Greek Travellers and Travel Literature from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century.

Abstract

Although the western travellers who travelled in the territories of the Ottoman Empire between the fifteenth and the eighteenth century have been studied extensively, the opposite happens as far as concerns the peregrinations of Greek travellers, which are almost unknown and difficult to find. They have not enjoyed the attention of the neohellenists — philologists and historians — and most of them are found only in rare publications of the nineteenth century. We can separate them in two main categories, those which describe the East and those which refer to the West. In this paper we deal only with the second group of texts, because they constitute one of the sources of knowledge about the relations of Greeks with the west, relations that constitute the central problem of Modern Greek studies.