Byzantium after the Nation

The Problem of Continuity in Balkan Historiographies

Dimitris Stamatopoulos

• Publisher: Central European University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9789633863077
• eBook ISBN: 9789633863084
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Eastern European History
• Index: History

Stamatopoulos undertakes the first systematic comparison of the dominant ethnic historio­graphic models and divergences elaborated by Greek, Bulgarian, Serbian, Albanian, Romanian, Turkish, and Russian intellectuals with reference to the ambiguous inheritance of Byzantium. The title alludes to the seminal work of Nicolae Iorga in the 1930s, Byzantium after Byzantium, that argued for the continuity between the Byzantine and the Ottoman empires. Rival Balkan nationalisms engaged in a "war of interpretation" as to the nature of Byzantium, assuming different positions of adoption or rejection of its imperial model and leading to various schemes of continuity in each national historiographic canon.

Stamatopoulos discusses what Byzantium represented for nineteenth-, and twentieth-century scholars and how their perceptions related to their treatment of the imperial model: whether a different perception of the medieval Byzantine period prevailed in the Greek national center as opposed to Constantinople; how nineteenth-century Balkan nationalists and Russian scholars used Byzantium to invent their own medieval period (and, by extension, their own antiquity); and finally, whether there exist continuities or discontinuities in these modes of making ideological use of the past.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front matter
• Table of Contents
• Transliterations
• Preface to the English Edition
• Chapter I. Introduction
• Chapter II. The Iconoclast Byzantium of Greek Nationalism
• Chapter III. The “Medieval Antiquity” of Bulgarian Historiography
• Chapter IV. Byzantinisms and the Third Rome: Russian Imperial Nationalism
• Chapter V. The “Roman Byzantium” of the Albanian Historiography
• Chapter VI. Byzantium as Second Rome: Orientalism and Nationalism in the Balkans
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back cover