Different Ways of Being Greek: Borderland Religion in the City of Corfu, 18th c., lecture by Daphne Lappa (Princeton University), Brown University, March 21, 2018, 5:30 pm

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 a 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 kids, 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? 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 premodern world there were more than one ways of being “Greek”.

Daphne Lappa earned a BA in history from the University of Crete, and MA and PhD from the European University Institute in Florence. Her doctoral and postdoctoral research focused on the religious conversion of Hews and Muslims to Christianity and their cross-confessional networks in early modern Venice and Venetian Corfu (mid-17th–18th c.). Daphne Lappa’s new project engages with local versions of early modern Greek-Orthodox Christianity, as well as the confessionalization process within the Greek-Orthodox Church.