IMMIGRATION AS A FACTOR OF MODIFICATION OF THE URBAN LANDSCAPE AT THE END OF VENETIAN RULE IN RETHYMNO

Some new remarks on the urban fabric of Rethymno and spatial allocation of social groups in the Sabbionara district are presented in this paper.

Merchants and businessmen leave Rethymno trying to avoid the payment of enormous taxes; their houses and stores are abandoned until the period of Ottoman rule. Ottoman archives after 1654 mention notarial acts concerning properties with mansions, gardens, annexes and ground-floor stores in Yalos.

It is hard to identify the owners’ names because of the transcription in Ottoman. For the zone between the Sabbionara Gate and the Loggia, some information permitting identification of persons is provided by authors’ comments in notarial acts.

The Ottoman archives concerning this area record ten buildings: two stores and eight buildings with mixed function. Some of these are situated on the coast, others with facades on two or three streets.

For the area between the Loggia and the inner mole of the Porto, two workshops are mentioned, which are located nearby ‒ but not inside the Market area ‒ according to Venetian regulations, and they are still active after Ottoman rule.

The city wall repair by Hussein Pasha, on the eastern coast, prepared the settlement of a military population. After the demolition of Venetian facades, several buildings were defensively restored with scarps.

Two social groups are located in the Sabbionara district until 1646: soldiers in the Gate area and merchants and businessmen near the Loggia.

The overcrowding of the male population, due to the military location, has left its mark on spatial structure, converting mansions into buildings for social assistance of the local community and residences for officials and janissaries.

In conclusion, not only buildings have lost their initial identity but also citizens, who continued to live in their own cities but have lost their ability to be identified due to transcription in the Ottoman archives.