic breadth would have also elucidated incompatibilities between the idealist, or aesthetic tradition of Greek scholarship and the positivist traditions brought to Greece by Anglo-American archaeologists in the 1960s. J. Malcolm Wagstaff's geographic perspective and the survey theories of John Bintliff, John Cherry and others need to be understood in the context of a larger intellectual battle between the humanities and the social sciences.
Chapter 5, "Greek Vernacular Architecture Reinterpreted," begins a pair of synthetic chapters. Earlier in the book, Sigalos promises to underplay formal characteristics in order to enrich the missing dimension of anthropology. On the contrary, this chapter highlights dominant formal features in Greek vernacular architecture from the organization of villages to the internal arrangement of rooms, and from aesthetic styles to room shapes. The discussion avoids deep art historical waters, such as the efficacy of the "Ottoman International Style," or the "Neoclassical Style," but the chapter manages to exhaust the relevant groupings and generalizations necessary "to pave the way for the analysis of the architectural forms" (69). Chapter 6 takes a step backwards in time, presenting a chronological context for pre-Ottoman houses. Here Sigalos analyzes the architectural features of excavated and surveyed houses divided into three distinct periods (Early Byzantine/Dark Ages, Middle Byzantine, Late Byantine/Frankish). It is not entirely clear why this chapter does not appear earlier, but read in tandem with Appendix B it offers a substantial synthesis of material. For a condensed version, the reader can turn to Sigalos' earlier essay, "Middle and Late Byzantine Houses in Greece (Tenth to Fifteenth Centuries)," Secular Buildings and the Archaeology of Everyday Life in the Byzantine Empire, ed. Ken Dark (Oxford, 2004), pp. 53-81.
Chapter 6, "The Case Study of Boiotia," is unfortunately buried in the middle of the book. It deserves greater highlight as the labor of Sigalos' intensive fieldwork built on previous work by Nancy Stedman, Peter Lock, John Bintliff, and Paul Spoerry. After a short historical introduction, we find a comprehensive presentation of Boiotia's settlements and houses amply illustrated with photos and maps in Appendix C. In order to control the Boiotian case study and enrich the geographical discussion, Sigalos undertook a survey of houses in Messenia during the summer of 1999. The results of this comparison, presented in Chapter 7, reinforce the previous conclusions and allow Sigalos to articulate general trends despite minor regional variations and time lags. These two chapters are the hidden jewels of this book and could have easily stood on their own.
The book ends with two critical chapters. Chapters 9 and 10 address general questions of continuity and change across a vast chronological spectrum. For example, Sigalos signals the uncanny persistence of the long house type in rural settings. Familiar to the archaeologists of medieval Britain, this unitary dwelling is slowly coming into focus as the competitor to another persistent form, the courtyard house of classical antiquity. The latter was in use through the medieval period, but Sigalos posits its concentration in urban and commercial settlements rather than rural villages. Trying to stay clear of ethnocentric narratives of cultural continuity, Sigalos highlights his study's main trends including discontinuities. The tower house, for example, is documented in both Frankish and Ottoman estates, yet its function and architecture should be distinguished. Another trend is the seeming universality of neoclassical fashions in the early nineteenth century, although more pervasive in Messenia than in Boiotia.
Finally, Sigalos must be commended for his fresh quantitative attention that is illustrated in Appendix A but inadequately discussed in the body of the book. A CD insert disappoints expectations further because it offers neither additional data nor a searchable format. The CD graphically duplicates the book's appendices and illustrations in, albeit sharper, PDF files. If Sigalos had made his database digitally available, the book would have gained a radical edge as an open system, a readymade platform for future scholarship. Welcome as it may be, Sigalos' statistical analysis raises questions about sampling methods, bias, scope, or completeness. New data has appeared since the publication of this book, most notably by the Morea Project, where Sigalos spent a season learning methods of documentation (Frederick A. Cooper ed., Houses of the Morea: Vernacular Architecture in the Northwestern Peloponnese (1205-1955) [Athens, 2002]). The Morea Project's dataset of 3,282 houses dwarves all earlier collections. It would be interesting to see how Sigalos' statistical conclusions are effected by the addition of this data now available at http://clvl.cla.umn.edu/marwp/gis.
Sigalos has successfully collected forgotten old information as he presents important new information, most notably from Boiotia. While trying to iron out the diversity of evidence, the variety of relevant textual sources, and the wild extremes of interpretive traditions, Sigalos tames eleven centuries of domestic architecture in Greece. Although the twentieth century capitalized on the domestic, the study of housing in Greece has been marginal. Sigalos' book clears the field and trumpets the need for further research, inviting the twenty first century to fill in a glaring gap. Despite its lack of organization and editorial care, this study was greatly needed.