Robert Pashley

Robert Pashley (4 September 1805 – 29 May 1859) was a 19th-century English traveller and economist.

Pashley was born in York and studied at Trinity College, Cambridge. Distinguished in mathematics and Classics, in 1830 he was elected a Fellow of Trinity at his first sitting. In 1832 he took his MA degree, and as a travelling Fellow undertook a journey in Italy Greece, Asia Minor and Crete, of which he published his two-volume Travels in Crete. His work is considered a classic of writing on the Ottoman Empire, with his detailed observations on local geography, customs and social issues.

His remains are buried at Kensal Green cemetery.

Pashley was one of the foremost researchers of Cretan culture in the first half of the nineteenth century. Pashley was the first one to work out the location of the ancient buried city of Cydonia, relying only on ancient literature, without the aid of archaeological recovery. In his travel to Crete in 1830 he observed that Greek was the common language of this island that was then part of the Ottoman Empire, even though a substantial part of the population was then Muslim.

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