Village's History
Liatani was the previous place-name. Without being documented, it is said that the first resident of the district was a wealth land owner, named Liatis.
The 2003 research from Leiden and Ljubljana universities under the supervision of Prof. Dr. John Bintliff and his collaborators: E. Farinetti, P. Sarri, K. Sbonias, B. Slapsak, V. Stissi, A. Vionis records: By the 8th century AD the Eastern Roman Empire, based at Constantinople, had reconquered the Greek countryside from the Slave, including Boeotia, and this ushered in a period of steady growth of rural population and at the major regional towns (such as Thebes in Central Boeotia). We can match this picture from Byzantine sources with the results of our rural survey around Tanagra, a whole series of small villages or hamlets was established at regular intervals of every few kilometres, datable by characteristic Middle Byzantine ceramics found on their surface to foundations in the 10th-11th centuries AD.
These continue to flourish into the next period of Crusader feudal conquest of our region (13th-14th century). The advantageous location of ancient Tanagra City explains the fact that one such village is founded only a kilometre from the ancient town, by the rural church still standing from that village of Agios Thomas. The church is Middle Byzantine of 12th century AD date, whilst the associated village which we discovered from widespread surface pottery in the fields left of the church, was occupied from the 11th-14th centuries AD (dating by A. Vionis, Leiden). All the Byzantine villages disappear in the 14th century, and this can be related to the return of the Bubonic Plague and to the devastating wars between the Franks, the Byzantines and the Turks which left most of the southern Mainland of Greece cleared of population, which either retreated to upland villages in each region or was carried off into slavery. The first village tax records for Boeotia, in 1466, shortly after the Ottoman Turkish conquest of Greece, show vividly this absence of Greek settlements in the Lowlands and a small number of enlarged refuge villages in the hills of Boeotia. Eastern Boeotia with the large plains and plateaux around Tanagra is especially empty.
To recolonise this landscape between 1400 and 1500 AD the final Frankish Dukes of Athens and then the Ottoman rulers invited large numbers of new settlers, from Albania, with the specific direction to locate new villages near abandoned ones from the previous settlement system. This is the origin of our modern villages at Tanagra (former Bratsi) and at Kleidi (Kleideti). Adter some 100 years of Ottoman rule, the peaceful conditions of the Pax Ottomanic saw population rise for both Greek and Albanian villages, as well as new village foundations. The Ottoman village tax record for 1570 shows this well.
Modern Ayios Thomas has a more complex history; it is rather recent, and was founded by villagers moving out of the mountains between Boeotia and Attica at the end of the Turkish era and after the War of Greek Independence, in the early 19th century AD. Before Thomas though a village existed at its own site, called Kelmendi or Liatani, and further south a small linked pair of hamlets called Kinos or Ginosati, now deserted. Our Project directs itself naturally to deserted villages where no overlay of modern constructions obscures houseplans and pottery finds of the pre-Modern era, and in 2003 we were able to plan the latest generation of stone longhouses at Ginosati and collect ceramics from the surface which fit the general 15th-18th century records for the village. It is important that we take the history and archaeology of traditional villages very seriously, since the roots of these farmers who work our landscape are quite different and in themselves very interesting and hitherto not the object of archaeological investigation. Based on our many years at deserted villages in the earlier Boeotia Project we can identify even domestic and coarse wares for periods of one to two centuries within the 1400 years of post-Roman life in Boeotia, whilst the combination of the Ottoman village records and later accounts from Western Travellers and 19th century post-Independence census and map records allows us to follow villages around the landscape over the long-term.
