1. Early and Middle Byzantine period

In the final centuries of Antiquity (5th-6th centuries AD), settlements in Boeotia, and in Central Greece in general, are re-defended against Barbarian invasions by new fortifications, and at the same time the new power of the Christian Church gives rise to a proliferation of basilican churches both within and outside of nucleated communities. Nonetheless archaeological survey shows that large villa estates dominate the countryside, associated with an abundance of transport amphorae: the regional economy appears to be largely in the hands of a class of wealthy landowners, but their products – wine and especially oil, appear to be targeted towards markets outside the region. A largely dependent peasantry occupy adjacent villages and shrunken ancient towns. In these urban centres the dominant class build mansions with fine mosaics.

With the loss of the region to colonising Slav tribes during the 7th-8th centuries AD, except perhaps for coastal strips where the Byzantine fleet could keep the invaders and Arab raiders at bay (Anthedon may have been an imperial base), accommodation must have been made between regional peasant populations and the new tribal rulers (the elite probably fled to the largest towns still held by the Empire). The city of Tanagra was still occupied extensively till the early 7th century, reduced in size between a rebuilt city wall, and boasting at least two large basilicas, but in the following centuries it is possible that the population fled to an already existing fortified hilltop village two kilometres distant, Agios Konstantinos (fig. 1).

Following the recovery of the region by the Byzantine Empire by the 9th century, stability returns and economic growth is shown by historic sources (e.g. the Cadaster of Thebes) and the spread of an extensive series of small villages and hamlets across the open landscape (fig. 2). The new land intake is still marked by medieval churches at the site of most of these Middle Byzantine foundations, but there are also monasteries and metochia in the open landscape to reinforce the picture of a new security (Skripou, Agios Nikolaos at Kampia). Although very few ancient towns had survived except as villages, economic life flourishes at the surviving regional centre of Thebes, where local industry included a renowned silk manufactory, and whose inhabitants were carried off during a Norman raid to practice their craft in Sicily.

2. The Frankish period

Surprisingly, the flourishing town and country life of Boeotia appear to rise to even greater levels of prosperity when the Frankish army of the Fourth Crusade takes possession after its 1204 AD capture of Constantinople. The town of Thebes is the seat of one half of the Duchy of Athens and Thebes, where sources inform us of a grand Western courtly life. A rare remainder of the ducal palace is the great tower at the heart of Thebes Museum, but at the other major town of the Frankish province – Livadheia, much of the castle may date from these centuries, particularly the 14th century when the Duchy fell to the Catalan Grand Company.

Much more evidence comes from the countryside. Whilst in the Peloponnese and Cyclades Frankish power was divided amongst a large group of middle to large feudal landowners, in the Duchy of Athens and Thebes below the dominant dynasties at the these two seats there were hardly any named feudal lords, so that the landscape was shared out amongst very many minor lordships. This created a visible difference in the settlement pattern: in place of larger and smaller castles with some satellite tower-estates found in these other regions, the Duchy of Athens and Thebes is essentially organized below the two named castle-towns through a continuous series of feudal towers (fig. 3). Research has shown that these towers almost invariably were placed near existing Byzantine villages to exploit their surpluses, and were the residence of the landowner or his bailiff. Their architecture is uniform, with a windowless basement for storing local produce, then an entry on first or second floor to hinder attack. One floor would be a reception area, where also local justice was dispensed, and where often some fine architectural details are preserved. Another floor was more private and led to a topfloor fighting platform.

Much less is known of the plan of rural villages from Frankish times, with the exception of the excavated tower-site at Panakton in the Skourta Plain. Here a plan characteristic for Peloponnesian Late Byzantine and Frankish settlements was recovered: an inner keep with the lord’s tower and then an outer bailey with simple dispersed houses for the dependent peasantry. More unusual was an isolated feudal tower-estate on the shores of Lake Hylike, at Klimmataria, where a courtyard is ringed by small rooms and beyond lies a row of probable stables .

3. The Ottoman and Modern periods

3.1. The transitional period

In the fourteenth century these rural tower-villages are almost all abandoned, judging from their surface ceramic assemblages and the subsequent record of the earliest Ottoman village censuses (Vionis 2008). A combination of factors is responsible: the Black Death, raids by Ottoman forces, and war between Byzantine and Frankish powers. We pick up the story however soon after when the Ottoman ‘defters’ provide an almost complete record of the Boeotian countryside from 1466 onwards within the new Ottoman control of Mainland Greece (fig. 4). A sample of the villages taxed have been explored through surface survey, where an excellent match of texts and archaeology has been confirmed. Both historic information and local tradition affirm that the final Dukes of Athens and Thebes, faced with population collapse in the countryside, invited Albanian settlers into the region to recolonize abandoned lands and provide a new source of cavalry to protect the land from the incursing Ottoman raiders. Whereas the majority of Boeotian villages were thus refounded by Arvanitic-speakers, a small group of Orthodox Greek communities had survived the difficult transition period; the new colonies are all very small whereas the Greek refuge villages are usually much larger, clearly forming inland and upland locations whence Greek farmers fled in the crises of the later 14th century. Surface survey of a classic example at Panagia in the Valley of the Muses closely follows the Ottoman tax records in showing how the refuge Greek village of Frankish times lasted into the 16th and 17th centuries, growing in population and economic productivity under the first 150 years of the Pax Ottomanica.

3.2. Florescence and decline of rural settlements

The general recovery after the 14th century lasts until the late 16th century, with the village tax registers showing a general rise in population and crop production in both towns and the numerous villages of Central Greece. The low tax regime, tolerance of local customs and religion, and a firm control over regional security, all stimulated the prosperity of Boeotia in Early Ottoman times. The village of Panagia for example, grew dramatically to some 1000 inhabitants, who retained sufficient wealth to found two monasteries and thirteen water mills, several of which survive as ruins in the Valley of the Muses. Since Greek and Arvanitic villages paid tax largely to support absent cavalrymen in the Ottoman army (sipahis), their plan will have changed little from Frankish or even Middle Byzantine times. So far however no plans have been recognized for houses or settlement layouts for this period, as generally they are overlain by the visible ruins of Late Ottoman times (for deserted villages) or modern residences (where occupation continues today). The same holds for the contemporary urban settlements of Thebes and Livadheia.

By the 17th century the Ottoman Empire begins to decline and weakness in the centre affects and is also caused by problems in the provinces: peasant villages fall into the power of local landowning elites (ayans) who increasingly exploit the farmers to produce cash crops for export. Independent villages are mostly converted into serf-estates or çiftliks, while the military weakness of the state encourages banditry, pirate raids and arbitrary abuse of local populations by bands of irregulars (kirjalis) paid by the powerful landowners. At the same time warfare in Greece between Venetian and Ottoman forces adds to Europe-wide stresses caused by renewed outbreaks of plague and a climatic downturn (the Little Ice Age). Both the Ottoman tax records for the late 16th through 17th centuries and surface survey at a number of deserted Boeotia village sites document a drastic decline in regional populations in town and country and a downturn in the condition of the peasantry (fig. 5). The large village of Panagia for example shrinks to one third of its former population and is broken up into thirteen çiftliks. Surface survey shows that this also meant relocation of the population, part of whom are already at the modern village site a kilometre away by the late 17th century according to Western Traveller’s reports. Finds of Later Ottoman era ceramics are very rare from the former village site agreeing well with the textual sources.

One of the new çiftliks formed in the 17th century was found by surprise during the surface survey of the ancient city of Tanagra, on the Acropolis plateau. It consists of four (fig. 6) single-storey longhouses (monospita, makrinaria) in a line, and should be one of the small settlements named Bratzi in the tax records. At another settlement of the Later Ottoman period, Harmena, dispersed longhouses lay below a substantial multi-storey building, probably the owner’s or manager’s house (konak), a plan well-known from ethnohistoric descriptions of Balkan ciftliks. A further example at Guinosati in the hinterland of modern Agios Thomas village gave both dispersed longhouses, a konak and a fine collection of later Ottoman era ceramics, mapped and published by Athanasios Vionis (fig. 7). In fact the remarkably numerous remains of villages deserted in later Ottoman times and in the later 19th century, when the new Greek state was still unable to prevent traditional brigandage from terrorizing Boeotian villages, have allowed us to get a very full picture of rural life in Central Greece up to and including the early 20th century, when photography and surviving structures add immensely our records (fig. 8).

It seems that nearly all rural settlements from the Early Ottoman period till the late 19th century consisted of dispersed single-storey or one-and-a-half storey longhouses, arranged in rows with much space between to allow outdoor activities, and often orientated north-south to match insolation and prevalent winds. Till the end of this period village squares as are typical for their 20th century successors were also usually absent. Personal possessions were few and usually domestic animals shared the longhouse with the family, who ate off low tables from communal bowls, sitting on the floor or low stools (fig. 9). Till the 1960’s, many Boeotian villages still possessed both numerous examples of such houses and traces of the original village plan could still be detected (fig. 10).

3.3. The urban centres

Boeotian urban life in Ottoman times has left very scanty traces. A shell of a mosque in Strategos Ioannes street in Livadheia and a remarkable painting of Thebes in the late 17th century with a spectacular mosque (fig. 11) hint at major and minor public buildings. The same Livadheia street, then the narrow main road through the town, is occasionally shown in contemporary and early post-Ottoman prints, but more evidence comes from the combination of pictures accompanying Western Travellers’ books and their verbal descriptions. Livadheia was notable for the assimilation of its wealthy merchant and landowning classes to Ottoman lifestyles, beginning with Oriental-style two-storey houses but including interior house furnishings and the wearing of Ottoman dress. Of these traditional Ottoman-era ‘Oriental’ mansions just one survives as a protected monument, that belonging to the well-known family of Logothetis, today a café near the Cathedral. Away from the Old Town centre poorer folk probably lived much like their contemporaries in the villages, in single or one-and-a-half storey longhouses. In the suburbs this rural form of domestic house, at times actually a longhouse with a farmyard, could still be recorded in rare examples in the late 1990’s but there are probably none remaining today.

In the last quarter of the 19th century conditions in the Central Greece countryside began to improve. Long-delayed land reforms and increased security boosted peasant life, while the growth of towns and greater involvement in wider markets encouraged the rise of a regional middle class of professional state servants and merchants. In Thebes and especially Livadheia, townhouses of the wealthier citizens adopted the Western-stimulated Neo-Classical style, and before long individuals of more than peasant income in the villages also began to construct two-storey stone houses with a mixture of Neo-Classical and more traditional features. Some surviving examples of the latter have recently been recorded as they are fast disappearing (fig. 12) along with the last surviving longhouses, all being swiftly replaced by modern concrete international-style homes. Village squares now became focussed on new central churches and public offices, while surrounding shops became typical. In the towns major replanning took place, including a total redirection of Livadheia from its original Medieval core on both sides of the river Herkyna towards a new grid-planned centre to the east.