Athens was
conquest by the Ottomans in 1456.
Two years later, Mehmed the Conqueror,
the Ottoman Sultan, visited the town and he inaugurated somehow
the Ottoman era for the city, which lasted up to 1831.
During that time, new buildings appeared in the very center of the
of the city, in the financial area where we are now.
And I need to say that the first Ottoman buildings
were created in 16th century, and several decades
after the conquest of the city, because the local Muslim community
was rather limited to the army people and very few families.
So when gradually more families, Muslim families appeared in the area,
there was a need for more Islamic buildings, for prayer
or for educational purposes and so on.
So in the area of the ancient Roman Agora,
there was a mosque built
and then a madrassa, which is a school
a theological school, or rather a low level, I have to say.
And then there were also
buildings of public baths.
There was a public bath
behind me to the right, which is not extant anymore,
because the idea of the early new Greek state was to erase
all known glorious historical levels
that this Byzantine and Ottoman era, in order
to present the classical antiquity or the Roman era.
So the bath disappeared.
But there is still another bath, which is very close,
and it actually functions as a as a museum of,
of water and the use of water
and so on.
So in the vicinity there was also a very small mosque
in order to support the needs of the
of the local community and the people who were working in the area.
So very clear, very near is also another
ancient building which was called, Orológio tou Kyrrístou
that is a clock tower or rather
a tower that was accounting the time.
It was built by
in the ancient era.
But in the in the Byzantine era, it was used as a small chapel.
And then the Ottomans in the mid 18th century used it
as a part of their teke, which is a dervish lodge
for the mystics of Islam, the dervishes, to
to do their own ceremonies.
I'm sitting in front of the gate,
the entrance gate to the madrassa of Athens, a beautiful
building of the 18th century, which does not exist anymore.
After the Greek Revolution of 1821,
which led to the independence of Greece.
Ottoman monuments were unwanted,
a dissonant heritage.
So a lot of the Islamic heritage
of the medieval and Post-Medieval town of Athens was demolished.
I'm standing in front of the gate of the madrassa,
which was one of the Ottoman buildings of the city,
and the gate is the only sign that such a monument existed
in Athens.
I'm sitting in front of the few, the very few remains
of what used to be one of the Ottoman mosques
in the old city of Athens, the so-called small mosque.
Küçük Camii in Turkish
We do not really know
the exact time of which
of this building,
but it existed in the 18th
and early 19th century. After the Greek Revolution
and the establishment of the Greek state
Athens became the capital city
of modern Greece
and Ottoman Islamic heritage
was not relevant anymore.
So the mosque was demolished
sometime in the mid 19th century, and today
we can only see it's ground plan
at the slope,
the slopes of the Athens Acropolis.
Islamic Ottoman heritage in the modern Greek
state was unwanted.
Not relevant.
And even today it is a difficult heritage to negotiate with.
We have a lot of cases of Ottoman monuments which did not make it
until today, because they were not wanted
in the modern national state,
others fell in oblivion and the few
which remained
we are still negotiating their survival
in the modern day in Greece.