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The Many Lives of ‘Oriental Textiles’ in the Byzantine Museum of Athens

Nikolaos Vryzidis

This post will briefly expose the many lives of the Ottoman fabrics in the collection of the Byzantine and Christian Museum of Athens. This group will act as a case study for the decontextualization and recontextualization that takes place when objects travel from one environment to another. While the Ottoman fabrics of the Benaki Museum’s Islamic art collection were mostly private purchases or donations, the Byzantine and Christian Museum’s so-called ‘oriental textiles’ (ανατολικά υφάσματα) present a completely different history, one that could also be studied through the lens of object biography (Fig. 1).

Une vitrine de tissus orientaux au Musée byzantin et chrétien d'Athènes

Fig. 1. Case of ‘oriental’ textiles at the Byzantine Museum, Athens, in the year 1983. (Archive of Elena Papastavrou, former curator of the Byzantine and Christian Museum).

This methodological approach marshals information on the life of objects, aiming at the recreation of their previous whereabouts before entering a museum rather than assessing just their physical characteristics. The study of an object’s manufacture, ownership, use and reuse, can reveal otherwise hidden cultural dynamics or even new perspectives on established narratives, thus, problematising and nuancing them. But above all, the object biography approach allows us to follow the complex lives of transcultural objects, in this case woven fabrics, that travel through different contexts and acquire novel meanings.

The core of the museum’s general holdings consists of the collection of the Christian Archaeological Society (ChAE). It is thanks to the scholarly missions undertaken by the passionate Byzantinist Georgios Lampakis (1854-1914) that a relatively large number of objects was amassed from ecclesial sacristies located within the borders of the Greek state. This important collection was later complemented by refugee heirlooms brought from Asia Minor/Anatolia, as well as some donations and purchases. Lampakis was not concerned with the art itself, as his criteria of gathering objects did not seem to be primarily aesthetic or perhaps even historical. On the contrary, his attraction was centred more on the objects’ status or function as sacred relics. In other words, objects used in the Orthodox liturgy with an association to prominent ecclesiastical figures. No doubt, this approach went along with what such society, which kept its name to this day, would regard as its main mission. But it fell out of line with the basic principles of contemporary to that period archaeological and art historical research, which was governed more by the logic of stylistic or chronological taxonomies than anthropological or religious criteria. Nonetheless, the picking of holy relics unintentionally produced an eclectic assemblage that was representative of different aspects of Greece’s heritage, perhaps even without the filter of the Modern Greek national narrative and its cultural priorities. In fact, one should conceive the museum’s holdings of Ottoman fabrics as a beneficial aspect of Lampakis’s approach (Fig. 2). Indeed, most of these fabrics come from vestments that, alongside other liturgical objects, were collected from monasteries and churches, with their documented provenance allowing us to trace the distribution of this consumption pattern in Greece under Ottoman rule. As a side note, the collection of refugee exchangeable property was governed by the same logic: they were heirlooms that Greek Orthodox from Asia Minor had brought with them when they were forcibly relocated to Greece. Many of these Anatolian Christian heirlooms included Persian fabrics.  An aspect of heritage one would not imagine to have been a priority for the Modern Greek national narrative thus came into being.

Fig. 2. Fragments of a vestment (possibly an epitrachelion), lampas weave, silk and metal thread, Constantinople or Bursa, sixteenth century, Byzantine and Christian Museum, Athens. (Image courtesy of the Byzantine and Christian Museum, photographer: Nikos Mylonas; inv. no. BXM 1693).

The vestments that Lampakis collected are a remnant of a very specific consumption practice that characterized ecclesiastical material culture: the use of sumptuous cloth by the Greek Orthodox Church. The first episode in their life took place in the weaving workshops of Ottoman Bursa and Constantinople, where Muslim, Christian and Jewish artisans produced fabrics with generically secular patterns for a religiously diverse clientele. The Christian elite consumed artifacts that conveyed prestige and visually spoke of its position to the wider society. Besides the textile market, pious oblations and the custom of the robe of honour were alternative channels through which the Church gained access to this kind of cultural capital. With this in mind, it seems reasonable to assume that the material of these vestments already could have had a previous life as secular furnishing or vesting items. At the same time, the further recycling of fabrics within the context of the sacristy is another dynamic worth considering when looking at them. Thus, these fabrics already enjoyed a remarkable intracultural and intercultural mobility, with the end-product of this process being their sacralization. As already stated before, it is this complex life that paved their way for a new context, that of the museum.

Nonetheless, while it is remarkable that an aspect of Ottoman heritage was saved by Lampakis as a Christian relic, the integrity of its identity had to wrestle with the dynamic of the Byzantine Museum’s museological approach at that time. First of all, it seems that the keepers of the collection reserved a special case for those vestments tailored of “anatolika (ανατολικά)”, meaning oriental, fabrics. This categorization effectively separated them from the religious embroidery produced at Christian workshops (Fig. 1). In this case, fragments extracted from the vestments were put together for the creation of panels with a focus on the overall integrity of the woven pattern (Fig. 3). The treatment reserved for these objects does not only imply that their sacred status was put aside, but also that this new taxonomy led to a moderate distancing from this type of Ottoman heritage. Nonetheless, the exact same practice points out that despite their ‘orientalisation’ the fabrics were appreciated for their aesthetic value and materiality. Otherwise, why would they have been included in the permanent display of one of the three major national museums in Athens (the two others being the National Archaeological and the Museum of Folk Art (now Museum of Modern Greek Culture))?

Fig. 3. Panel of the fragments in Fig. 2, rearranged in a new display (Image courtesy of the Byzantine and Christian Museum).

In an attempt to contextualize, it could be argued that Greece’s shift from being an Ottoman province to a European nation-state, more or less under the political and cultural influence of the collective West, was to a certain extent responsible for this approach. After all, the then director of the Byzantine Museum, George Sotiriou (1880-1956), had spent time in a Germanic environment during a period when Islamic art was gaining more attention, as the 1910 Munich exhibition Meisterwerke Muhammedanischer Kunst also hints. It cannot be a mere coincidence that the only major change in the second edition of the museum’s catalogue, that Sotiriou authored, was the appearance of the new taxonomy of “oriental fabrics”. This state of affairs continued for pretty much the whole of the twentieth century and until the museum’s refurbishment in the early twenty-first century. Perhaps the recent openness and acceptance of Ottoman heritage by Greek archaeologists and art historians calls for a new understanding of these remnants, following the complexity of the many lives they led before and after arriving at the museum.

 

Further readings

Olga Gratziou and Anastasia Lazaridou (eds.), Από τη Χριστιανική Συλλογή στο Βυζαντινό Μουσείο (1884-1930) [From the Christian Collection to the Byzantine Museum (1884-1930)], Athens, 2006.

Elias Kolovos, Georgios Pallis and Panagiotis K. Poulos (eds.), Οθωμανικά μνημεία στην Ελλάδα: Κληρονομιές υπό διαπραγμάτευση [Ottoman Monuments in Greece: Heritages under Negotiation], Athens, 2023.

Elena Papastavrou and Nikolaos Vryzidis, “Sacred Patchwork: Patterns of Textile Reuse in Greek Vestments and Ecclesiastical Veils of the Ottoman Era”, in Ivana Jevtić and Suzan Yalman (eds.), Spolia Reincarnated: Afterlives of Objects, Materials, and Spaces in Anatolia from Antiquity to the Ottoman Era, Istanbul, 2019, p. 259-286.

George Sotiriou, Guide du Musée byzantin d’Athènes, Athens, 1932.

Nikolaos Vryzidis and Elena Papastavrou, “The double life of ‘oriental’ textiles at the Byzantine & Christian Museum, Athens: interpreting storage and displayability of Ottoman silks in 20th-century Greece,” in Mirjam Brusius and Kavita Singh (eds.), Museum Storage and Meaning: Tales from the Crypt, Abingdon – New York, 2018, p. 218-228.

Across the Mediterranean and Outside the Law: Narcotics Trafficking in the Eastern Mediterranean during WWII

Kostis Gotsinas

On May 26, 1945, just days after Germany’s surrender and the end of World War II in Europe, two Greek sergeants of the Hellenic Royal Navy were arrested in Alexandria, Egypt, for carrying morphine ampoules in violation of local drug laws. The case itself was not exceptional, as Alexandria was a hub for drug trafficking. However, what made it unusual was the trajectory of the confiscated goods.

Allegedly originating from the Greek State Narcotics Monopoly [Κρατικόν Μονοπώλιον Ναρκωτικών Φαρμάκων], the drugs were obtained by the two sergeants in Volos, a town in Central Greece, through a local pharmacist. While the pharmacist may have legally possessed the substances, it seems the drugs deviated from the rightful distribution channels. Instead, they likely belonged to a batch of narcotics seized by communist-affiliated forces during the armed conflict with governmental and British troops in Athens in December 1944—an event that foreshadowed the impending full-scale civil war. Official reports submitted by the Greek government to the League of Nations and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) detail how the retreating Greek People’s Liberation Army (Ελληνικός Λαϊκός Απελευθερωτικός Στρατός, ΕΛΑΣ) transported northward the seized drugs removed from the State Monopoly building (Fig. 1). This would explain how the morphine ampoules found their way to Volos, though how they ended up in the pharmacist’s possession remains unclear (Fig. 2).

Fig. 1. The building of the Greek State Narcotics Monopoly in Athens, which now houses the Ministry of Health (photograph by the author, February 2024).

Carte montrant la ligne de démarcation entre forces britanniques et grecques

Fig. 2. Map entitled Dividing line between British troops and ELAS, established upon the truce concluded on January 11, 1945 (Source: Η απελευθέρωσις της Ελλάδος και τα μετά ταύτην γεγονότα [The liberation of Greece and the subsequent events], Athens: Army History Directorate, 1973).

Nevertheless, the labels on the cardboard boxes containing the ampoules, as documented by the Egyptian authorities, provide further insight into the drugs’ trajectory. They indicate that the morphine preparations originated from the pharmaceutical plant of C. H. Boehringer Sohn, located in Ingelheim am Rhein in Germany, as well as from the Medical Parks of the Military Districts of Leipzig and Hamburg (Wehrkreis-Sanitätspark IV & X). One could even speculate about the origin of the raw material used to manufacture the morphine solutions, specifically raw opium. Considering that Turkey was one of the major suppliers of opium to European and American pharmaceutical industries from the early 20th century through the 1930s, we could imagine a full circle: Anatolian opium exported to Germany, transformed there into morphine, sent to Greece, and ultimately smuggled to Egypt.

Although we lack evidence for every step of this journey, the broader patterns of narcotics production, distribution, and circulation in the first half of the 20th century emerge clearly: the supply of raw materials by a handful of opium-producing countries—Turkey, Persia, China, India, Bulgaria, Serbia; the central role of pharmaceutical companies based in Germany, France, Britain, Switzerland, or the Netherlands in the production and distribution of substances like opiates and cocaine, alongside short-lived illicit laboratories catering to the black market; and finally, the operations of smuggling networks that were, to varying degrees, organized and structured across the globe, with a focus on the Eastern Mediterranean in our case. If the Interwar period saw a shift from bulkier substances like opium and hashish to “white powders”, the case of the morphine ampoules smuggled to Alexandria—along with similar cases from this period—demonstrates that trafficking routes from Greece to Egypt remained viable and that smuggling expertise continued to be transmitted.

Thus, the story of the vials confiscated in Alexandria at the end of World War II can be interpreted as a tale of dual movements. On the one hand, a physical movement across space and beyond borders, following the maritime routes of illicit trafficking that had developed since the late 19th century—it is no coincidence that the two Greek sergeants transporting the morphine ampoules were aboard a steamship. On the other hand, a movement beyond the confines of legality, as these substances transitioned from legal commodities to war loot and eventually to illegal goods. This narrative underscores the inherent ambivalence of substances labelled as “narcotics” or “drugs”, which can function both as powerful medicines and as potential poisons. The distinction hinges on a fine line, drawn by each country’s legislation that prohibits non-medical drug use while permitting only therapeutic applications.

One might also consider a third movement: the flow of information regarding the narcotics’ disappearance and reappearance, which highlights the implementation of elaborate control mechanisms during the Interwar years and the adoption of new communication technologies. News of the drugs’ disappearance from the State Monopoly warehouse was quickly relayed to the British allies of the Greek government, seeking their assistance in recovering them. Soon, this information travelled through letters and cables to the Allied Headquarters in Italy, then to Washington, and finally to the League of Nations in Geneva. The discovery of the morphine vials in Alexandria set off a second round of communications, as the Egyptian Central Narcotics Information Bureau informed the Opium Section of the international organization on the seizure, as expected. It wasn’t long before the connection was made between the looting of the Greek Narcotics Monopoly warehouse and the smuggling of morphine ampoules in Alexandria. To confirm this connection, Sir Thomas Russell Pasha, director of the Egyptian Central Narcotics Information Bureau, sent two black-and-white photographs to the League of Nations’ Secretariat. The photographs depict the six confiscated cardboard boxes filled with glass ampoules containing morphine preparations (Fig. 3 & 4).

Morphine ampoules seized in Alexandria

Figures 3 & 4: Photographs of the ampoules seized in Alexandria on May 1945 [accompanying “Marc Bay, Director C.N.I.B. to the Director of the Opium Traffic and Social Questions Sections, League of Nations No./CNIB/E/1/2231, Cairo, 31.3.1946”, League of Nations, File R4814-12-43198-387].

Serving as the visual representation—a kind of black-and-white reflection—of the original vials, these images document items that were either destroyed by the Egyptian authorities or perhaps reintroduced into legal pharmaceutical distribution channels. The recent digitisation of the League of Nations’ archives marks a final transformation, converting these paper photographs into digital images. This process of dematerialization means that we are now consulting a reflection of a reflection, unable to hold the tangible evidence of a minor smuggling case that unfolded at the end of World War II.

Archives

League of Nations (Geneva), File R4814/12/42990/387, “Illicit Traffic – Theft of drugs from the State Monopoly Depot, Athens, December 1944”.

Bibliography

Richard Davenport-Hines, The Pursuit of Oblivion: A Social History of Drugs, London: Phoenix Press, 2001.

Kostis Gotsinas, “Το όπιο του λαού: Ιχνηλατώντας τα χαμένα αποθέματα του Κρατικού Μονοπωλίου Ναρκωτικών μετά τα Δεκεμβριανά” [The opium of the people: On the trail of the lost narcotics of the State Monopoly after the events of December 1944 in Athens], in Efi Avdela & Vasso Seirinidou, Για την ιστορία του εγκλήματος και της δικαιοσύνης στην Ελλάδα, 19ος-20ός αιώνας: θεσμοί, πρακτικές, πρόσωπα [For the history of crime and justice in Greece, 19th-20th c.: Institutions, practices, individuals], Athens: Themelio (forthcoming).

Ryan Gingeras, Heroin, Organized Crime, and the Making of Modern Turkey, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Liat Kozma, “White Drugs in Interwar Egypt: Decadent Pleasures, Emaciated Fellahin, and the Campaign against Drugs”, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 33, no. 1, 2013, p. 89-101.

Michael de Ridder, Heroin: Vom Arzneimittel zur Droge, Frankfurt-New York: Campus Verlag, 2000.