Balkans

The 18th century in the Balkans is generally considered as a transitional stage from the late Middle Ages to the Enlightenment or the National Revival period. Research apparently focuses mainly on the “progressive” features of historical personalities – those features that announce the future. This appears to be the case also with Partenij Pavlovič, a cleric of Bulgarian origin in the service of the Serbian churches of Peć and Karlovci: many scholars characterize him as an early exponent of Enlightenment and National Revival in the Balkans. However, a close and critical reading of his autobiography and the autobiographical marginalia he used to add to some medieval manuscripts reveal that he was, in fact, a rather bigoted advocate of a conservative brand of Orthodox Christianity. His worldview was far remote from rationalism, secularism and religious tolerance typical of Enlightenment thinking. Partenij repeatedly triggered quarrels with representatives of the Catholic church about the notorious question of the filioque, which according to him is to blame entirely on the Rome. He thinks – as did, by the way, also the Patriarchate of Constantinople – that Ottoman rule is imposed by God to punish the Orthodox Christians for their sins, most likely for their preparedness to accept a reconciliation between the Churches of Rome and Constantinople and their reunification under the authority of the Pope. He strongly believes in the miraculous healing forces of icons and relics. He also seems to be convinced that earthquakes and other natural calamities are deliberately caused by God to punish Catholics who want to turn Orthodox churches into Catholic ones. Partenij looks forward to Peter the Great liberating the Balkan Orthodox Christians from Muslim dominance, but there is no trace of any Bulgarian or Slavic ethnic, let alone national awareness. Cyrillus and Methodius are venerated by him as Christian proselytizers and wonder-workers; there is hardly any attention for their role as the creators of the first Slavic alphabet and the Slavic literary language. Bulgarian and Serbian kings and tsars are referred to solely as protectors of Orthodox Christianity. There is no interest whatsoever in Peter as a reformer; he is perceived exclusively as a tool in the hands of God in order to fight Swedish and Turkish heretics. This might be disillusioning to those who prefer (as I do) Enlightenment to medieval religious obscurantism, but one has to accept the prevalence of the latter in the 18th-century Balkans if he or she wants to grasp how Partenij – and evidently most of his contemporaries – perceived the world around them and responded to it.

This paper presents the collective volume “Entangled Histories of the Balkans” edited by Roumen Daskalov and Tchavdar Marinov and published first in English by Koninklijke Brill (Leiden) and then by New Bulgarian University (Sofia). Modern Balkan history has traditionally been studied by national historians in terms of separate national histories taking place within bounded state territories. The authors in this volume take a different approach. They all seek to treat the modern history of the region from a transnational and relational perspective in terms of shared and connected, as well as entangled, histories, transfers and crossings. This goes along with an interest in the way ideas, institutions, and techniques were selected, transferred and adapted to Balkan conditions and how they interacted with those conditions. The volume also invites reflection on the interacting entities in the very process of their creation and consecutive transformations rather than taking them as givens.

The paper argues that historic myths and myths of origin, being an essential part of national mythology, are neither the first to emerge nor the only one. Furthermore, as a general rule, there are often several variations of the narration about the past of a nation that are evolving and compete for the dominant position. In an attempt to evade the polemics the author analyses some Bulgarian aspects of the crucial problem about the evolution and competition among these variations of national mythology comparing them with analogical Balkan phenomena. In all these countries there are mythical narrations about the ancient times, about Christian Middle Ages and Byzantium, about the struggle for an independent state, etc. They were arguing for primacy in the beginning; later some ideologists of the nation managed to build one relatively stable synthesis.

This paper presents volumes 2 and 3 of the collective research project “Entangled Histories of the Balkans” dedicated to the “Transfers of Political Ideologies and Institutions” (edited by Roumen Daskalov and Diana Mishkova) and to the “Shared Pasts, Disputed Legacies” (edited by Roumen Daskalov and Alexander Vezenkov). Modern Balkan history has traditionally been studied by national historians in the terms of separate national histories taking place within bounded state territories. The authors in this volume apply a different approach. They all seek to study the modern history of the region from a transnational and relational perspective in terms of shared and connected, as well as entangled, histories, transfers, and crossings. This goes along with an interest in the way ideas, institutions, and techniques were selected, transferred and adapted to the Balkan conditions and how they interacted with those conditions. The volumes also invite reflection on the interacting entities in the very process of their creation and consecutive transformations rather than taking them as givens.

In Western literature, the Balkans are most often represented in an unfavourable way. A remarkable exception seems to be the Dutch writer A. den Doolaard (1901-1994). He wrote three novels rendering the Balkans in a positive way. The inn with the horseshoe (1933) describes the braveness of an Albanian boy avenging the besmirched honour of his brother. Orient-Express (1934) deplores the decline of the Macedonian liberation movement due to internecine terrorism. The wedding of the seven Gypsies (1939) extols the dissolute lifestyle, associated with Gypsy music. However, the positive qualities the reader is supposed to admire differ essentially from the norms valued in daily life. Taking pleasure in the Balkans seems to be a form of escapism, limited to leisure time