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Gravestones are part of the material cultural heritage of Ottoman rule throughout the territories that once belonged to the empire. The island of Crete was conquered by the Ottoman army in 1645–1669, and remained Ottoman until 1898 (formally until 1913); the last Muslims left Crete in 1924 following the population exchange agreement between Turkey and Greece. Many hundreds of Islamic gravestones have survived in Crete, but not in cemeteries, as these were destroyed during the twentieth century. The gravestones are thus kept in various locations as stand-alone objects devoid of a context. After providing an overview of the main characteristics of the gravestones from Crete, this talk discusses cultural transfer theory as a model of interpreting their diffusion across the island. It also juxtaposes the Ottoman Turkish epitaphs of the gravestones with death-related folk couplets in Greek – Crete was a Greek-speaking island – in order to highlight the variety of forms of cultural expression that Cretan society used in different circumstances.

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Antonis Anastasopoulos is an Associate Professor of Ottoman History at the University of Crete. He studied History and Archaeology at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. He completed his M.Phil. and doctoral studies at the University of Cambridge, Faculty of Oriental Studies. He has been teaching Ottoman history at the Department of History and Archeology of the University of Crete since 1999, and is also affiliated with the Institute for Mediterranean Studies of the Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas. In January 2010 he taught a cycle of four seminars at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Section des Sciences Historiques et Philologiques, in Paris, and in the spring semester of the academic year 2015-2016 he taught Greek and Balkan History at the Department of History of the Boğaziçi University in Istanbul. He has edited or co-edited five volumes of collected essays, and has published more than 30 articles in academic journals, collective volumes and encyclopaedias.