Hadji Ali Haseki (, ) was an 18th-century Ottoman Turk and for twenty years (1775–1795) on-and-off ruler of Athens, where he is remembered for his cruel and tyrannical rule. Biography The career of Hadji Ali Haseki is known chiefly from two sources, written by contemporaries: the journals of the Athenian scholar Ioannis Benizelos, and the memoirs of Panagiotis Skouzes. They are complemented by the reports of Western European travellers, and subsequent Greek historians. According to Skouzes, Hadji Ali was born in central Anatolia, and had entered the palace service (Enderûn) as a youth. He eventually became a personal bodyguard (haseki) to the Sultan Abdul Hamid I (), as well as of his sister Esma Sultan. Skouzes reports rumours that Haseki and Esma were lovers, and that she greatly favoured him and promoted his interests because of this. According to Benizelos, prior to coming to Athens, he had served as voivode (civil governor) of Durrës. Background: Late Ottoman Athens Athens had been under Ottoman rule continuously since 1456, apart from a brief Venetian occupation in 1687–1688, during the Morean War. Under Ottoman rule, the city was denuded of any importance and is commonly dismissed as a "small country town" by modern scholars such as Franz Babinger, but this image is incorrect: the city's population grew rapidly during the 16th century, and with was for a time the fourth-largest Ottoman town in the Balkans, after the capital Constantinople, Adrianople, and Thessalonica. The Venetian occupation led to the near-abandonment of the city in fear of Ottoman reprisals, and it began to recover only slowly. By the middle of the century, the city numbered inhabitants, of whom about 4/5 were Greek Orthodox, i.e. Greeks and a few Arvanites—most of the Arvanites in the area of Attica lived in the countryside rather than in Athens itself—and the rest "Turks", i.e. Muslims regardless of ethnic origin, including Gypsies and "Aethiopians"; as well as a few Catholics (mostly Westerners resident in the city). There does not appear to have been a Jewish community in Athens during that time. The Turkish community numbered several families established in the city since the Ottoman conquest. Their relations with their Christian neighbours were friendlier than elsewhere, as they had assimilated themselves to their Christian neighbours, even to the point of drinking wine, speaking Greek, and allowing more freedom to women. The Greeks held the city's commerce in their hands, and enjoyed