ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the role of time and temporality in a travelogue from the Ottoman Empire written by one of these travellers, Jacob Berggren. It also examines Berggren’s ways of relating to the competing temporalities of his journey and of the region: the layered temporality of antiquity and modernity; biblical and Homeric temporalities; an imperial temporality; the ruptural temporality of revolutions and political unrest; and his own, personal temporality, oriented at individual progress and career. To the simple juxtaposition between modern clock time and mythical or natural time, on the one hand, and the multi-layered temporality that ancient ruins convey, on the other, is added in Berggren’s travelogue a more acute experience of revolutionary disruption and modern ruins. In connection with his very first Mediterranean passage from Trieste to Constantinople, Berggren was caught between the persistence of myth and the threats and promises of modernity.
