Different Ways of Being “Greek”: Borderland Religion in the City of Corfu, 18th c. by Daphne Lappa (Princeton)
Konstantina Zanou (Columbia)

University Seminar in Modern Greek

What did it mean to be Greek-Orthodox in the early modern Venetian and Ottoman lands? Was this a uniform category? Or, could it take on different, local contents? For example, how would a Greek- Orthodox Christian from Ottoman Epirus, who spoke Greek, was dressed in the Ottoman style and recognized as head of his religious community the Patriarch of Constantinople, see those Greek- Orthodox living in the Venetian city of Corfu, speaking heavily-Italianized Greek or Italian, wearing their European clothes and their wigs, living in a westernized urban environment, and having as religious leader a local figure that was under the sole jurisdiction of the local Venetian government? Did these two “types” represent two different versions of Greek-Orthodox Christianity? Using the concept of borderland religion to frame the very local, urban religious mélange of Latin and Greek elements in Corfu, and comparing the latter with Ottoman Orthodox religiosity, the paper suggests that in the pre-modern world there were more than one ways of being “Greek.”