Vostitsa: The town of Aigio

The Venetian records from 1700 record 5 churches in Aigio, but only 3 of them are still extant today. A look at what happened and changes to the town through time using census and other records, traveler accounts, and maps.

A companion page to this episode can be found on the Helonaki website.

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Jen 0:33

Long ago, there was a small castle, that was toppled by the false Maltezous and found above the sea in the Gulf of Naupaktos. The town was made again on a hill. It belongs to the HASI of the Pasha of the Morea and as a Kasi with a degree of 150 whites. To the north. Aigio is bordered by the sea. It is a small market town with 200 low and high tiled houses built with stone, with trees and their gardens. The plain that is found to the south is fertile and full of villages. Everywhere there are pomegranate and olive trees as large as plane trees that you could not find the same anywhere else. Many old men told me that in the city, there are olive trees that are 2000 years old. I saw 40 small shops, an inn and a hamam that works in the winter. In July, the people bathe in the sea. The faithless Venetians have burned and destroyed Aigio three times up to now. Some large buildings remain demolished. The mosque of Sheik Afendi because it was a stone didn't burn as happened with all the other buildings and mosques. To the east is where the river of Kalavryta passes this ruined market town, the river, which goes from the mountains and empties into the Gulf of Naupaktos to the west of the town. Two small bridges with nine arches pass over the river. To the west of the town, there is sweet water, which drains from eight stone spigots. Some good landowner showing his benevolence constructed a wooden pavilion next to the running water. There is the opium den of Ali Baba where a few dervishes of the order of Bektashi live. Many small boats pay the opium den a visit because it is on the beach and it is a good site for distraction. Down from the shade of a large tree, the unbelievers sit and happily spend their time. Some pray. Others yet eat kebabs and drink wine. And some dashing people wash their clothes. It is an admirable spot for an outing. This is from travels in Greece, 1668 through 1671 by Evliya Çelebi. This is actually a translation of the Greek translation of Çelebi's books. The Greek translation, was published by Demetrius Lupis in 2005. It Includes Çelebi's travels in the Peloponnese, Ionian islands, Crete, and the Aegean islands, some of which are not available in other translations. I'm Jen Glaubius and this is the Helonaki Deep Dive a podcast about mapping and analysis for historical and archeological research. In this episode, I'll discuss the town of Aigio, which was also known as Vostitsa at the time. And how the town has changed over the years. Let's dive in. I visited Aigio in June of 2022. Wandering around the streets and taking pictures of buildings and other interesting objects for the Dispatches from Vostitsa series of blog posts, that I posted for Patreon supporters. I took pictures of the area around the port where the old railroad tracks run along the water, along with a new walking path. Down where some warehouses from the heyday of exporting currents still remain, some rehabilitated, others falling apart. And up above where the main part of the town has been located for hundreds, if not thousands of years. I took pictures of the town museum, which is based in an old house, that unfortunately was closed when I tried to visit. And I took pictures of the churches that I wandered past, including churches mentioned in the Venetian records from 1700. Once I was back home, I was thinking about those churches and I decided to georeference the map of the town of Vostitsa, which is included in the Venetian records from 1700. I have a photocopy from the book of the published records. I needed to match up at least three locations from the map from 1700 to those same places in the modern map of Aigio to do the georeferencing to match up the 1700 map with the modern day. The best locations for matching up were the churches of Taxiarchon, Faneromeni, and Theotokou. Since the churches probably didn't move location, even though they had definitely been rebuilt since 1700. So with the three church locations, I was able to georeference the map fairly well and found that Ermou street or Hermes street actually matches one of the major roads that you see in the Venetian map. But remember that in 1700, there were five neighborhoods in the town of Vostitsa, each with a church. So three of those churches, I used for the georeferencing, but where were the other two? Aghios Anastasios and Aghios Zorzi, which are nowhere to be found in modern Aigio. What exactly had happened to those churches in the 300 years between 1700 and 2022? Of course, there have been many changes. There has been a lot of destruction from wars. And as we talked about a few episodes ago, earthquakes have caused a lot of damage in the town of Aigio itself. And although there's been a town in the location of Aigio, since at least the Archaic Period. at least 2,800 years ago and probably longer there are definitely Mycenaean remains maybe Middle Helladic and Early Helladic as well. So much, much longer. But the center of activity in that area has certainly shifted through time. It's possible in the case of an earthquake, a very large earthquake, where there was a lot of destruction, that buildings were taken apart where they were, and perhaps rebuilt in a slightly different area, that wasn't as destroyed. That's one possibility to explain why things have shifted since 1700. So of any place in the Vostitsa territory. We also have most information about the town of Vostitsa or Aigio as it is now. And I'm going to use both of these, Aigio and Vostitsa, just so you know. Now we know the most information because the town received the most visitors of any place in the territory of Vostitsa, both because it is on the coast and had a small port. And it was and continues to be the administrative center for the area. So unlike the villages, we have more reports of visits to Aigio than to any other place in the territory. There were also a greater variety of items in the town than elsewhere. As the Ottoman traveler Evliya Çelebi wrote about in his description of Aigio from his visit in 1668, which was the passage that I read in the intro to this episode, before 1700 had multiple mosques although only the stone mosque of Sheik Efendi was still standing because the others had been destroyed by the Venetians recently. But in addition to that, there was an inn and a hamam, which was a bath house. So there were definitely signs of the Ottoman occupation of the town of Vostitsa. So as a reminder, there's a link to the companion page on the Helonaki website for this episode. Which will have information on all the traveler accounts that I'm going to talk about. As well as images of Aigio and where to find those sources and maps and plots I've made for this episode. So check it out. The link is within the show notes. So to look at Aigio, we're going to look at the existing sources of data. The Ottoman defter from 1463. The Venetian records from 1700 and modern census records. As well as traveler accounts and sketches that were made of Aigio. And also that report of earthquake damage, that I talked about a few episodes ago. Let's start with the first traveler to Aigio I want to talk about, Pausanias, who lived between 110 and 180 A.D. Pausanias traveled around Greece looking at antiquities at that time and wrote about temples and different buildings that were in various places. Pausanias provides information that's a little more direct since he's talking about buildings that were built only hundreds instead of thousands of years ago. So for Aigio, Pausanias wrote that there was an ancient sanctuary of Elithia the goddess of childbirth and midwifery. There was a precinct of Asclepius, which was probably an area where people would come for healing, since Asclepius was the God of healing. There was a temple of Athena. There was a Grove dedicated to Hera. There was a theater and next to it, a sanctuary of Dionysus. And those two go together since Dionysus with his revelry, was often the patron of the theater. There was a marketplace, as you would expect, an agora. And with the Agora, there was a precinct of Zeus and a sanctuary of Artemis. Outside the marketplace, but next to it, there was a temple shared by Apollo and Artemis. So she had a sanctuary within the marketplace and then shared a temple just next beside it. All of this was in the upper part of Aigio. Then there's a cliff and a small piece of land next to the water. Down by the water, there was a sanctuary of Aphrodite. There was a sanctuary of Poseidon, which you would expect him to have a sanctuary near the water since he's the God of the sea. There was a sanctuary of the maiden daughter of Demeter. So also known as Persephone. There was a sanctuary of Zeus, the assembler. And this was where according to the Iliad of Homer, this is where Agamemnon had assembled the Greeks for the war against Troy. We're not done yet. There's also a sanctuary of Demeter Panachaean, so Demeter of all of, Achaea, the area of the Northwestern Peloponnesus. And there was a sanctuary of safety. So there was a lot of stuff down by the water which was down below. As well as things up above in the main part of the town. So this is the state of Aigio in the second century A.D., during the Roman period. Some of the Roman era forum, the marketplace has been identified in Aigio and has been excavated and other buildings as well. But none of those other buildings have been clearly identified. Even though Pausanias has this description. There hasn't been anything identifying to describe them. And all the things that have been excavated are in the upper main part of the town. There's nothing from this period, seemingly, in the lower part by the water. And this makes sense because with destruction, whether from warfare or natural disaster, like earthquakes. The area by the water definitely got more of a pummeling. It was destroyed many times by tsunamis as will be described in traveler accounts coming up in just a little bit. But even if both parts, the upper and lower part were destroyed equally. Many times the stones from those buildings were taken out. Because there are no longer part of a standing building and they were placed into a new building. From the Roman period, then Greece becomes part of the Byzantine empire. And there's that period, when there are migrations or invasions or incursions by Slavic peoples. So you have an infusion of new people into the area, with their own language. Up until that point, this town had been known as Aigio, but afterwards, it gets a more Slavic name, Vostitsa. And the name Vostitsa, first is attested in the Chronicle of the Morea. So after the Franks gained control of the Peloponnesus, when it was the principality of Achaia after 1204 after the Fourth Crusade. There are four versions of the Chronicle of the Morea in different languages. So there's a Greek version, a French version, an Italian version, and a version in Aragonese, which is a type of Spanish. All four versions mentioned Vostitsa because it was one of the baronies given out to different knights after Villehardouin took control of the Peloponnesus. But, each version provides different details. They don't agree entirely in what was provided in each barony. None of the four versions even agree on the number of baronies. It gets pretty confusing. So I made myself a chart. And if you'd like to follow along, you can find that chart on the companion page for this episode. When the baronies of the Frankish period are written about, the number of baronies is always 12. And from looking at these four versions, there's only one way that there are 12 baronies recorded in any of these versions, which you can see if you look at the chart. I started looking at this because I was interested in whether or not Vostitsa had a castle, because if you remember from the intro passage, Çelebi wrote that Vostitsa had a castle, but it had been destroyed by the false Maltezous. And so I was interested in whether or not from the Frankish period, there was a castle. So I started looking into these four versions. Now of these four, the French version does not mention castles at all. So we're mostly going to disregard it. I just want to say that there are nine baronies in the French version. Although, if you include the four fiefdoms that are given to four bishops, the number goes to 13. Neither of those is the number 12. So disregarding the French version. Now we're looking at the Greek version, the Aragonese and Italian version. From these three versions, there's only one possible configuration that adds up to 12. The Greek version includes 10 baronies, 13, if you include the knight orders and 20, if you also include the bishops. The Greek version mentioned six castles. The Aragonese version has 14 baronies, which goes up to 17, if you include the three knight orders. And 25, if you also include the bishops. And the Aragonese version says that 10 of these had castles and is the only one that mentions Vostitsa having a castle, but it does say that Vostitsa has a castle. The Italian version, mentioned 11 baronies, which if you include the German order would be 12. This is the only possible 12. But it also mentions fiefdoms for seven bishops, which brings the number up to 19. And the Italian version also mentioned six castles, like the Greek version does. So it's interesting. In the three accounts that mentioned castles the Greek, Aragonese, and Italian. There are four places that are always mentioned with a castle. That's Karytaina, Veligosti, Geraki, and Chalandritsa. If you want to look at where these locations are, I've included a map made by someone else of the medieval of the middle ages in Greece locations. And you can find that on the companion page as well. All right, so four locations always have a castle. There are two locations, two places that only have a castle in the Aragonese version, that are also mentioned in the other versions of the Chronicle. And those places are Vostitsa and Passavant. It's possible that those locations didn't have a castle and it's only the Aragonese, they just included a castle for some reason. But the Aragonese version does not include a castle for everywhere. And there are two places mentioned in all three accounts of castles that do not have a castle at any of those accounts. The first place is Gritsena, which is also known as Lakkos. And then there's Patras. Which. I'm not sure about Gritsena/Lakkos, but Patras, Patras definitely has a castle. It still has a castle. And the castle in fact was built in the sixth century A.D. by the Byzantine emperor Justinian. So there was definitely a castle there. But it's not mentioned in any of these four accounts, which is super weird. But it brings us to the fact that, besides the Aragonese version of the Chronicle of the Morea, which where it has more castles. The only other account that mentione Vostitsa with the castle that I've been able to find was Evliya Çelebi, the Ottoman traveler. Who traveled in the late 1600s, and mentioned a castle that the false Maltezous had destroyed. So if Vostitsa ever had a castle in the Frankish period. It definitely has not survived to the present day. It hadn't survived by the late 1600s when Çelebi was traveling there. Our next source of information about the town of Vostitsa is from the Ottoman defter from 1463. In this first Ottoman defter of the Morea Vostitsa was among the largest of towns that was in this record. But unlike some of those other towns, Vostitsa was not divided into neighborhoods. So some of the large towns had neighborhoods, Vostitsa did not in this record. Within the town, there were 159 households that were taxed along with 64 bachelors and 26 widows. If we use a family size of about 4.21 people, understanding that people can't be partial, we get a number of around 760 people. So a population around that maybe a little bit larger or smaller for 1463. Along with that we know from the defter that there were vineyards in the town, there were 85 olive trees, 200 fruit trees. This is interesting. 557 Mulberry trees, which were for silk production. The silkworms were fed on Mulberry leaves. There were also flax, wheat, barley, cotton. There was a water mill in the town. And there were also salt pans. It was along the coast. And so there was salt production in the town of Vostitsa. And remember, this was right at the end of the Byzantine period, at the beginning of the Ottoman period. So there were no mosques or other Turkish buildings there at that time. Our next account of the town of Vostitsa comes 200 years later, and it's by the Ottoman traveler Evliya Çelebi that I read in introduction to this episode. Çelebi was visiting Aigio/Vostitsa at the end of the long 30 year war between the Venetians and the Ottomans in which the Ottomans took control of Crete. And during that time, the Venetians had tried to attack Ottoman holdings in the Peloponnese to try to draw them off, which didn't work. And so that's why Çelebi writes that the Venetians had burned and destroyed Aigio three times to that point. And Vostitsa, the town of Aigio was still partially destroyed when Çelebi visited. So the only mosque standing was the one of stone by Sheik Efendi, all other buildings, and mosques of that sort had been burned. The town still had an inn and a hamam. The hamam being a bath house. There were 40 small shops that Çelebi saw. And the town had 200 houses that were built of stone. So it was still in place, even though there were signs of destruction when Çelebi visited. And of course Çelebi talked about the water that drained from the eight stone spigots, so the fountain. Which will show up more and more as Western Europeans start to visit And then interesting, he talks about an opium den, along the coast, close by the fountain. And this was a place, not just for the opium den, but where other people would come and eat and basically hang out, wash their clothes, The next information we have about the town of Vostitsa, is the Venetian cadaster from 1700. The cadaster itself dates 30 years after Çelebi had visited and it's halfway through the 30 year Venetian period. In addition to the actual written records of what and who were in the town of Vostitsa, there's also a map of the town itself And it provides some complimentary information, but it doesn't show everything that you have in the written record. So keep that in mind. So I'm going to be talking about information from both the map and the written cadaster about what Vostitsa was like in 1700. Let's start with churches. The cadaster says that there was one newly constructed Latin church, and this would have been for the Venetians themselves, since they were not Orthodox. There were also five Greek churches in good repair. And so these would be the five churches that the five neighborhoods are centered on. There was also one mosque in the town, and this was probably still the stone mosque of Sheik Efendi that Çelebi had described 30 years earlier. Of course the mosque probably wasn't in use during the Venetian period. It probably was used for other things at that point. And the mosque does not show up on the map. I also could not find the Latin church on the map either. The five Greek churches and the neighborhoods are on there. So let's talk about those neighborhoods. There were five in number. And each one was centered around a church. So the church of Madonna Fanaromeni had 140 houses. The neighborhood of Michel Archangelo had 34 houses. The neighborhood of St. Zorzi had 118 houses. St. Anatasi neighborhood has 79 houses and the neighborhood of Madonna ton Xenon had 78 houses. So the smallest at this point was Michel Archangelo with only 34 and the largest was Madonna Fanaromeni with 140 houses. There were 454 total buildings in Vostitsa in 1700. That doesn't include other infrastructure, such as four mills that were intact. They also counted one mill that had been destroyed and was still in disrepair. There was one bridge and there's also one good fountain and six destroyed fountains. So interestingly, only one fountain use in the town. Perhaps, the one that's down by the coast, that had been in use for a long time. We have information about the population of the town itself as well from two different sources. So there's 435 families listed in the Venetian cadaster from 1700. There's another census record, by a Venetian official called Grimani, also dating to 1700. And he only recorded 383 families. So. About 50 families, fewer than the cadaster had. So using again, a family size of around 4.21 people, we get a range of around 1,613 people to 1,832. So if you look at the plot of population through time, I plotted it as 1,723, the average of those two numbers. Our next information about Vostitsa comes from over 50 years later from Richard Chandler, who was in Greece during 1765 through 1766 and published a book Travels in Greece in 1776. And he mostly spent his time talking about the plane tree and the spring with little mention of the town up above. The plane tree and the springs are very common with the traveler accounts that we have from people who were looking at antiquities in Greece during the Ottoman period. There are many images of the large plane tree and the fountains. And I've posted some of those on the companion page as well. So you can see the variety of the ways that people depicted Vostitsa. And it's almost always the plane tree and the fountains, or if it's from a distance, it might have a little plane tree, but up above the cliffs, you can see spires of churches. So take a look at those on the companion page. A few years later in 1799 there was a visit by Pouqueville, the French traveler. He was not especially impressed with the town. Because he was looking for antiquities. So the only thing he thought was there from antiquity was the fountain. So Pouqueville wasn't impressed. He talked about the fountain. He mentioned that they had places to drink coffee beneath the large plane tree. And also that there were small vessels at the port of Vostitsa that loaded raw silk, cheese, currents, undried skins of oxen, brandy, wines, and sardines. And they would ship those things to the port of Patras, which is further to the west. And at Patras, these items would be loaded into larger vessels for Italy, according to Pouqueville. He also provided a drawing of the 12 fountains that you can see on the companion page. So shortly after that, Colonel Martin Leake, who was in the British military, but very interested in antiquities, visited in 1806. He describes the town of Vostitsa as being on the hill, separated from the water by a cliff 50 feet high, which definitely checks out. Again, he talks about the large plane tree shading the fountains next to the small port. So the thing that everybody talks about. He also talks about the currents and other produce, which came from all over the Northern Peloponnese and shipped from Vostitsa. He mentioned the one mosque in town. And that there were 30 Turkish families and about three to 400 Greek families living in Vostitsa at that time. Among the Greek families were some newly arrived from Galaxidi, on the north shore of the Gulf of Corinth. So just across the Gulf of Corinth. They had left their home of Galaxidi duty due to problems with Ali Pasha, who was from Ioannina and in charge of that area. So they came across the Gulf of Corinth and they settled the small area of land between the main part of town up above and the cliff itself. And that area is still known as the Galaxidi in Aigio. Leake was also interested in antiquities. He saw more than Pouqueville. He saw signs of ancient settlement. He saw pottery. There were ancient graves. Architectural fragments and broken tiles. And he noted spolia of columns and base reliefs in both a church and in a private home in Aigio. So there were pieces of antiquity that were visible. If not the large temples that you could still see in Athens and other parts of Greece at that time. Leake visited in 1806. 11 years later in 1817, there was that large earthquake that damaged most of Aigio that I talked about a few episodes ago. That report gives us some really good information about the neighborhoods of Aigio, because it describes damage by neighborhood. To start with, there was a Turkish quarter, which had 62 houses, 52 shops and six ovens, which think of an oven as a common oven where people would bake their bread. Two important houses had been damaged in the Turkish quarter, as well as 33 of the houses inhabited by Turkish people. So over half. 22 of the shops damaged, four of the ovens. So a lot of damage. Minor damage to 24 further houses, 30 shops and only five houses and two ovens and a Sufi monastic complex were undamaged. The mosque itself, presumably the one of stone was completely destroyed. So it did not make it through this earthquake. In the neighborhood of Fanaromeni, there were 208 total houses. Over half of them, 112 were seriously damaged, 73 could be repaired, and 23 were undamaged. The church of the blessed Virgin Mary, Fanaromeni, was also undamaged by this earthquake. The neighborhood of St Michael Arcangelo, which had 270 houses total. Of the 270, 218 were seriously damaged. With only seven undamaged buildings. And the church itself was split from the top to the bottom. So a lot of damage in that neighborhood. The neighborhood of St Zorzi, there's no report, except that there was a very old church and belfry of St. George, St. Zorzi, which had been seriously damaged. But no mention of houses or other buildings at all, except for the church. And that it was a very old church. In the neighborhood of Galaxidi, so those immigrants from the north coast of the Gulf of Corinth. There were 69 houses total, only three were seriously damaged, 21 weren't touched at all, and 45 could be repaired. The last neighborhood was, Issodia or Madonna ton Xenon. There were 83 houses total, of which 82 were seriously damaged. Only one house was undamaged and the church was damaged as well. So from this report on the damage from the 1817 earthquake note that the only thing in St. Zorzi that neighborhood was the church. And there's no mention of the neighborhood of St. Atanasi at all. This report from 1817 and the Venetian cadastral records from 1700 are the only two that mentioned the number of buildings per neighborhood. And so I've plotted that out just to see the change from 1700 to 1817. And you can find that plot on the companion page. Shortly after that was the Greek revolution. There was definitely damage to the town during that time. But our next source of information is from 1830, from the Expedition Scientifique de Moree, the French expedition. One of their reports was on architecture and antiquities. And from that report, we know that there were both medieval and ancient reliefs in the town. And there was an inscription that had been part of the church of Eisodia Theotokou, which is also known as Madonna ton Xenon, so it changed names through time. But there isn't much else about the state of the town, unfortunately, cause that would be really interesting. And after that, what I have are the modern Greek censuses. So 1879, there was a population of 5,311. And the population mostly goes up from there. Except there's a dip between 1907 and 1920 due to out migration. And then between 1920 and 1928, there's a huge increase in population. And that's probably immigration due to the population exchanges at the end of the Balkan wars. Greece and Turkey exchanged Orthodox and Muslim populations. So there was a massive change in population at that time. This is all very interesting, but the information, that I have from these reports doesn't necessarily tell me what happened with Vostitsa. The 1817 report of earthquake damage by neighborhood is really interesting, but it's really good to map out these things as well. There's a map from 1700 that I've geo-referenced onto present day satellite imagery, and it matches the three churches that still exist, and Ermou street. Not much else as similar. And so, the information about neighborhoods is interesting, but I like to see maps. I need to kind of see it in person. So I went looking for maps of Aigio, between 1700 and today, just to get a better idea of what was going on. I ended up finding an 1836 map, that was published in a book. And that map, interestingly shows those three churches that still exist, plus Agios Andreas, which I had taken pictures of in June, 2022. Agios Andreas is the church in Galaxidi, so that new part after the immigration from the north coast of the Gulf of Corinth. It also has Ermou street. So there's continuity between the three churches and Ermou street. New information from the map are the houses of Galaxidi and the new church Agios Andreas. Interesting enough though, the town itself stops west of where the neighborhoods of St. Zorzi and St. Atanasi were, the two missing ones. The town stops west of there. And so that shows in 1700, the town had shifted to the west over the past 130 years after destruction from war and earthquakes. And of course there's more destruction that happened with a big earthquake in 1860s, that further damaged different churches and led to new neoclassical churches that were built. And so we know that. The earth 1817 earthquake report. Didn't have a neighborhood for a St. And the only thing in St Zorzi was the very old church, because the shuttle, the settlement had shifted to the west. Their neighborhoods had ceased to exist by that time. And now for some endnotes. I want to mention that I did all of the georeferencing in the qGIS geographical mapping software. All statistical analysis and plots were done using the Python programming language. The book that I got the 1836 map from itself is very interesting. The book title is urban planning and the Greek state 1833 through 1890. It's by Dora Monioudi-Gavala and published in 2012. The book is written in Greek with English translations of most of the text. And it's super interesting. When the Greek state was established the reign of king Otto. So remember he was Bavarian who's German. He came in and he tried to make Greece more like quote unquote European countries. There was a decree of 1835. Entitled on the sanitary construction of cities and towns. That roads were to be built on rectangular grid and oriented. So all buildings receive sunlight. This all sounds great. The only problem with rectangular grids is it doesn't take into account the topography of the land. Maybe you can't really do a rectangular grid and it definitely doesn't take into account the older areas that were constructed without a grid. And so there was a map of a plan for Aigio that dated to 1835 that had a rectangular grid overlaid on some of the newer areas of Aigio There were parts of town west of the church of Fanaromeni, which had been the Western most area in the 1700 map. And those areas have a regular grid. And you can see that in the street plan today. Thanks for listening. Email questions or comments to deepdive@helonaki.com or ask them on the Helonaki Deep Dive Facebook page. Show notes with links to resources mentioned in this episode will be available at helonaki.com. That's H E L O N A K i.com. My thanks to Patreon supporters at the geospatial analyst level, Janice and Jerry Farrell. Your support keeps the Helonaki deep dive going. The Helonaki Deep Dive is written and produced by me, Jen Glaubius of the Helonaki. The theme music is Deep Ocean, instrumental by Dan o of dan o songs.com, additional sounds from zap splat.com. Thanks for listening.