This book attempts a reinterpretation of the multifaceted history of the societies of the Greek peninsula during the Ottoman Empire over almost half a millennium. Our aim is to narrate the history not only of the geographical unity of the southernmost tip of the Balkans, intersecting with the Aegean, Ionian, and Mediterranean seas, but also the history of various and different places and spaces that were formed and disassembled, contracted and expanded as social constructs within historical time.

Within the pages of the book, one encounters snapshots from the early years of the Ottoman conquests (a wedding outside Silivri, an earthquake in Thrace, an unexpected enemy: the plague, the road to the West), which will bring the Ottoman sultans to the forefront of history in Constantinople itself, the Gotham City of the Ottomans, in Thessaloniki, the Jewish metropolis of the Ottoman Balkans, and also in Athens, the "capital" in terms of population in the southernmost part of the Greek peninsula.

After examining the cities, towns, fortresses, and castles, the network of imperial construction, of space, we will also enter the worlds of the countryside, focusing both on the common denominator of agriculture and on the diversity of exploitations.

For the next century, we follow the steps and gallop of Evliya Çelebi, a passionate "world traveler" (seyyah-i alem) of the territory of the Ottoman sultans, in his travels through the Greek peninsula between the years 1668-1671. Finally, the developments of the 18th century in the societies under Ottoman rule are examined with the axis of a Greek book from the Enlightenment period, the Modern Geography, which was published in Vienna in 1791, three years after the French Revolution.

The years of Ottoman rule were a time of great crises and transformations that cannot be described with the evaluative interpretation of a particular "decline" of the Ottomans, as was argued in earlier historiography. Here we attempt to interpret this historical period by avoiding exceptionalism and integrating the Greek peninsula into the broader context of crises and transformations in the Ottoman Empire, the Mediterranean, Europe, and the world.