The archive of the Venetian administration at Ithaca
Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: The Greek state archives recently reopened the local archive at Ithaca. Its prolonged inaccessibility to researchers, and the unclassified and uncatalogued state of most of its records, has meant that sources from its large Venetian collection remain unstudied. This article describes the formation and development of the Ithacan archive during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This archive was established to serve the island’s governors and was functionally integrated with the Venetian administration of the island. A selection of primary documents presented here outlines the professionalization of public-record keeping at Ithaca and uncovers this local institution as the site of certain colonial technologies of power. This is further supplemented by a discussion of the provenance of the current “archive of the Venetian administration” through destructive events in the twentieth century, and an account of the present state of the records as a descriptive aid to researchers with a view to renewing interest in the collection.
Source: Mediterranean Historical Review
Author: Kyriaco Nikias
Institution: University of Vienna
Language: English
Subfield: Conservation
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4399337262