Introduction: foregrounding the marginal

Part one outlines the origins of the volume in a 2021 conference at the British School at Athens and discusses the importance of the theme of ‘marginalisation’. The project is shown to be fundamentally interdisciplinary, specifically located at the cross-roads between classical reception studies, cultural history and material culture studies. The landscape of scholarship relevant to travel and classical antiquities in nineteenth-century Ottoman Greece is sketched out. The methodology adopted here is the case study, creating a mosaic of micro-histories and emphasising the small and intimate. A key aim of the volume is to examine the complexity and mixed motivations in travel and encounters with the classical landscape, which disrupt triumphalist narratives both of foreign collecting and of Greek nation-building. Part two offers a narrative arc of the volume as a whole, with detailed readings of the nine chapters highlighting the various ways in which they focus on the theme of the marginal.