The Ottoman past in Greece is a foreign country, to paraphrase David Lowenthal’s book title, regarding the distinction between the past and the attitudes toward the past, including nostalgia, aversion to the past, selective remembering and forgetting. While the above statement largely describes the attitudes towards the Ottoman past manifested within the modern Greek public sphere, the academic study of Greece under Ottoman rule and the imprint of this era on the Greek state, albeit belatedly, today constitutes an established and thriving research field. History, as a discipline, is clearly in the lead in this development, with other fields like archaeology, architecture, and urban studies, as well as disciplines like anthropology, (ethno)musicology and philology gradually catching up, thus contributing to the widening of the research scope. Echoing these developments, this dossier is the outcome of an attempt at an interdisciplinary approach to the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Greek state via the study of lived space and material culture. Based on a five‑year research project under the same title hosted in the French School at Athens, this dossier is a collection of individual case studies that set up a framework for the critical discussion of the abovementioned transition...

And as for each issue, the dossier is followed by a ''controversy'' article.