The subject of this paper is based on studying bilingual and trilingual inscriptions of the ottoman buildings in Greece and their produced contexts. This paper presents the historical layout of production of early Islamic bilingual inscriptions with reference to the reasons of this phenomenon.
This paper also provides a statistic inventory of the existing foundation inscriptions of the ottoman buildings in Greece. There are 315 inscriptions in total. Among which 47 are in Arabic, 178 are in ottoman, 60 are in Greek, four are in Byzantine, three are in Modern Turkish, two are in French, nine are only in numbers, and 17 are bilingual and trilingual. The latter are our main intention in this paper. Furthermore, it highlights the analysis of these inscriptions' numbers and their classification according to their language, date, place and content.
It documents and examines in details, as far as concerned, the bilingual and trilingual inscriptions of the Ottoman buildings in Greece. From the auther perspective, these inscriptions are divided into five groups: 1) Arabic–Ottoman inscriptions, 2) Ottoman–Greek inscriptions, 3) Arabic–Greek inscriptions, 4) Ottoman–Italian inscriptions and, 5) those written in Ottoman–French–Greek languages. These inscriptions identify 11 Ottoman buildings including: three mosques, one tekke, two fountains (Çeşmesi), three residential houses, one commercial building, and one clock tower. Their inscriptions date back to the last decades of the 19^th century and early 20^th century, and distributed over different regions in Greece.