Hadjikyriacou | 243player—to mention just a few of his capacities. Through this wide spectrum of
activities, Hadjiyorgakis developed a range of legal, quasi-legal, and illegal means
to accumulate wealth, with a diversified range of investments in different sectors
of the Ottoman economy.
This wide spectrum of activities was typical for the provincial power holders
at the time. As Ali Yaycıoğlu explains,
We should not approach this period with modern assumptions based on a di-
vision between economy and politics or business and governance. In the eigh-
teenth and early nineteenth centuries, governance was business. Provincial
power-holders acted as fiscal, military and administrative entrepreneurs by
using their prestige, local knowledge and connections, managerial capacities
and capital for profit and power.... In this system, where administration and
entrepreneurial activities were amalgamated, there was no clear distinction,
most of the time, between the revenues collected for public (administrative)
needs and those for private (personal and family) disbursement.Hadjiyorgakis’s additional title, “representative of the non-Muslims,” encap-
sulates the administrative and fiscal functions of communal organization and
leadership in Ottoman Cyprus. This office appears to have been introduced in the
mid-eighteenth century, matching a trend toward bureaucratization throughout
the empire, particularly in tax farming and collection, which entailed specific
forms of fiscal authority over non-Muslim communities. Unsurprisingly, tax
collection was a lucrative form of investment for the great and petty notables
throughout the empire.
The complex forms that tax collection took in eighteenth-century Cyprus
often blurred the lines between taxation and moneylending. Taxes were paid to
Istanbul in advance by the representative on behalf of the community. While
from the vantage point of the state this arrangement ensured the quick and ef-
ficient payment of taxes, it also meant that the people would repay the amount
to the dragoman in interest-incurring installments. Moreover, in a chronically
cash-starved economy the dragoman would not relinquish his own liquid cash but
rather contract a loan on behalf of the community, the cost of which would pre-
sumably accrue to the original sum alongside the community’s debt to the drago-
man. This created a perfectly legal cycle of indebtedness and forms of relations of
credit that entailed almost zero risk to Hadjiyorgakis. There were also hidden
and unaccounted-for profit margins inherent in the tax-collecting process. These,
however, are more difficult to document given the nature of available evidence.
“The Lord Always Prevailed”: An Iconographer’s Diatribe
One of the most sensational of Hadjiyorgakis’s ventures led to the complete
collapse of the provisioning system and sparked a series of revolts. In 1802, the