The Vision of Athens and Constantinople in XIXth century Travel Writing

This work focuses on how in the 19th century Western and Greek travellers would perceive two specific points of the Mediterranean which have always been two main cultural crossroads: Athens and Constantinople. My research aims at profiling the contribution by Italian, French and Greek literati to the moulding of national identity, according to the model B.A. has brought up in “Imagined Communities”. As for the corpus, following Edward Said’s “Orientalism”, I have selected works of 19th century travel literature belonging to Philhellenism and Oriental Exoticism. The purpose of my essay is to highlight how these two movements, both rooted in Romanticism, have contributed to create a western identity for Athens and an oriental one for Istanbul, without taking into account the fact the two cities shared common Byzantine – Ottoman roots or, better, that they both geo-politically belonged to the Intermediate Region as identified by Dimitri Kitsikis.