NATIONS AND J O U R N A L O F T H E A S S O C I AT I O N AS

NATIONALISM
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FOR THE STUDY OF ETHNICITY

A N D N AT I O N A L I S M EN
Nations and Nationalism •• (••), 2019, 1–9.
DOI: 10.1111/nana.12539

Nationalisms and the Orthodox worlds†

SINIŠA MALEŠEVIĆ
University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

ABSTRACT. This review article explores the role nationalism has played in the world
dominated by the Eastern Orthodox Churches. The focus is on the recent contributions
of Paschalis Kitromilides who has written extensively on this topic. The article assesses
the four books dealing with the relationship between religion, politics, Enlightenment
and nationalism in the Balkans and Eastern Europe. The analysis emphasises the com-
plex and contradictory relationship between nationalisms and the Orthodox Churches
pointing to the profound transformation that has taken the place in this relationship
over the last 250 years.

KEYWORDS: Enlightenment, ethnic nationalism, modernity, Orthodox Church

Paschalis Kitromilides, Religion and Politics in the Orthodox World: The Ecumenical Patriarchate
and the Challenges of Modernity. London: Routledge 2019, 130 pp. £115.
Paschalis Kitromilides (ed), Enlightenment and Religion in the Orthodox World. Oxford: Voltaire
Foundation, 2016. 329 pp. £70.
Paschalis Kitromilides and Sophia Matthaiou (eds). Greek–Serbian Relations in the Age of Nation‐
Building. Athens: National Hellenic Research Foundation. 2016, 257 pp. £35.
Paschalis Kitromilides Pravoslavni Komenvelt: simbolička nasleđa i kulturna susretanja u
Jugoistočnoj Evropi. Belgrade: Zavod za udžbenike. 2016. 317 pp. £ 25.

In his numerous public pronouncements, patriarch Irenaeus (Irinej), the

current leader of the Serbian Orthodox Church, regularly glorifies the Serbian
nation and the Serbian state. Hence, in one of his rather typical statements in
2017, he warned Serbs that ‘they must not forget their history and the crimes
committed against them and that they have responsibility to pass this knowl-
edge to the future generations’. Moreover, the patriarch emphasised that ‘the
Serbian nation has lost many bodies but it must not lose its soul’ and that is
why Serbs should not quarrel among themselves but work together because
‘we love our fatherland and wherever Serbs live that is Serbia … Serbs here
and in the world have to unite and think about the great and glorious history
of our people’.1 Very similar statements can be found in the speeches of other
contemporary Orthodox Church dignitaries from Armenia, Romania,
Bulgaria, Georgia to Russia and Greece. Hence, it is no surprise that most

†Occasionally the journal publishes articles which express an author’s particular viewpoint on a
topic or theoretical issues under the heading “Viewpoint”. This is one such article.

© The author(s) 2019. Nations and Nationalism © ASEN/John Wiley & Sons Ltd 2019
2 Siniša Malešević

Eastern Orthodox Churches are generally perceived as the beacons of ethnic

nationalism. Furthermore, the Orthodox Churches maintain the policy of au-
tocephaly where each church is headed by its own fully independent religious
authority. This policy has in modern history been tied to the state formation,
and attaining state independence has regularly resulted in the establishment
of an autocephalous national church. Hence, the independence of Greece in
1832 was followed by the creation of the Greek Orthodox Church separate
from the Ecumenical Patriarchate of the Constantinople. Similarly, in 1872,
the leaders of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church proclaimed their autocephalous
status which was tied to the political autonomy and eventual independence of
the Bulgarian state. This strong link between the independence of the state and
the church has contributed substantially to the widely shared view that the
Eastern Orthodox Churches have always been nationalist organisations.
Nevertheless, as the four books under review here amply demonstrate, the link
between nationalism and the Orthodox Church has never been simple and
straightforward. On the contrary, both the Church and the nationalist ideolo-
gies have experienced substantive transformations over the past 250 years.
Although the Eastern Europe including the Balkans have traditionally been
associated with the ethnic nationalist projects which utilised religious markers
to reinforce the differences between the ethnic collectivities and nation‐states,
this has not always been the case. Despite the popular assumptions that the
Ottoman legacy and the deep religious divides have automatically generated
entrenched ethnic nationalisms in the Balkans, the historical analysis shows
otherwise. In fact, as Paschalis Kitromilides, the world leading authority on
this topic, clearly shows here, the Orthodox world was profoundly influenced
by the Enlightenment ideas that initially have shaped the character of nation-
alisms in the region. More specifically, Kitromilides documents well how the
late eighteenth century influential Orthodox clerics were open to many strands
of the Enlightenment project. For example, influential monks such as Cosmas
of Aetolia and especially Orthodox scholars such Eugenios Voulgaris and
Theoklitos Farmakidis were influenced substantially by the ideas of Enlighten-
ment. Voulgaris was very well versed in the work of Voltaire, Montesquieu,
Locke and Wolff and attempted to combine his Orthodox faith with the teach-
ings of natural philosophy. In this context, he directed the Athonite Academy
at the Mount Athos from 1753 to 1759 where he successfully blended the teach-
ing of the religious classics with the modern European philosophers. In the mid
and late eighteenth century, many highly educated Orthodox clerics were keen
to incorporate the Enlightenment ideas into the religious canon aiming to offer
a spiritual extension or an alternative to what they regarded to be an overly
materialist conception of progress.
Nevertheless, the secularist foundations and the further radicalisation of the
Enlightenment project, including the violent legacy of the French revolution,
alarmed the traditional Orthodox hierarchies which eventually became hostile
towards the Enlightenment. As this hostility grew, the Church authorities also
resisted nationalist ideas that underpinned the Enlightenment project. Hence,

© The author(s) 2019. Nations and Nationalism © ASEN/John Wiley & Sons Ltd 2019
Nationalisms and the Orthodox worlds 3

in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Orthodox church
establishment was firmly opposed to the nationalist ideas and practices. For
example, the Greek Orthodox Patriarch Gregory V issued an encyclical on
education in 1819 that condemned the popular practice of naming children
after ancient Greek mythical heroes, describing this as a pagan trait. The
Church was also opposed to the key aspects of nationalist project such as the
attempt to standardise the Greek vernacular.
As Kitromilides (2007) shows in the updated and revised Serbian edition of
his modern classic ‘An Orthodox Commonwealth’, there were two principal
reasons why the key representatives of the Orthodox Church became antago-
nistic towards nationalism. Firstly, they gradually realised that the national-
ism, as articulated in the aftermath of the French and American revolutions,
was conceived as a profoundly secular, liberal and modernising project which
had little understanding for the traditional religious thought and practices. In
this context, liberal nationalism was perceived as an ideological enemy of
Orthodox Christianity and as such represented a threat to the Church but also
to the Orthodox Christian way of life. Secondly, despite the recognised concept
of the autocephaly, the Orthodox world largely represented a unified cultural
space that was underpinned by the shared universalist creed of Orthodox
Christianity. Both the Byzantine and Ottoman empires preserved this shared
cultural space which existed not only in the domain of the high culture of the
Constantinople but even more so in the everyday life of Orthodox Christian
population. The ‘Orthodox commonwealth’, as Kitromilides calls it, was con-
stituted not only by the same faith but also by the shared social experience of
individuals in their everyday activities. In other words, Orthodoxy was not just
a religious doctrine; it was also a distinct way of life that united ordinary peo-
ple across the Balkans and Eastern Europe. This everyday experience was built
around religious calendar and was accompanied by specific rituals. This was a
world with a very different concept of time and space to the one we inhabit to-
day. In this premodern universe, local attachments and the shared religious
world‐view easily trumped ethnic identifications. As Kitromilides shows in this
period, Orthodox monks such as Dapontes, whose writings are preserved,
could easily travel throughout this Orthodox commonwealth without differen-
tiating between different geographical locations and different regional tradi-
tions. His writings indicate strong local attachments (he expresses deep
longing for his native island) and a deep immersion into a religious world‐view,
but there is no indication of any recognisable ethnic or national identification.
Hence, the arrival of ideas and movements advocating national sovereignty,
state independence and particularistic, that is, nationalist, attachments were
bound to undermine the universality of the Orthodox Christian tradition.
Hence, the Church authorities resented nationalism and favoured revival of
the neo‐Byzantine imperial order.
Nevertheless, once the nationalist ideas gained traction among the political
and cultural elites and the Ottoman imperial structure started to crumble, the
Church hierarchies reluctantly changed their position and eventually accepted

© The author(s) 2019. Nations and Nationalism © ASEN/John Wiley & Sons Ltd 2019
4 Siniša Malešević

the establishment of sovereign nation‐states. Moreover, as new states of

Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, Romania and others came into being, the political
leaders were determined to create national churches that would be completely
independent from the Constantinople. In this environment, the old Byzantine
idea of autocephaly, which originally had nothing to do with nationhood,
was radically transformed and utilised by the political rulers for the nationalist
purposes to divide the Orthodoxy into several different national churches.
Hence, as Kitromilides shows, this process was not led by the Churches but
by the state leaders who aimed to control the religious establishment through
the creation of national churches. Thus, the national independence brought
about a paradoxical situation where the ‘liberated’ Orthodox patriarchs and
other top clergy often ended up having less real power over their flock than
their predecessors had under the millet system of the Ottoman rule. Although
the formation of national states has contributed to political and social modern-
isation, the establishment of autocephalous churches severely constrained their
influence. Furthermore, the religious universalism of Orthodox tradition has
suddenly been replaced with the ethnophyletism – the conflation of one’s reli-
gious denomination with one’s nationhood. In this new context, the traditional
religious idea of martyrdom (hiermartyr) has been transformed into a concept
of ethno‐national martyrdom (ethnomartyr). Consequently, in the nationalist
re‐interpretation of the past, the death of Patriarch Gregory V was framed
along these lines. Even though he was completely opposed to nationalism
and tried to stop the Greek uprising in 1821, he has become the leading
ethnomartyr in the Greek national narratives. Gregory V was unsuccessful at
stopping the uprising and was eventually hanged by the Ottoman authorities.
Therefore, this nationalisation of the Orthodox churches is a fairly modern
phenomenon spearheaded by the political elites keen not only to fully control
the Church but also to use the Orthodox cultural tradition to justify the estab-
lishment of independent national states. Once the state apparatuses gained
control over the autocephalous churches, these previously universalist religious
organisations became fiercely nationalist, and the Orthodox Churches are now
generally regarded as the epitomes of ethno‐nationalist institutions.
Kitromilides’s latest book Religion and Politics in the Orthodox World
(2019) demonstrates convincingly that this nationalist trajectory was not inev-
itable. By zooming in on the experience of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of
Constantinople, he shows that the contemporary reality where each nation‐
state with the Orthodox religious majority must have an independent national
church is a myth grounded in a recent political experience. The very existence
of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople indicates that the Orthodox
Christianity was not predetermined to become nationalised as it has become in
the last two centuries. Through the historical analysis of the Ecumenical
Patriarchate, Kitromilides shows convincingly that Orthodoxy and national-
ism are in fact ideologically incompatible projects as former articulates a
universalist and ecumenical vision of the ‘universal empire’ whereas the latter
is a particularistic project centred on political power over specific territory and

© The author(s) 2019. Nations and Nationalism © ASEN/John Wiley & Sons Ltd 2019
Nationalisms and the Orthodox worlds 5

population. Furthermore, Kitromilides is critical of the conventional historio-

graphic accounts that analyse Orthodox churches through the secular prism of
power politics. Instead, he attempts to understand the dynamics of the
Orthodox religious institutions by exploring the wider historical context in
which they operate and by studying how the key representatives of these institu-
tions perceived their role in the world. The book challenges the dominant na-
tion‐centric interpretations of the past pointing out that the nationalisation of
religion in Eastern Europe and the Balkans was product of a very recent history.
Although the Ecumenical Patriarchate is now perceived as an organisational
aberration, a non‐national Orthodox Church, Kitromilides argues that this
organisational form is much more in line with the original Orthodox tradition
while the other, national, churches represent the organisational and ideological
anomaly. The book offers a chronological analysis of the Ecumenical Patriarch-
ate showing how it successfully maintained its non‐national structure for
thousands of years. The very existence of this non‐national church continuously
challenges the hegemonic idea of Orthodoxy defined by nationhood.
This book together with the ‘An Orthodox Commonwealth’ makes a strong
case that the early nineteenth century nationalisation of Orthodoxy was a
modernist, Enlightenment inspired, state project often implemented through
the direct and conscious policies of imitating the West‐European experience.
The leaders of the new Balkan states successfully instrumentalised the tradi-
tional canon law to nationalise the idea of autocephaly in order to break the
links with the Great Church in Constantinople but also to put the local Church
organisations under the control of the new states. Thus, using the Enlighten-
ment blueprint for the relationship between the Church and the State,
Adamantios Korais formulated a completely different model of state and
church organisation which was later largely implemented in the legal system
of the Kingdom of Greece. The other Balkan states developed a similar legal
codes and practices to subordinate the Church to the state. Kitromilides
(2019: 34–5) argues that in many respects, these practices involved imitation
of ‘the Protestant model of European Modernity’ where ‘the Church became
a component of the public sector, [and] its structure was integrated into the
state administration and the clergy became public functionaries’. Hence, the
nationalisation of Orthodoxy had very little to do with the traditional practices
and much more with the modernising projects of state and nation‐building.
The four books reviewed here cover a wide range of issues. While the two
authored books explore the general patterns of these historical shifts from
the distinctly non‐national to the nationalising worlds of the Orthodox
Christians, the two edited books zoom in on the cultural, political and social
differences within the Orthodox world. In The Enlightenment and Religion in
the Orthodox World, Kitromilides and other contributors challenge the con-
ventional views of Enlightenment as an aggressively and exclusively secular
project which allegedly made no room for religion. They also question the
dominant perceptions of Enlightenment as being an essentially a West‐
European phenomenon. Most chapters in this book show not only that

© The author(s) 2019. Nations and Nationalism © ASEN/John Wiley & Sons Ltd 2019
6 Siniša Malešević

Enlightenment has shaped and was profoundly influenced by religious doc-

trines but also that the intellectuals and clerics, in the Eastern Europe and
the Balkans, were initially very open to these ideas. For example, the Orthodox
clergy embraced some Enlightenment ideas to counter the widespread supersti-
tion and rampant pagan practices among ordinary people and to combat the
chronic illiteracy which has proved a major obstacle to reading and under-
standing the religious texts. The chapters in the book compare varied historical
experiences in the two main intellectual and organisational centres of the
Orthodox world – the South East Europe culturally dominated by the Greek
language and the Russian Empire. The book also zeros in on the impact
Enlightenment ideas had on the transformation of the non‐Greek‐speaking
Balkan societies including Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania. Although Russia
was a latecomer to the Enlightenment ideas, the Russian Orthodox Church
was one of the most westernised institutions of the empire. With the clerical
education thought in Latin until 1808, the Church was among the first institu-
tions to be exposed to the new ideas coming from the West. In this context, the
Russian word for enlightenment (prosveshchenie) which has multiple meanings
(the restoration of sight, illumination, education and spiritual perfection) was
deployed to navigate the secular and religious connotations of the new ideas
from the West. This conceptual ambiguity proved crucial in reconceptualising
of the Enlightenment in Russia as an endeavour of moral self‐improvement
which combined the secular and religious notions of righteousness. The
chapters in the book also chart the creative interactions between clerical
intellectuals such as Voulgaris and Russian Archbishop Platon Levshin both
of whom draw on the Enlightenment principles and natural law to advocate
a degree of religious toleration. This volume shows clearly that the intellectual
currents in the Orthodox world were very much in tune with the developments
taking place in the West.
The second volume edited by Kitromilides and Matthaiou deals with a more
specific issue – the Greek–Serbian relations in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. The book explores the historical context of the Serb–Greek
alliances from 1861 to 1918, the shared experience of resistance to the Ottoman
rule, the character of parliamentary governance throughout nineteenth
century, the role of Orthodox Christianity in the political and cultural
alliances between Greek and Serbian national movements and the wider social
and cultural relations between the two countries after the independence. One
of the more interesting findings in this book is that despite a generally cordial
relationships between Serbia and Greece and the numerous agreements and
political alliances established in this period, there was very little systematic
and the long‐term political or cultural cooperation between the two states. Al-
though the Serbian and Greek politicians signed numerous political and mili-
tary agreements between 1861 and 1918, there was little will to implement
them. For example, the Serbian government decided to remain neutral in the
Greco‐Turkish war of 1897, while the Greek government refused to back
Serbia’s clandestine request for the military support from Bulgarian attack in

© The author(s) 2019. Nations and Nationalism © ASEN/John Wiley & Sons Ltd 2019
Nationalisms and the Orthodox worlds 7

1915. Although two countries cooperated well during the Balkan wars of
1912–1913 and the local population of Corfu was very hospitable to the surviv-
ing Serbian soldiers residing in the French occupied Corfu from 1916 to 1918,
the Greek–Serbian political and military alliance remained much more nomi-
nal than real. This was even more pronounced in the cultural sphere: while
before the age of nationalism, ‘the Orthodox commonwealth’ was a shared cul-
tural space where clerics, monks, government officials, traders, merchants and
others were integrated in the wider interactional networks across the region,
the emergence of independent nation‐states largely mitigated against such
wider cultural links. Once the principle of nationhood trumped that of religion
and lineage, there was little room for the genuine cultural interaction across
the state borders. Unlike their imperial counterparts which unintentionally
created space for the transcultural activities, the new nationalising states driven
by different geopolitical logics and by different ideological ambitions mostly
closed off these avenues for greater cultural interaction. Although a number
of chapters in this book are at pains to present the rich repertoire of Greek–
Serbian cooperation in the age of nation‐building, what is more striking is
the fact that despite vocal support for such activities from the both sides, this
co‐operation was in fact quite modest considering the enormous potential
and the geographical and cultural closeness of the two countries.
There is no doubt that Paschalis Kitromilides is one of the most knowledge-
able and perceptive scholars of nationalism in the Balkans. He is also the lead-
ing authority on the relationship between the church and state in the Orthodox
world. He has already published numerous highly influential studies on these
topics, and these four recent contributions will only enhance his reputation fur-
ther as the foremost cultural historian of modernity in the South East Europe.
These four books successfully combine the intellectual and cultural history of
the Balkans and the Eastern Orthodox churches with the wider theoretical dis-
cussions on the relationship between the Enlightenment, modernity and na-
tionalism. Kitromilides and several contributors to the two edited volumes
(particularly Iannis Carras, Andrei Pippidi, Elena Smilianskaia and Vojislav
Pavlović) offer insightful and well‐researched historical analyses that question
the established doxa about the relationship between nationalism, enlighten-
ment and the Orthodox religious institutions and their most influential repre-
sentatives. The two single authored books by Kitrimilides are also very good
– the updated and revised edition of ‘An Orthodox Commonwealth’ offers a
wealth of information, analysis and subtle scholarship on the organisational
and ideological structure of the premodern Balkans and Eastern Europe.
Kitromilides is particularly good at drawing refined comparisons between
the traditional world where the Orthodoxy was not just a religious doctrine
but a largely unquestioned everyday social experience of individuals living in
this part of the world and the modernising Balkan societies where the
nationalising and inevitably secularising state radically transforms the social
dynamics of everyday life. This theme also underpins Kitromilides’s latest
book which challenges ahistorical and anachronistic interpretations of the

© The author(s) 2019. Nations and Nationalism © ASEN/John Wiley & Sons Ltd 2019
8 Siniša Malešević

church and state relationships and rightly insists on understanding historical

contexts on their own terms. These four books make an important contribution
to the several strands of scholarship including the nationalism studies, the
sociology and history of religious institutions and the history of the church
and state relationships in the Orthodox world.
However, some assessments and analyses are also likely to invite criticisms.
For example, Kitromilides is rightly critical of the state’s use of religion for
political ends. Nevertheless, there is not much criticism of the responsibility
of religious establishments for their own politicisation of religion within and
outside the Church. At times, it seems that Kitromilides paints a bit too rosy
view of the Orthodox clergy. He recognises ‘the fiery rhetoric in the Church
of Greece’ and that some Orthodox clerics were ‘invoking their Orthodox
identity in ethnic and civil conflicts in Yugoslavia’ (2019: 110), but there is
no comprehensive analysis or critique of the Church’s role in the ethno‐nation-
alist mobilisation in the Balkans. Although in nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, the governments were at the helm of these ethno‐nationalist
drives by the end of the twentieth century, and today, the nationalist priests
have often taken the lead in these campaigns and have occasionally been re-
sponsible for inciting violence against the non‐Orthodox populations. There
is no doubt that the many clerics in the Serbian Orthodox church were directly
involved in the warmongering activities in 1990s and are still supportive of the
radical ethno‐nationalist projects. The Bulgarian and Greek Orthodox
authorities are still deeply hostile to the ecumenical initiatives and perceive
themselves as the beacons and defenders of their respective nations. Hence, un-
like their late eighteenth and early nineteenth century predecessors, they tend
to oppose Enlightenment project, modernisation and liberalisation which are
now associated firmly with westernisation. The Russian Orthodox establish-
ment has also been fully aligned with the authoritarian government in
Russia and has shown disdain for the heritage of Enlightenment including
the freedom of speech and dissent. It seems that it is only the Ecumenical
Patriarchate in the Constantinople which has successfully resisted this
nation‐centric instrumentalisation of religion.
Some could also question the overly culturalist analysis of the Orthodox in-
stitutions and their representatives as the Church is not and has never been free
from politics. Although Kitromilides is a cultural historian who focuses on the
history of ideas and as such has less to say about the political history of the
churches, I believe that having more analysis of the politics of the Orthodox
churches would in fact enhance the cultural analysis of this institution.
Kitromilides is right that the activities of Orthodox churches should be
analysed on their own terms without our own secular biases. However, the
Church authorities themselves had historically to navigate the religious and
the secular world which inevitably made them into the political agents whether
some of them liked it or not.
Furthermore, some of the contributions in the two edited volumes are
rather uneven. For example, several chapters in the Greek–Serbian Relations

© The author(s) 2019. Nations and Nationalism © ASEN/John Wiley & Sons Ltd 2019
Nationalisms and the Orthodox worlds 9

in the Age of Nation‐Building stand out in terms of reproducing the nationalist

stereotypes and tropes that underpin the conventional, state supported, histo-
riographical accounts. Hence, in their contributions, Dušan Tabaković,
Ljubodrag Ristić and Sanja Lazarević Radak largely replicate the conven-
tional nation‐centric narratives of Serbian historiography. Hence, one can read
unreflective stereotypical assessments such as the age old ‘plans of Serbian
national unity’ (p. 65), how in 1875 Serbia ‘was boiling with national fervour’
(p. 47) or how in the Habsburg empire ‘the Serbs considered that only by the
free use of their mother tongue they could preserve their national identity’
(p. 199). These chapters embrace hard groupism (Brubaker 2004) and tend
to reify and essentialise very diverse experiences of individuals and groups in
the Balkans (Malešević 2019, 2013) while also providing little or no evidence
on the perceptions of ordinary people. These chapters tend to project contem-
porary categories into the early nineteenth century and as such go very much
against the main arguments developed by Kitromilides and other modernist
scholars of nationalism in the Balkans.
Nevertheless, leaving to one side these criticisms, there is no doubt that all
four books advance our scholarship on nationalism in the Orthodox world.
Paschalis Kitromilides has done more for the development of this scholarship
than anybody else. His painstaking research and comprehensive analyses have
dispelled many established myths and untruths about the relationship
between nationalism and ‘the Orthodox Commonwealth’. I highly recommend
Kitromilides’s work to the new generation of scholars of nationalisms in the
Orthodox worlds.

Note

1 The statement is a direct translation from the Serbian as published on 25/10/2017 at https://
freshpress.info/politika/patrijarh‐irinej‐gdje‐god‐zive‐srbi‐je‐srbija‐cuvajte‐dodika/.

References

Brubaker, R. 2004. Ethnicity Without Groups. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Kitromilides, P. 2007. An Orthodox Commonwealth: Symbolic Legacies and Cultural Encounters in
South‐Eastern Europe. London: Routledge.
Malešević, S. 2013. Nation‐States and Nationalisms: Organisation, Ideology and Solidarity.
Cambridge: Polity.
Malešević, S. 2019. Grounded Nationalisms: A Sociological Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

© The author(s) 2019. Nations and Nationalism © ASEN/John Wiley & Sons Ltd 2019