Small Place, Large Issues: Didimoteicho/Dimetoca and Early Ottoman Urban Practices in the Balkans from the Mid-Fourteenth to the End of the Fifteenth Century

Abstract

Didimoteicho (known as Dimetoca during the Ottoman period) is a rather small rural township on the Greek-Turkish border to the west of the Meriҫ riverbed that was an urban center of considerable strategic importance during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The urban transformation of this city during the same period illustrated the complex social and economic conditions that emerged in the area. Textual sources and urban space analysis are brought into the discussion to claim that a newly established, centralized Ottoman authority inaugurated the area's experience of modernity in the early fifteenth century. This is particularly evident in the town's market. New monuments and institutions gave the city a distinct urban quality, turning the small town of Didimoteicho into an illustration of early modern Ottoman urbanism.