The Folklore Museum and Archive (Department of History and Archaeology, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki) and the Culture–Borders–Gender/LAB (Department of Balkan, Slavic and Oriental Studies, University of Macedonia) are organizing, on Wednesday, May 6, 2026, a lecture by Robert M. Hayden, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh, USA.
The title of the lecture is:
“Sedimentations and Erosions of Hybrid Heritage of the Ottoman Era in the Balkans”
The event will take place at Amphitheatre B of the new building of the Faculty of Philosophy at AUTH, from 16:00 to 17:30.
The lecture will be delivered in English.
The event is open to the public.
Abstract:
Ottoman heritage in SE Europe reflects a history of changing patterns of interactions between people adhering to different forms of Islam and those adhering to different forms of Christianity and Judaism, under governance premised for centuries on the domination of Islam and of Muslims, followed by rule often premised on domination of one or another Christian community. We argue that the Ottoman legacy should therefore be approached not as discrete sites identified as Muslim, Christian or Jewish, but rather as nodes in intersecting religioscapes of those communities as they changed through time. Some such nodes intersected as sites dedicated to the service of one of these communities were claimed by members of another, and physically altered to match such claims. The locations of many sites, and the physical structures created and modified at them, also reflect the dominance of Islam, or of efforts to challenge that dominance. Thus all heritage of the Ottoman period manifests in physical form the changing patterns of social and cultural hybridity of Ottoman and post-Ottoman states and societies and specific sites may comprise architectural palimpsests reflecting changes in these interactions. Examples analyzed are mainly from Bosnia and Croatia but also include some from Bulgaria, Crete and Turkey.