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Nations and N ationalism

2

2), 1996, 163-191. SEN 1996

‘Balkan m entality’: history, legend,

imagina

1

on

PASCHALIS M. KITROMILIDES

University of Athens

ABSTRACT. In this article I attempt to do two things. First I consider in what sense

it could be reasonable to talk of a ‘Balkan mentality’, shared across national divisions

by all peoples in Southeastern Europe. I argue among other things that nationalism

and its impact on culture and scholarship has been a major stumbling block for the

conceptualisation of

a

shared ‘Balkan mentality’. Secondly,

I

go on

to

examine one

possible context in which a shared mentality could be said to have existed among the

Orthodox Christians in the Balkans. I suggest that such a context could be located in

the pre-nationalist Balkan society of the eighteenth century, a period in which the

region was politically united by Ottoman rule. To illustrate the content of the mental

outlook shared by the Balkan Orthodox in the eighteenth century I examine the

autobiographical writings

of

three major authors, one writing in Greek (Caisarios

Depontes), one in Bulgarian (Sofroni VraEanski) and one in Serbian (Matija

NenadoviC). I identify the shared mental elements reflected in their texts and point out

how the transition to a national self-conception taking place at the turn

of

the

eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the Balkans, marked the end of this shared

‘Balkan mentality’. The study is thus an exploration in the ‘prehistory’, as it were,of

nationalism in the Balkans, an exploration which also looks at the symbolic origins of

nationalism in the region as reflected in the texts of two of the three authors.

I

Is there a shared Balkan mentality? This short phrase may appear on the

surface to pose just a simple question that could be answered in as simple a

manner with a straight yes or no. The answer could be in the affirmative for

those who are used to thinking about the Balkans in conventional

stereotypes and would therefore equate a supposed ‘Balkan mentality’ with

the passions, the experience of disorder and the sense of irregularity

associated with this region of the world all those elements that are taken

as differentiating the European Southeast from the norms of civilised life in

the European Northwest. But the answer could equally be a negative one

and it would rather more realistically suggest itself to the empiricist

observer

of

the profound cleavages and divisions that mark Balkan history:

how could one possibly imagine a shared mentality being fostered in a

region which is synonymous with conflict and violent confrontation



164 Paschalis M . Kitromilides

throughout its history? The difficulty with the original question, however, is

not resolved through this duality of equally plausible but mutually exclusive

responses to it. Every single term that makes up the question would appear

upon a little serious reflection to be problematic and to require clarification:

what precisely does the word ‘shared‘ denote? Who shares and what ought

to be the required depth of supposed common elements in order to make it

possible to recognise them as forming a shared system of thought and

values? And what exactly is the entity denoted by the geographical term

‘Balkan’: can this epithet be assumed to have a readily recognisable meaning

in terms of geography and history? Finally, what about ‘mentality’ itself?

How is it possible to use this term still as a descriptive and analytical

category in serious historical writing in view of all the conceptual problems

that even its proponents acknowledge to be associated with it? (Burke 1992:

91-6). Does the term ‘mentality’ possess anything other than vacuous

symbolism for faddish historical writing or is it really empirically ‘opera-

tional’ while retaining an aura of artistic imprecision,

as

one of its major

scholarly promoters has recently claimed? (Vovelle 1985: 6 ) . In other words,

can it be usefully employed in order to enhance conceptually our under-

standing of the past? These are real questions and by no means the only

ones that can be raised in connection with this important term of

contemporary historiography.

There may nevertheless be more substance to the original question than

the objections outlined so far would allow. The idea of a ‘Balkan mentality’

is neither new nor does it have a negligible lineage in the scholarly discourse

about Southeastern Europe. The actual term itself,

la mentalith balkanique,

was used for the first time, as far as I can determine, in 1918 by the great

Serbian geographer Jovan CvijiC in his monumental treatise on the human

geography of the Balkans (1918: 111). CvijiC was the greatest Balkan

geographer of his time and his work contributed probably more than

anything else to the establishment of an indigenous tradition of scholarship

in geography, ethnography and comparative ethnology in the Balkans.

Cvijik‘s work exercised an indirect but substantial influence on the develop-

ment of continental European scholarship more generally through its

considerable, although largely unacknowledged, impact on the elaboration of

Fernand Braudel’s geographical determinism.’ What is especially remarkable

about his employment of the phrase ‘Balkan mentality’ is of course the

precocity of its appearance in scholarly writing. The use of the term

‘mentality’ by CvijiC in 1918 slightly antedates its official introduction into

European social thought by Lucien Levy-Bruhl in the title of his

La mentalitt

primitive

in 1922 an epoch-making work in European anthropology and

historiography. In coining the term therefore, Cvijit, an active participant in

French scholarly life during his teaching at the Sorbonne in 1917-18, appears

to be well in tune with the explorations at the forefront of social science in

his time.2 One could even claim that a revisionist history of the idea of

mentality should ascribe to him, along with Levy-Bruhl, part of the credit for



‘Balkan mentality’ 165

the creation of the term, on account of his coinage of the term ‘Balkan

mentality’ in

La

pkninsule balkanique. In view of these broader associations

the idea of a ‘Balkan mentality’ obviously cannot be dismissed as an

intellectual lightweight and seems to require some serious scrutiny. It would

be worthwhile therefore in discharging this task in the following pages to

take a cue from John Locke and, acting as ‘under-labourers’, with intellectual

humility and an awareness of the complexities of the subject, try to clear

‘some

of

the rubbish, that lies in the way to knowledge; which certainly

would have been very much more advanced in the world, if the endeavours

of ingenious and industrious men had not been much cumbered with the

learned but frivolous use of uncouth, affected, or unintelligible

term^ .^

What Levy-Bruhl meant when he used the term ‘mentality’ in order to

describe the ways of thinking of ‘primitive’ societies, has been interpreted as

referring broadly to the ‘collective psychology’, the unspoken assumptions

and deeper preconceptions that make up the mental world shared by the

members of a society (Cazeneuve 1968: 264). CvijiC did not use the term,

collective psychology, but he spoke rather of

curactdres psychiques

or

curacrdres intellectuels et moraux (Cvijik

1918: 263-4), psychological or

intellectual and moral characteristics of peoples, which he understood as the

product of a complex of factors, going back ultimately to the nature of the

geographical environment. Although in his text the most consistently used

term is caractires psychiques, I believe that what he wanted to convey by the

term ‘mentality’ is best expressed by the incidental expressionfo nd psychique

(CvijiC 1918: 272), psychic base or foundation, which indeed refers to that

deeper layer of often non-verbalisable assumptions and ways of under-

standing the world, which is generally now meant by the historiography of

mentalities as the admittedly rather loose content of the term.4

The broad methodological problems associated with the use of the term

mentality as a descriptive and analytical category are readily illustrated by

Cvijik‘s attempt to introduce the idea

of

a ‘Balkan mentality’. It might thus

be illuminating to have a further look at how he understands the term. The

mentality of peoples, CvijiC suggests, is the product of a complex set of

factors, geographical, historical, ethnic and social (CvijiC 1918: 263).

Although what he describes as historical, ethnic and social causes play a

critical mediating role in shaping the character of the mentality of a

collectivity, ultimately the decisive causal influence is ascribed to the

immutability of environmental and geographical factors: CvijiC, as an heir

of European positivism, kept his method deeply rooted in the logic of

physical geographical analysis. His own understanding of his craft is placed

in clear relief when he uses the analogy of ‘geological segments’ (coupes

gkologiques) in order to describe the various layers of common experience



166 Paschalis M. Kitromilides

and shared meaning that make up the mentalities of groups (CvijiC 1918:

265). In the particular case of the ‘Balkan mentality’ the impact of

geomorphological and environmental factors such as mountains, plains,

valleys, littorals, quality of soil, water supply, climate, relative humidity,

etc., have a direct impact on economic activity, subsistence and habitation

patterns and therefore constitute the outer parameters of the modes of life

and therefore the ‘mentality’ of human groups.

Within this broad and physically determined unit of collective human

existence is exerted the influence of historical, ethnic and social ‘causes’: the

great historical causes shaping the destinies of the Balkan peninsula were

the repeated waves of ‘great invasions’ since late antiquity, the attendant

profound ethnological changes and the formation of medieval states, often

locked in lethal conflict with each other (CvijiC 1918: 8695). But the flow of

these epoch-making historical processes was channelled and ultimately

shaped by the immutable geographical features of the peninsula. So too was

the influence of great civilisations, associated with the domination of three

great empires in the Balkans, the Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman.

Geographical factors determined the ‘zones of civilisation’, shading into

each other and extending beyond the Balkans into Asia Minor and Central

Europe (CvijiC 1918: 100-1 1). These ‘zones of civilisation’, in continuous

interplay with each other, formed the immediate substratum of ‘mentalities’

in the Balkans and supplied their language and forms of symbolic

expression: the most pervasive zone was that of Byzantine civilisation,

represented primarily by Orthodox Christianity and Greek culture; upon

this deeper layer of civilisation were imprinted the ‘Turkish and oriental

influences’ associated with the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans; finally

there was the zone of Western civilisation, associated with the ancient

traditions of Roman rule and preserved through the presence of Latin

Christianity in the northwestern arc of the Balkan peninsula. These zones of

civilisation were constantly shifting and interpenetrating because of the

most important social phenomenon marking the Balkan experience: the

migratory movements, either forced or voluntary, that over the centuries

kept populations on the move and created the web of interlocking diasporas

throughout the peninsula and beyond. By transplanting and intermixing

populations and by exposing human groups to experiences of social

adaptation and readaptation migrations provided, according to CvijiC, yet

another factor in the shaping of mentalities, with the evolution of new

psychological characteristics (CvijiC 1918: 149-50).

Yet beyond the historical and social factors that shaped the collective

psychology or ‘mentality’ of the human groups contained within the

geographical unity of the Balkan peninsula, CvijiC puts a premium on

a

third group of ‘causes’, those associated with ethnic identity. The ethnolo-

gical factor in the Balkans appears to be the primary focus of his attention,

since he considers this factor the basic given of Balkan history and society

from the period of the ‘great invasions’, which began with the Slavs in the




sixth century and finished with the Turks in the fourteenth century (CvijiC

1918: 90). The narrative appears to suggest that despite the ebb and flow of

ethnic groups and the continuous shifts in their territorial basis both within

and outside the Balkans, ethnic identities remained constant and distinct

through the centuries and underlay the ‘national passions’ (CvijiC 1918:

11 l), which agitated the Balkan world of Cvijic‘s own time. Indeed one of

the major objectives of his treatise was to delineate in graphic detail the

psychological characteristics connected with a major ethnological family in

the Balkans, his fellow South Slavs. His project, or at least the comparative

ethnology which occupies its second half, was primarily motivated by the

desire to show the ethnic and psychological unity of the South Slavs,

excluding the ‘Eastern South Slavs’, that is the Bulgarians, in order to

illustrate a broad range of affinities between Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.

This in turn was expected to provide as in fact it did at the time of peace-

making and nation-constructing following the First World War a

legitimate ethnological argument for the integration of the three ‘Western’

South Slavic peoples into a unitary kingdom. CvijiC: was a Serbian patriot

and a Yugoslav visionary and could rightfully claim major credit for the

imaginative intellectual labour that contributed to the birth of the new state

of Yugoslavia.

Despite the sophistication with which he delineates the methodological

difficulties involved in the study of ‘mentalities’ and the problems attendant

upon an attempt, through direct and indirect methods of observation (CvijiC

1918: 264-70), to recover the psychological characteristics of ethnic groups,

his effort in the first part of the treatise to lay the methodological

foundations of an argument concerning a shared ‘Balkan mentality’

eventually founders upon the ethnological determinism of the second part.

A

common Balkan mentality becomes a patent logical impossibility the

moment it is causally connected with

so

many divergent, mutually exclusive

and usually antagonistic ethnic identities. The diversity of ethnic identities

subverts the cultural and psychological community presupposed by the

argument for a Balkan mentality. National ontology, as it were, denies the

metaphysics of Cvijic‘s ‘balkanism’.

I11

If Cvijic‘s example illustrates how the idea of a ‘Balkan mentality’ founders

upon the rock of nationalism, one might still ask whether this idea could

somehow

be

salvaged through some alternative route. One conceivable

approach might be through an anthropological path, an attempt to recover

common values and beliefs as exemplified in modes of behaviour and forms

of symbolic expression at the grass-roots. Anthropologists or folklore

researchers have for a long time looked at common customs or shared

normative frameworks especially among the peasant populations of different




regions in the Balkans. An important pioneering example has been the field

research of M. E. Durham at the beginning of the twentieth century,

whereby she could record common customs cutting across religious

differences between Christian and Moslem tribal cultures in Albania, Bosnia

and Montenegro (Durham 1928). On the other hand, ethnographic data

about common intra-Balkan motifs in decorative folk art, folk poetry and

ballads as well as a broad array of common proverbs have been a b ~ n d a n t . ~

On the basis of this ethnographic evidence an argument about a shared

Balkan value system or ‘vision of the world’

could

be

plausibly advanced,

It

is interesting furthermore to notice that the plausibility of a shared Balkan

folk civilisation has been questioned not so much on the grounds of the

credibility of the empirical evidence or on methodological principles but

rather on account of nationalist claims and counter-claims concerning the

‘authentic’ ethnic character of the contested forms of popular symbolic

expression (Megas 1952). Beyond the basic ethnographic evidence associated

with various forms of folk art, an anthropological approach to the definition

of

a

common Balkan ‘mentality’ might attempt to extend to the whole of

the Balkans the principles of the ‘Mediterranean’ anthropology of honour

and shame, which were initially put to fruitful explorations of forms of

social behaviour in Greece and Cyprus. It would be an interesting exercise

in historical anthropology to try to recast in terms of ‘honour and shame’

ethnographic materials such as those recorded by M. E. Durham or the

social psychology of the various South Slavic groups described by Cvijik.

Nevertheless, could such an anthropological approach yield a viable

argument about a specifically Balkan ‘mentality’, a way of understanding

the world and regulating social behaviour that is common and peculiar to

the peoples inhabiting the Balkan peninsula? The basic problem about all

anthropological or social psychological arguments in favour of the existence

of

a

shared Balkan ‘mentality’ is that they are bound to turn into

sociological metaphysics unless they provide convincing answers to the

question as to what is specifically Balkan about it. In a way it may sound

paradoxical and probably hopelessly retrogressive to modern social scientific

minds, but after thinking long about it I am inclined to believe that the

whole issue of ‘Balkan mentality’ essentially hinges on a very old rule of

Aristotelian logic: it is fundamentally a question of a diferentiu specifics

and unless such a diferentiu is convincingly shown to be available and valid,

the argument collapses. Now

I

think that this basic reason from Aristotelian

logic militates against the validity of an ethnographic approach to the

question of ‘Balkan mentality’. As far as the various folk art motifs or the

evidence from proverbs or songs or forms of ‘honour and shame’ behaviour

are concerned, a broad comparative perspective would soon dispel1 any

certainty one might have entertained that these forms of evidence in fact

document anything that is specifically ‘Balkan’ in nature.6




IV

‘Balkan mentality’ appears to be not only a problematic concept but an

elusive one as well. Our attempts to clear the ground toward definition have

thus far failed to satisfy basic rules of logic. Before abandoning the term as

well as the

idea,

however, it might

not be pointless to try one more route.

This would involve another paradox, in that we might try to understand

and possibly

salvage the idea of a

‘Balkan mentality’ by looking at some

basic critiques

of

the very concept of mentality itself as an analytical

category. It is true that the very idea of mentality has mostly fulfilled a

polemical function in the human sciences: it was introduced as a major

analytical category in comparative ethnology in the opening decades of the

twentieth century amidst considerable controversy and it spilled over into

historiography with conscious polemical intent.7 It was used mostly as a

frontal attack against more conventional forms of intellectual history and it

has been embroiled in repeated waves of scholarly intellectual fashion

originating in France but spilling over into the rest of the European

continent and the English-speaking world. Despite considerable achieve-

ments which go beyond the apparent success associated with intellectual

fads and have involved the production of some outstanding works

combining serious research and scholarly imagination, the mentalities

approach has been severely and justly criticised as prone to tautology,

unverifiable speculation and generality of discourse which can be misleading

as well as simplifying (Lloyd 1990: 1-38, 135-45). Yet supporters of the

mentalities approach, although acknowledging the methodological and

logical problems, tend to insist on the fact that it has been an ‘operational’

approach, presumably meaning that it has produced positive research

results. On this score, despite all the rubbish, to recall Locke again, the

evidence is on the side of the proponents of mentalities: works of high

quality, insight and serious innovation have indeed been produced by a

succession of great scholars since Lucien Febvre.

Paradoxically, however, it is from one of the most serious recent

critiques, a critique which makes a very powerful logical case for disposing

of the mentalities approach altogether, that we may take our cue for a final

trial of the idea of a ‘Balkan mentality’. This comes in G.

R.

Lloyd’s

insistence that a ‘mentality’ can only make sense if it is understood as

context-bound. In particular, he argues, it cannot make sense unless it refers

to a specifically defined political context as a framework of communication

(Lloyd 1990: 13, 142-3). It can thus be understood as the mental expression

of a historically recognisable political unit. Therefore, if we are looking for

a ‘mentality’, that is certain recurrent attitudes, beliefs or perceptions of

shared interests that characterise a culture, we will have to connect this

‘vision of the world’* with a specific political context in a particular period

of time. In other words, we are looking for a recovery of the past through a

history of attitudes, forms of behaviour, symbolic expressions of the




‘unconscious’ (Vovelle 1985: lo), or to borrow a term from a leading

practitioner of the mentalities approach

of expressions of the

‘collective

imagination’? in order to penetrate into the mental and emotional world of

earlier epochs in the historical trajectory of

a

politically recognisable social

unit.

If we are to attempt to approximate the idea of a ‘Balkan mentality’ on

the basis of the foregoing presuppositions, we must start with an exercise in

historical abstraction and imagination: that is, we have to travel in time

until we reach a period during which the Balkan peninsula is free of the

internal national divisions which, since the second half of the nineteenth

century, have radically transformed the cultural traditions and communica-

tion patterns prevailing in the particular geographical units which made up

the Balkan national states. Since the emergence and consolidation of

national states in the Balkans in the century from about the 1830s to the

1920s individual national ‘mentalities’ (Greek, Bulgarian, Romanian,

Serbian, Turkish, Albanian) have replaced whatever could be described as a

common ‘Balkan mentality’. As we have already noted above, Cvijic‘s

attempt to talk of a ‘Balkan mentality’ collapsed logically when he

introduced ethnic components into his conceptualisation of psychological

characteristics in the Balkan peninsula. Ethnicity is

a

factor of distinctive-

ness and therefore cannot make for commonalities; nationality is a factor

of

division and therefore undermines the sense of shared meanings; finally,

nationalism is @so

fucto

a machine of conflict and violence which annuls

first and foremost those deeper affinities and unspoken assumptions which

form the psychic substratum of a shared ‘mentality’. The quest for a

‘Balkan mentality’ therefore must get away from ethnic and national

constructs before any substance can be ascribed to it.

This requirement can be satisfied if our imaginary trajectory takes us to

the prerevolutionary eighteenth century, an epoch marked by the absence

of national divisions from the Balkans. The termination of the wars of

external expansion of the Ottoman empire into Central Europe after the

treaties of Carlowitz (1 699), Passarowitz (171 8) and Belgrade (1 739)

brought about a stabilisation of external borders for about

a

century and

allowed remarkable freedom of movement within the Balkan region. This

was an epoch during which the great rivers of the peninsula, and most

remarkably the Danube, united the various geographical regions of the

Balkans rather than separated them. The internal political unity of the

Ottoman Balkans laid down the preconditions for the growth of a common

society, and it is the outlook connected with this society that ought to

be

the object of any quest for the recovery of a shared ‘Balkan mentality’. The

existence of a common Balkan society depended on the movement of

people, on a trans-Balkan network of economic activities and on common

political institutions (the Ottoman administration and taxation system).

Beneath the factors making for a common society, there of course existed

elements of ethnic differentiation, expressed primarily in the multiplicity of




Balkan vernacular languages. What is surprising, however, for a premodern

era was the facility with which people crossed linguistic frontiers and the

Protean nature of linguistic identities, which constantly shifted and also

comprised multilinguality as a constituent of daily life. Linguistic difference

was a potential source of ethnic distinctions and eventually it was going to

be politicked by the future national states and turned into a factor of

conflict. In the context of a pre-national society, however, linguistic

difference was not a source of conflict since people were multi-lingual and

in the absence of state boundaries, they could cross potential ethnolinguistic

distinctions much more easily.10

The ‘vision of the world’ connected with this society was primarily

based on religious belief. I think that the way religious belief colours

understandings of the world and supplies frameworks for living one’s

daily life, can provide the required clues for grasping the content and

meaning of ‘Balkan mentality’ in the eighteenth century. Religious belief

should therefore be the focus of our attention in our attempt to recapture

this outlook. Besides, even a cursory comparative look at studies of

mentalities will reveal the critical methodological significance of the

examination of religion and the forms of behaviour and symbolic

expression associated with it. In considering religious experience in the

Balkans during the eighteenth century we will of course have to face up

to the problem of the plurality of religious doctrines. At least three major

religions were present in the Ottoman Balkans in the eighteenth century:

Orthodox Christianity, Sunni Islam and Judaism, with Catholic and

Uniate populations on the fringes of the peninsula and extensive forms of

religious syncretism, especially between Christianity and Islam at the

grassroots.” Thus eighteenth-century Balkan society could be understood

as a world of concentric and overlapping circles within a broader space

whose human geography was defined by a multiplicity of languages and

religious doctrines.

The multiplicity of potential identities associated with this kind of

pluralism could very well create insurmountable difficulties for an argument

about a shared ‘mentality’. What I propose to do accordingly is to focus on

the outlook on life associated with the religion of the vast majority of the

population in the Balkan heartlands, namely Orthodox Christianity. In

what follows I will attempt to describe some components of this outlook as

they can be gleaned from autobiographical sources recording the life

experiences of Orthodox Balkan authors. The further task of extending the

analysis to written evidence transmitting the experience of the minority

religious groups in the Balkans in the same period in order to reconstruct

the picture in its entirety, will have to be left to others.

I

hope nevertheless

that the autobiographical evidence

I

will discuss in the following pages will

provide an adequate basis for an initial interpretation of the ‘mentality’ of

Balkan Orthodoxy which, few will disagree I am sure, primarily defines

religious belief in Southeastern Europe.




V

The world of Balkan Orthodoxy found a characteristic expression in the life

and autobiographical writings of Constantine Dapontes (1 7 13/14-84), who

as a monk later in life took the name Caisarios. If one immerses oneself in

the thousands of Dapontes’s fifteen-syllable couplets, especially in his

autobiographical narrative Garden of Graces, which has been aptly described

as his

Confessions,12

one comes face to face with a panorama of Balkan

Orthodoxy not only as a living faith but also as the content of daily

experience. The Garden of Graces, composed in Caisarios’s monastic cell in

the Monastery of Xeropotamou on Mount Athos after his definitive

withdrawal from the world, was meant to be an

apologia pro vita sua,

addressed to Prince Alexander Mavrocordatos (1754-1 8 19) subsequently

(1782) Grand Dragoman of the Sublime Porte and Hospodar of Moldavia

(1785-87), primarily known in Balkan history with the appellation Firaris

(fugitive) on account of his flight and alignment with the Russians during

the Russo-Turkish war of 1787-92. The narrative poem is meant to be an

account of the nine-year peregrination of one of the holiest relics on Mount

Athos, the section of the True Cross preserved at the Monastery of

Xeropotamou. Dapontes was charged by the brotherhood at Xeropotamou

to undertake this peregrination in order to collect alms for the rebuilding of

the main church of the monastery. In his account of his nine-year

wanderings with the Cross, Dapontes inserted many digressions about the

places he visited and punctuated his narrative with autobiographical notes,

as a sub-text about himself which constitutes a counterpoint to the main

text that focuses on the Cross. This literary device, which could be seen not

as part of a conscious narrative strategy, but rather as a form of

spontaneous expression of recollections, personal tastes and values more or

less on the basis of free association, provides an excellent illustration of how

religious belief and the whole symbolic universe of active Orthodox practice

were integrated into daily life and supplied the framework of values and

meanings underpinning collective attitudes and legitimising individual

choice^. ̂

From Dapontes’ autobiographical account we learn that he was born on

the Aegean island of Skopelos circa 1713-14 and educated in a local school

set up for this purpose by his father, who was the local consular agent of

Great Britain. The school was operated by an Orthodox monk especially

summoned from the great Athonite Monastery of 1vir0n.I~ hus from quite

an early age the world of Orthodox monasticism was filtered into the island

boy’s intellectual formation. At seventeen he was sent by his father to

Constantinople in order to embark upon a career in Phanariot circles. These

were the

oda\

groups around the Patriarchate of

Constantinople

whos

seat h d been since 1599

in

the Phanar quarter

of

Istanbul close to the

Golden Horn. Thus the Aegean youth came in contact with a broader world

of power and intrigue, a world defined by the Ottoman ruling institution




and comprising the constant accession and fall of Orthodox patriarchs and

princes. In Constantinople the young Dapontes attached himself to the

retinue of one of the reigning families of Moldavia and Wallachia,

Racovita, but by the time he made his way to Bucharest in

1731

his patrons

had

fallen from power. He sought help and solace in the advice of the

Patriarch

of

Jerusalem Meletios who was a

friend

of

his father and was in

Wallachia for the purpose of collecting alms for the Holy Sepulchre. The

patriarch recommended him to the new Prince

of

Wallachia, Constantine

Mavrocordatos, the greatest of the Phanariot legislators and reformers in

the Danubian principalities. From Mavrocordatos Dapontes obtained

support in order to continue his studies in the local princely academy,

where he became a disciple of George Chrysogonis of Trebizond, nephew

and successor of the great neo-Aristotelian scholar Sevastos Kyminitis, who

at the end of the seventeenth century had led the reform of the princely

academy of Bucharest. Thus Dapontes was exposed to the tradition of

Orthodox learning transmitted in the higher schools of the Greek East. He

particularly admired Kyminitis’s two books, both of them works of

Orthodox scholarship, which he considered ‘schools of learning’

(BG

V,

Dapontes remained attached to the retinue of Constantine Mavrocor-

datos, whom he followed to Jassy when the prince was transferred to the

Moldavian throne in

1732,

and again to Bucharest when the prince returned

to Wallachia in 1735. The most significant outcome of Dapontes’ associa-

tion with Constantine Mavrocordatos was the charge he received from the

prince for the composition of the official chronicle of the Russo-Turkish

War of 1 7 3 6 9 , which was largely fought on the territories of the

principalities. This resulted in one of Dapontes’s most significant prose

works, the voluminous record of the war which is entitled

’EprpepGec

AaKzKui (Dacian Diaries). Thus the author’s Orthodox background was

inoculated by a lively sense of power politics in the modern world. Dapontes

remained in the principalities until 1746, sharing the changing fortunes of

his Phanariot patrons, reaching high offices in court, acquiring wealth and

enemies and, by his own admission, committing many sins in a land of

material opulence and moral depravity (BGV, 111:

258 .15

To atone for his

sins he endowed churches and monasteries in Moldavia and in his home

island of Skopelos and defrayed the cost of publication in Venice of the

special service of Skopelos’s patron saint, Saint Riginos

(BGV, 111:

42 .

From Moldavia Dapontes returned to Constantinople where he lived

until

1753.

In

1747,

shortly after his arrival there he was thrown in jail and

remained incarcerated for twenty months. During his imprisonment his aged

mother left Skopelos for the only time in her life and ‘took to sea where she

had never been before’ and came to Constantinople to visit him in prison.

Deeply ashamed of his condition he refused

to

see her and the old woman

died three months later in August

1747

without having seen her son for

eighteen years. Dapontes relates the incident with great remorse in the

111: 9 .




Garden

of

Graces (BGV,

111:

43-4 .

Shortly after his release from

prison,

where, as he notes, he was justly punished for the sins he had committed in

Moldavia and Wallachia, he was engaged and married in

1749

to a

young

woman from the island of Halki in the Sea of Marmara. The match-maker

was the Patriarch of Antioch, Sylvester, who was residing on the island.

Halki with its Orthodox monasteries and natural beauties was a resort

particularly favoured by Orthodox prelates from all over the empire when

they had to reside in the capital on church or other business. Other grand

prelates, Dapontes informs

us,

had also proposed various matches to him,

but he finally decided on Mariora, who gave birth to a premature daughter

in August

1751.

The girl died on

14

September and her mother followed

shortly thereafter on October

6,

the victim of

a

plague epidemic. Dapontes

mourned her in an epigram, in which he imputed her death to his own

wickedness and sins and prayed for the forgiveness of sins of both of them

(BGV, 111: 46).

The death of his wife occurred in the church of the Holy

Virgin on Halki, before the icon of the Virgin Mary, to whom the

unfortunate woman in the desperation of her illness, had appealed for a

miracle, having a few months earlier been miraculously cured from another

illness.

After these repeated adversities in his personal life Dapontes, meditating

on his sins, especially those connected with his residence in Moldavia,

which, he says, even the Danube could not wash away, and ‘saturated with

the things of the world, both good and evil’

( BG V, 111:

51), decided to take

monastic vows. In August

1753

he retired to the islet of Piperi, in the

Northern Aegean, close to his native Skopelos. The islet was uninhabited

save for a community of about ten monks tending two churches of the

Virgin and living in a small monastery. Dapontes, who now had become

brother Caisarios, lived on Piperi in total solitude for three years. He

resided in a solitary cell, mixing with the rest of the community only in

church and at table and spending all of his time writing, composing his

thousands of verses, more than ten volumes full of them according to his

own testimony (BGV, 111: 52). When the labours of writing tired him he

cultivated his garden and derived great pleasure from this occupation. This

was the happiest period of his life and it inspired in him what is probably

the best moment in his voluminous poetic output, his encomium ‘of solitude

and monastic comportment’

(BGV, 111: 54-60).

This is indeed a remarkable

text which combines a lively appreciation of the beauty of nature and the

rewards

of

absolute simplicity of life with a sense of spiritual exuberance

coming from the ‘association through books with the wise apostles and all

the other saints’

(BGV, 111: 59).

Three years of this spiritual retreat and return to nature fortified

Dapontes’ moral and psychological resources for another foray into the

world. In

1756

he succumbed to the temptation to cross over to Skopelos in

order to take residence in the local monastery

of

the Annunciation, which

had been founded by his father and where he had encountered, he tells us,




the three foundations of his own happiness, namely learning, prayer and the

adoration of the Virgin

(BGV, 111:

61). Although this was paradise on earth

for him, a few months later, in May 1757, following an inner dictate of the

will

of

the Lord, he left for a pilgrimage to Mount Athos, intending to

return to his own monastery in due course (BGV, 111: 61). On Athos he

took up residence at the Monastery of Xeropotamou, where the sacristan

had been a compatriot and old friend. This sealed Dapontes’ fate for the

rest of his life. The brotherhood at Xeropotamou were preparing to send

out an alms-collecting mission to Wallachia in order to rebuild the

crumbling church of the monastery. Upon Brother Caisarios’s arrival they

turned

to

him as God-sent for this charge, being a man of the world with

intimate knowledge of the principalities and many acquaintances among the

rich and powerful, including the reigning prince, Constantine Mavrocor-

datos, his old patron. Dapontes complied, and after the liturgy of the

Pentecost on 22 May 1757 he set out for his nine-year peregrination in the

Balkans, entrusted with the monastery’s holiest treasure, the True Cross.

This was a remarkable journey on account of which Dapontes can be

safely considered, along with his contemporary, the Kievan monk Vassily

Barsky, the greatest of the wandering Orthodox monks in the eighteenth

century. His itineraries turned out to be an almost complete record of

Balkan geography, excluding the western part of the peninsula. From

Athos, Brother Caisarios escorting the Cross, sailed along the Macedonian

coast to Ainos in Thrace and from there the land journey began across

Thrace to Adrianople, thence across the Bulgarian heartlands to Tirnovo

and its environs, across the Danube to Wallachia, entering Bucharest amidst

great honours and expressions of piety and devotion to the Cross. After

seven months in Wallachia the itinerary turned north to Moldavia, entering

Jassy a week before Easter in April 1758. After two years in the

principalities Dapontes brought the Cross to Constantinople in August

1760. The Cross was to remain in the capital of the empire for four years,

sanctifying the faithful and multiplying the treasure Dapontes had brought

back from Wallachia and Moldavia. The presence of the Cross in the city

saved it, according to Dapontes, from a widespread plague epidemic which

during the same period had infested Smyrna, Salonica, the islands, Asia

Minor, Bulgaria and Wallachia, but left Constantinople completely un-

affected (BGV, 111: 104-5). Finally, in July 1764, the Cross departed from

Constantinople for Chios, Samos, Psara and Euboea, reaching Dapontes’

own ‘dearest island’ Skopelos by the following year, and from there in

September 1765 proceeded to Mount Athos, being received by the entire

community of Xeropotamou at the monastery’s own harbour, the

ursunas,

and conducted with great pomp to the monastery on the hillside above.

From these nine years of wanderings Dapontes brought back 100 purses of

alms

(BGV,

111: 227) and precious votive treasures for the church, having

himself supervised their production by leading craftsmen in Constantinople

(BGV, 111: 101-2).16 The church was magnificently rebuilt, and Dapontes




spent his remaining years, until his death on 4 December 1784 at

Xeropotamou, industriously composing his extensive writings, some of

which were printed in Venice during his lifetime, while others, such as his

‘Confessions’, were left in manuscript.

VI

I have devoted some space to Dapontes’s own account of his life not only

for its intrinsic fascination, but also in order to illustrate the making of an

Orthodox author in the eighteenth century. Dapontes wrote voluminously,

but his texts are not marked by frequent strokes of genius nor do they

contain a host of original ideas. Nevertheless, they record faithfully the

values of the world of Balkan Orthodoxy in his time and show with

considerable liveliness how these values were translated into social experi-

ence. In Dapontes’s account Orthodoxy is not simply a religious doctrine

and a form of worship, it is the primary content of social life itself. It is

therefore worthwhile to attempt to abstract from his narratives and

articulate the components of this social experience in order to recreate the

Orthodox outlook on life, the Orthodox ‘mentality’ itself. Reading his texts

we come face to face with the written testimony

par excellence

of this

‘mentality’. First of all, this was an experience that was not coloured by

national or ethnic subjectivities: Dapontes adores his native island, which

was his ‘golden homeland’. He calls Skopelos

‘Kapcpthzarqv vqoov pou,

O ~ K O Vzbv n ~ z p t ~ 6 ~

od,

‘xpufiv nazpi6a’

(BGV, 111:

164 ,

but has no

sense of a national motherland beyond this locality. The traditional modes

of geographic mobility which were so intimately connected with his life

story drew into his experience the entire space of Southeast Europe as an

integral whole, unfragmented by political or national divisions. The unitary

historical space of Southeast Europe was delimited by commonly accepted

symbols of Orthodox culture, especially places of pilgrimage and worship

which punctuated Dapontes’s itineraries and inspired his literary efforts.

The foremost such palladium was Mount Athos, one of whose most sacred

symbols, the True Cross, Dapontes took around the Orthodox Balkans for

nine years in

a

mission of healing faith. These two elements, which are so

well illustrated in Dapontes’s experience, namely the traditional pattern of

geographic mobility which assumed the entire space of Southeastern Europe

as naturally enclosing its trajectories and the shared symbolism of Orthodox

culture which spoke to all the faithful in the same way, account for the

supranational character of Balkan Orthodoxy.

The evidence of strong attachment to a local Heimat, which we noted

above, seemingly introduces an element of ‘secular patriotism’ into the

overall religious framework of spatial reference but this does not involve a

contradiction: both sets of attitudes and feelings register the rich texture of

the cultural experience that made up the Orthodox vision, which retained its




liveliness by staying close to nature and thus remaining capable of

integrating secular sentiments and motivations. This suggests that the

strength of the Orthodox vision consisted not in its analytical clarity but in

its ability to absorb and synthesise contrary forces into a viable unity

because it could supply credible ‘maps of meaning’ to the faithful.

Furthermore it ought to be remembered that local attachments, expressed

among other manifestations in the veneration of local saints, constituted an

integral component of pre-national identities, whose multiplicity and

diversity modem national states later attempted to supplant with the

uniformity of national loyalties.

Dapontes’s texts also reflect certain other deeper attitudes and beliefs

that might be interpreted as the threads out of which the Orthodox

‘mentality’ was woven. First and foremost among these dimensions of the

Orthodox Balkan outlook was a sense of time defined by the ecclesiastical

calendar: the passage of time was felt to revolve around the succession of

feast days in the Orthodox calendar, and daily life was punctuated by the

Saint’s days, which marked the changing seasons and charted the organisa-

tion of harvests, fairs, family events, days of joy and days of trial and

mourning. This was the standard framework for the understanding of time

in Christian culture until it was subverted and gradually superseded by

secular temporal schemes. Besides the ecclesiastical definition of time the

Orthodox outlook comprised also a sense of space which was equally

determined by the Christian heritage of the Balkans: the spatial horizon was

defined by places of worship, great shrines of the faith and humble chapels

isolated in the countryside, graves of the saints, places of martyrdom,

environments sanctified by miracles. Pride of place was reserved for shrines

sheltering miraculous icons or holy relics. The entire geography of the

Balkans and the Greek archipelago, which came within the compass of his

wide-ranging travels, was primarily punctuated on Dapontes’s mental map

by such holy places.

Another fundamental component of the Orthodox ‘mentality’ as recorded

in Dapontes’s texts was the active presence of the supernatural in daily life.

The supernatural was integrated into everyday experience through the

constant quest for the miraculous intervention of the divine in the life of the

individual and in family affairs, through the constant effort to read the will

of God and to communicate with the Virgin and the Saints through dreams,

through votive offerings, and through special acts of worship. The active

presence of the supernatural in daily life was mediated primarily by the

objects of religious worship, icons and holy relics, and was formalised and

canonised in the ecclesiastical practices of the Orthodox religious tradition.

This canonisation acted as a check upon extreme expressions of superstition

and often charlatanism which threatened to corrupt the spiritual content of

the faith. That is why the official church as a rule opposed and condemned

extreme forms of fundamentalism, which ran the risk of stirring up acts of

fanaticism that might compromise the dignity of Orthodoxy.




One further fundamental aspect of the Orthodox outlook was the

organisation of the individual’s life around the sacramental life of the

church. An Orthodox individual’s autobiography was essentially a record of

one’s participation in the sacraments of the church and the sealing of all

major occasions in life with the prescribed forms of religious practice. If the

length and the repeated digressions marking the composition of the Garden

of Graces

fuse this Orthodox understanding of life with other elements of

pronounced personal expression that make up Dapontes’s poetry, the prose

fragments of his autobiography that have recently come

to

light (Kehagio-

glou 1986 , make this sacramental focus of individual life completely

transparent. From the perspective of Dapontes’s autobiography the

Orthodox individual’s life revolves entirely around the church and its

sacraments. One’s own baptism in infancy and one’s chrismation through

marriage, the baptism of one’s children, the active participation in the

sacraments of the Eucharist and confession and the optional taking of holy

orders which the faithful in traditional Orthodox society approached as an

integral rather than as an exceptional occasion in a Christian’s life such

was the commonly understood pattern of an Orthodox biography. This is

precisely the pattern that emerges from eighteenth-century autobiographical

texts, and this pattern fits very well with the Orthodox conception

of

life as

a sacramental path.17 Dapontes, whose family life was

so

intensely stamped

by death, offers us a glimpse into the Orthodox attitude towards death as

well: the alleviation of pain through the transaction of the religious rites

prescribed by the church and the dignified acceptance of death as part of

the Christian voyage in the expectation of the resurrection of the dead.

The intense religious content of individual experience and the religious

frameworks of life and thought did not of course refract the Orthodox

vision of the world in such a way as to obscure the material components of

life and the social structures of reality. The special value of Dapontes’s

testimony consists primarily in the fact that it did remain a

vision of the

world,

a world which was encompassed within the religious framework

without losing its material existence. Just as Dapontes never lost sight

during his peregrinations of the beauty of nature and the charms of material

creation besides his continuous recollection of the geography of faith, so his

living through the ecclesiastical calendar of feasts and fast days constantly

reminded him of the products of the earth, of the simple natural tastes of

the austere diet prescribed for days of fasting and repentance and of the

richer tastes, smells and luxuries connected with the great feasts of

Orthodoxy, either in monastic refectories or in the dining halls of worldly

mansions. Such recollections pervade his marvellous ‘Canon inclusive of

many excellent things’.’* In it Dapontes reminds us of the material

underpinnings of the Orthodox outlook and delineates a specifically Balkan

conception of the material rewards of life: the sweet wines of Samos and

Cyprus, the fruits of the Ottoman lands, the pistachios of Aleppo, the figs

of Smyrna, the pears of Sinai, the apples of Moldavia, and special luxuries




of the surprisingly wide space that comes within the purview of the

Orthodox vision, from the pastrami of Caesarea in Cappadocia to the

smoked fish-roe of Vidin and the cheeses of Wallachia, compose a

cornucopia upon which the Orthodox conscience rejoices on feast days.I9

Even from his prison days Dapontes remembers the enticing sweets and

pastries prepared for him by a solicitous female visitor (Kehagioglou

1986: 43).

Nevertheless the material world was not of course only made up of

pleasures and gratifications. Dapontes repeatedly reminds us of the other

side of pleasure, which is sin and depravity. For the Orthodox conscience

this is the inevitable consequence of the Fall and original sin but it is also

the threshold to repentance and forgiveness by a merciful God.

So

Dapontes

never tires of confessing his sins to the whole world, acknowledging his

weak and corrupt nature as a first step toward absolution. Despite his

countless other sins, pride and self-righteousness were not among them. The

depravity of the material world however extends far beyond individual

corruption and sin: it takes the form of pervasive social injustice, the

exploitation and suffering of the weak at the hands

of

the powerful. A

powerful stream

of

social criticism from the vantage point of the Orthodox

sense of justice runs through Dapontes’s writings. In the

Garden of Graces

he laments the depravity and misery he had witnessed on his travels,

resulting from the injustice, greed, vanity and personal corruption prevailing

in Orthodox society.20 n other works too he did not fail to stigmatise the

evils of injustice. In a book published during his own lifetime he voiced his

abhorrence for the arrogance and vanity he associated primarily with the

boyar class and Phanariot officialdom in the Danubian principalities

(Dapontes 1776: 89-109 . In the description of Dacia in his

Geographical

History,

he included a letter to a high magistrate, Constantine Dudescu, in

which he extolled the rich natural endowments of Wallachia but denounced

the extreme inequality and injustice marking its agrarian social structure at

the expense of the suffering peasants.21From this point

of

view Dapontes’s

work belongs to the remarkable tradition of social criticism inspired by the

agrarian problem in the Danubian principalities, a tradition which for more

than a century produced a succession of important works from the

Zstoria

ieroglifica by Dimitrie Cantemir to the works of Dionysios Photeinos and

Naum Ramniceanu.

VII

The components of the Orthodox mentality that are so eloquently recorded

in Dapontes’s work and especially in his autobiographical texts, can be

traced in the autobiographical writings of other Balkan authors as well. Let

me illustrate this common Orthodox substratum shared by Balkan authors

in the eighteenth and in the opening years of the nineteenth century, before




the advent of nation-states and nationalism, by looking briefly by way of

conclusion at the testimony of two more of the few autobiographical

accounts we possess from this period, the ‘autobiography’ of Sofroni,

bishop of Vratsa, and the memoirs of Prota Matija Nenadovii. In these

sources too we encounter the same sense of time defined by the ecclesiastical

calendar, the same sense of space determined by the geography of faith, the

same understanding of individual life as a record of sacramental experience,

the same quest for communication with the divine through the detection of

the presence of the supernatural in daily life, the same consciousness of the

interplay of sin, repentance and forgiveness as the content of individual

experience.

The autobiography of Sofroni (1739-1815) is a sombre and gloomy

text;22 t does not possess any of the exuberance marking Dapontes’ account

of his own life in the Garden of Graces. Yet the points of contact between

these two sources, which convey to the reader such a dissimilar psycholo-

gical climate, can be located in the shared Orthodox ‘mentality’ that

underpins both of them. In Sofroni’s pages we find the sense of time

associated with the temporal organisation of the Orthodox year: feast days

and great holidays dictate the rhythm of the daily life of the Christians,

whose primary preoccupation was to secure their livelihood amidst the

disorders associated with the decline of Ottoman power at the end of the

eighteenth century. The disruption of daily life was precisely understood as

the inability to follow the normal flow of the Christian year with its feasts

and religious observances because of the impingement of external and civil

wars and especially because of the violence associated with the movement of

troops and irregular bands which plundered the harvests and spread death

and suffering among the rural population. Space was also understood in

terms of the geography of faith: Mount Athos lingers on the horizon as a

place of spiritual reconstruction (VraEanski 1981: 80 , where one can

prepare to discharge the will of God. Local monasteries were invariably

seen as places of refuge and material sustenance as much as of spiritual

comfort (VraEanski 1981: 89, 94, 96, 98 . Amidst the suffering inflicted by

political disorders the Christian author ruminates on his sins and thus

abandons himself to the providence of God. In talking about his life,

Sofroni refers primarily to his sacramental path, which in his case included

elevation to the episcopal dignity after the death of his wife. As

a

priest and

bishop, Sofroni aptly illustrates the traditional role of the Orthodox

churchman as teacher and transmitter of learning but especially as a leader,

spokesman and protector of his flock, partaking in their sufferings,

upholding them amidst their hardships (VraEanski 1981: 85-6,89,91-2).

Throughout Sofroni’s account, despite the violence that often unfolds

before our eyes as his narrative recreates the conflicts over Pasvanoglu’s

separatism and the anarchy of the janissaries, we get no sense of ethnic

conflict in the Balkans. Social and personal conflicts abound because of

human corruption and sin, but no sense

of

ethnic opposition or division is



‘Balkan mentality’

181

detectable. The occasional Greek merchant or money-lender may be on the

opposite side from the Bulgarian Orthodox peasant, but then again they

may both be on the same side, supplying refuge and comfort to each other

in the face of invading armies or agents of the distant imperial authorities.

As Sofroni tried to comfort his flock as their bishop,

so

Greek Orthodox

bishops comforted and sustained him.23 Such was the Orthodox community

in the Balkans before the age of nationalism.

The argument for a Balkan society, culturally homogenised by the

Orthodox tradition in the eighteenth century, may raise question-marks on

the minds

of

scholars accustomed to thinking about Balkan history and

politics in terms of divisions rather than commonalities. I do not want to

minimise or write

off

divisions in Balkan society in the pre-modern period,

but these were mostly social and class divisions, which, as a rule, by cutting

across ethnolinguistic demarcation lines, in a way sustained the dynamic of

a common society. Against the argument for a unitary Balkan Orthodoxy

one may point to local traditions of worship and veneration of local saints,

going back in some cases to memories of the medieval Balkan empires. This

feature of Balkan Orthodoxy, however, should not be seen as an internal

division pointing to potentially conflicting ‘ethno-national’ identities, but

rather as a common practice observable throughout the Orthodox world,

whose spiritual identity is intimately connected with the veneration of

saints. Local traditions focus upon the veneration of saints with whom the

faithful can readily identify because they feel them to be fellow countrymen

and compatriots both in this world and the next. In its ecumenical outlook

the Orthodox church never sought to impose uniformity on worship by

levelling local traditions of piety. This attitude is evident as well in the

preservation within the same church of many liturgical languages. In the

eighteenth century, for instance, the Orthodox church took the initiative for

the production of a religious and liturgical literature in Turkish, printed in

Greek characters, in order to meet the spiritual needs

of

the Turcophone

Orthodox in Asia Minor. In doing this the church was discharging its

pastoral duty as it felt incumbent upon itself to do, it was certainly not

encouraging through the use of print the cultivation of a separate identity.

Finally, it is often suggested that in the eighteenth century the Orthodox

church, officially represented by the Patriarchate of Constantinople,

attempted through its hegemonic policies in the Balkans to ‘hellenise’ the

non-Greek-speaking Orthodox and this is taken as evidence of latent

ethnic division and conflict. This is a classic case of misreading the

historical evidence by projecting the national confrontations of the later

nineteenth century upon an earlier period. First the official church never

could have conceived of such a programme because this was entirely

beyond its own theological and canonical terms of reference: as evidence to

the contrary one could point to the survival of the Slavonic liturgical

traditions among the South Slavs, not only in the Serbian lands with their

stronger and more articulate ecclesiastical institutions but also among the




Bulgarians (Hupchick 1993). As a matter of fact, Greek nationalists in the

late nineteenth century, like the historian Constantine Paparrigopoulos,

criticised the Patriarchate of Constantinople for failing to do just that, to

hellenise culturally the Orthodox of the Balkans (Paparrigopoulos 1887:

505-7).

It is also pointed out that the revocation of the autocephalous status of

the churches of PeC and Ochrid in 17667 constituted another instance of

ethnic conflict within Balkan Orthodoxy, in which the Greek-dominated

Patriarchate of Constantinople suppressed the autonomy of these two

ecclesiastical sees, which provided focal points of Serbian and Bulgarian

loyalties respectively. What actually happened, and its historical significance,

was quite removed from such a nationalist reading of Balkan ecclesiastical

history: when the two sees had their autocephaly revoked through formal

appeals of the local synods to the Ottoman Porte, they were Greek sees

Ochrid for centuries and PeC since the flight of Patriarch Arsenije IV to

Austria in 1739. The major motive behind this action was desperation over

the debts of the two churches and this, along with his respect for the

antiquity of the autocephalous status of the two sees, explains the reluctance

with which the Ecumenical Patriarch Samuel I accepted the edict of the

Porte and received PeC and Ochrid and their debts under his jurisdiction.

This at least is the impression that emerges from eighteenth-century sources

of ecclesiastical history such as the work of Sergios Makraios. Yet this

administrative action ustified in terms of canon law by the absence of

independent statehood, which is presupposed by ecclesiastical autocephaly

was reinterpreted by nineteenth-century historians, at the height of Balkan

nationalist antagonisms, as a form of assertion of Greek ethnic hegemony

over the non-Greek nationalities in the Balkans.24 These rather summary

historical remarks are put forward here just as a pointer towards the need

to reread carefully eighteenth-century evidence before succumbing to the

rhetoric of nineteenth and twentieth-century nationalism if we want to

approximate the character of the pre-nationalist cultural configuration of

Balkan society in the pre-modern period.

That prenationalist age, however, was coming to an end. The Orthodox

frameworks of Dapontes’s world were still echoed in the memoirs of Prota

Matija, but the broader community within which Dapontes conceived the

Orthodox individual was becoming ever more distant. The title of prota

with which Matija Nenadovii: (1777-1 854) was designated indicates that he

held the office of the arch-priest, which is the highest dignity for married

priests in the Orthodox church. In his old age, the prota, who has been

aptly characterised as ‘the heart of the First Serbian uprising’ (StojanceviC

1982: 34 , wrote his memoirs for the instruction of his children and

grandchildren. In contrast to the low tone of Sofroni’s autobiographical

account, the prota’s memoirs form an epic canvas of the outbreak of the

long struggle for the liberation

of

Serbia. The clangour of arms resounds

through

the prota’s pages and his account is a record of constant




movements of troops and of the effort to transform the Serbian peasants

into soldiers by Karageorge and his associates. Yet the whole narrative is

set within a framework closely reflecting the Orthodox outlook.

As

a priest

the prota uses in his prose many expressions from Church Slavonic, which

appropriately colour his style (NenadoviC 1969: xlv). More substantively, his

understanding of the world and of the insurgents’ own actions remains

persistently within an Orthodox framework, which defines identity in terms

of the symbols of Orthodoxy. What is perhaps the most pronounced literary

feature of the narrative is its temporal dimension, which is invariably

expressed in terms of the religious calendar of Orthodox feast days and

Saints’ days. The events of the revolt, the dates of battles, the itinerary of

the prota’s mission to Russia in the autumn of 1804 amidst the hardship of

freezing weather and interminable distances, are uniformly recorded in

terms of the religious calendar (NenadoviC 1969: 96-119). In observing the

surrounding space the prota looks primarily for places of prayer and

worship, especially in Russia where he was exhilarated by the magnificence

of Orthodox worship at Kiev and by the churches in Moscow (NenadoviC

1969: 103-4, 109). As for Sofroni, so for the prota too, the rural space in

his

native Serbia was largely understood in terms of the geography of

monasteries, which were seen as places of refuge for the Orthodox. When it

comes to recounting the events of his own life Prota Matija offers a useful

testimony of the way individual and communal life focused on the church

and its sacramental life in late-eighteenth-century rural Serbia (NenadoviC

1969: 21-3). He does not omit to record the manner in which he acquired

the rudiments of literacy through apprenticeships to priests in his native

village of Brankovina and at Srem (NenadoviC 1969: 16-19). His recollec-

tions of the transmission of Orthodox learning also comprise the role of the

Holy Mountain of Athos and its itinerant monks (NenadoviC 1969:

21).

vn1

The evidence discussed

so

far has established, with some adequacy,

I

hope,

the way in which the Orthodox tradition supplied the framework of life and

of the ‘vision of the world’ shared by the Orthodox Christians in the

Balkans during the eighteenth century. The non-national common Orthodox

‘mentality’ represented by Dapontes was, however, coming to an end at the

dawn of the next century. Sofroni’s autobiography closes with the declara-

tion of his intention to write in his native Bulgarian language in order to

communicate with his flock more effe~tively.~~his hints at the discovery of

a community more intimate, if narrower, than that of broader Balkan

Orthodoxy as the focus of identity. The Prota Matija in his turn reports

how, on 15 February 1804, the Orthodox community at Brankovina, upon

hearing of Karageorge’s rising against the Turks, gathered and raised the

standard of their church, a white, red and blue banner with three crosses on



184

Paschalis M. Kitromilides

it, as a symbol of their intention to join the revolt (NenadoviC

1969: 56).

That rather simple and ostensibly traditional gesture in fact symbolised an

epoch-making transformation: from a symbol of faith carried around at

religious festivals the Brankovina standard was being turned into the secular

flag of a national movement in the making. In its tempestuous course the

nineteenth century was to witness the erosion of the common ‘mentality’ of

Balkan Orthodoxy and its gradual replacement by mutually exclusive

national identities, which more often than not came into violent collision

with each other. It was this historical background that made Jovan Cvijic‘s

conceptualisation of ‘Balkan mentality’ around ethnic characters a rather

unrealistic construct at the time of the First World War.

Orthodoxy formed the inner core, as it were, of the outlook of Balkan

Christians; its outer parameters, however, were set by the historical fact of

the Ottoman conquest. Ottoman rule was taken as a given of the natural

order of things, which the Balkan peoples accepted as part of their daily life

and vision of the world. Dapontes dates his first arrival in Constantinople

by reference to the year in the reign of the incumbent Sultan (BGV, 111: 7 .

This chronology, further specified by references to the reigning patriarchs

and hospodars of Moldavia and Wallachia, remains an integral part of the

cognitive framework of his work. The understanding of Ottoman rule as

part of the legitimate order of things was very much enshrined by the

church’s attitude of loyalty to the empire. This explains the recurrent

declarations of loyalty to the sultan by the Serbian insurgents in the early

stages of their revolt. As recorded by Prota Matija in his memoirs, these

declarations of loyalty were meant to distinguish between the sultan’s

authority, which was regarded as legitimate and God-given, and the

arbitrary excercise of power by tyrannical local pashas and janissaries who

were considered as the immediate enemy of the loyal Christian subjects

(NenadoviC

1969: 12-16, 31, 59-60,

124 . A similar attitude was reflected in

Sofroni’s pages, which record his anguish over the disorder caused by local

lawless warlords, without ever questioning the legitimacy of the overall

political structure which culminated in the pyramid

of

the Ottoman ruling

institution.

The perception of Ottoman rule as part of the given order of things

which went hand-in-hand with the Orthodox organisation of life was of

course very different from the combative recreation of the Ottoman past in

the national literary traditions of the Balkan countries in the later nine-

teenth and the twentieth century. The modern perception of the Ottoman

background of the Balkans as mediated by the national literary traditions

constructs a very different record which actually projects a divided rather

than

a

shared historical past and therefore makes an attempt to connect it

with a common Balkan outlook problematic. One exception to this rule is

that of the Bosnian author Ivo Andrib, who has managed in his historical

novels to recapture the Ottoman past as part of the social and daily

experience in the life of ordinary people in the Balkans, without using it as



‘Balkan mentality’

185

an axis around which to organise nationalist polemic, as usually happens

with many other Balkan authors.

The generally negative retrospective interpretation of the Ottoman past

unites the former Christian subjects of the empire in a common attitude that

tends to blame the period

of

Ottoman rule for all the subsequent failures

marking the independent courses followed by the new Balkan nations in the

nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. Yet this obviously ideological

manipulation of the Ottoman past not only fails to do justice to the

historical character of the period and to the considerable achievements

connected with it,26but also obscures one of its most characteristic aspects,

the fact that it brought political unity and created commonalities in the life

of the Balkan peoples commonalities that allowed the growth of a shared

outlook such as that represented by the authors discussed in this article.

Any study of ‘Balkan mentality’ will therefore have to reconsider the

Ottoman heritage shared by the Balkan peoples and the ways it stamped

their social and economic organisation as well as the flow of their daily and

spiritual life.27 A serious research approach along such lines will manage to

reveal the shared deeper structures of experience that supply the parameters

of attitudes and mentalities. Furthermore, a reappraisal of the Ottoman past

that will transform it from a given of ideological discourse into an object of

critical research, will represent a step away from the conventional practice

of history in the Balkans as nationalist polemic. An essential element in this

transition that might be achieved through the reappraisal of the Ottoman

past, would

be

the substantive integration of Turkish history into the

history of Southeast Europe. The challenge is of course considerable and

methodologically it involves a serious test for comparative analysis, but few

will disagree, I believe, that it possesses great potential for a new under-

standing of Balkan history.

Upon the tradition woven in eighteenth-century Southeast Europe by the

interplay of Ottoman rule and Orthodox religious culture a new element

was gradually imprinted in the course of that century. That new element

was the idea of Europe, which was destined to prove a potent force for the

transformation and eventual break-up of the common traditions of Balkan

culture. The idea of Europe involved a perception of a broader civilised

world beyond the borders of the southeastern Ottoman comer of the old

continent. The world of European civilisation had France as its chief model

but it also included distant but matchless England, neighbouring and more

familiar Italy and fellow Orthodox Russia. Awareness of this diverse world

beyond the Ottoman borders, of its potentialities and of the models of

development it could supply to Ottoman Southeastern Europe was

channelled into Balkan consciousness through a number of literary conduits,

including the political propaganda of the European powers, but especially

by the remarkable geographical literature that grew in the course of the

eighteenth century. The indomitable Dapontes, with his prolific outpouring

of writings, partook in this literature as well with his

Geographical History,




composed in 1782 as a versified description of various European countries,

which he himself had never visited.28

The idea of Europe impinged upon Balkan consciousness in another way

as well: through the gradual awareness of inter-state interaction and

international conflicts and the opportunities this world of power politics

opened up for the future of the Balkan Chri~tians.~~ith his chronicle of

the Russo-Turkish war of 1736-9 Dapontes offers an early example of this.

The Memoirs of Prota Matija too supply a lively record of the encounter of

traditional Orthodox Balkan culture with the modern world of power

politics as represented by the convoluted international intrigues and deadly

conflicts involving the Ottoman empire, Russia, Austria and Napoleonic

France. Thus the European Janus, wearing the two faces of a superior

civilisation and of power politics, was gradually received and integrated into

the tapestry of the Balkan vision of the world. The European Janus,

however, although it was received with considerable excitement and hope,

brought with it the secular political logic of nationalism that impregnated

Balkan politics with violence, suspicion and fear and destroyed the common

world of Balkan Orthodoxy in less than a century after Dapontes’s death.

IX

The three components of the Balkan experience I have attempted to identify

in the foregoing sketch of the symbolic universe of eighteenth-century

Balkan society, i.e. Orthodox religious culture, Ottoman rule and the idea of

Europe, formed the framework of communication which, connected with a

clearly recognisable political context, could be interpreted as a distinctive,

historically plausible ‘mentality’. I am not entirely certain whether it would

be methodologically sound to claim that this historically and politically

specific set of distinctive mental characteristics ought to be equated with a

‘mentality’ in a broader anthropological sense. This is, however, as far as

one could logically go in trying to salvage a conceptual kernel of a

mentalities approach. Let me conclude therefore with just a few further

methodological pointers, warranted by the problems of evidence, inference

and conceptualisation raised in the previous pages.

The tendency to grand generalisation and the overarching claims of the

mentalities approach should obviously be replaced by attempts to describe

mental and attitudinal structures in historically specific and politically

readily definable contexts. Only because eighteenth-century Balkan society

meets these two criteria has it been logically possible to sustain an attempt

to recover and record some of its shared mental characteristics. Historical

specificity is therefore the critical factor in the description of such sets of

recurrent and pervasive assumptions and norms that define the outlook of a

collectivity. But to insist upon talking about a diachronic uniformity called

‘Balkan mentality’ is no more than an unverifiable historical legend, and it




can turn into a perverse mythology as well.

A

case in point is the attempt to

appeal to Orthodoxy as a common symbolic banner in the Balkans in the

closing years of the twentieth century, as if Balkan Orthodoxy today is what

it used to be in the eighteenth century, before its inner unity was subverted

and its soul perverted by its subjection to the expedients of nationalism in

the two centuries since Dapontes, Sofroni and Matija NenadoviC wrote.

Historical specificity and resolute resistance to the easy temptations of

comforting legends are, however, not enough. In order to penetrate into and

recapture the symbolic universe of the past a discerning imagination is also

necessary. Imaginative reconstruction and empathy constitute the essential

mental tools of the interpretative encounter with the past required for a

convincing history of social attitudes and mental structures. History and

imagination will therefore have to be combined in any serious attempt to

penetrate into the symbolic and moral world associated with social

situations which we may somewhat superficially feel to be close and intimate

to our own world, while in so many substantive if rather imperceptible

ways, they remain peculiarly elusive, distant and unfamiliar. ‘Balkan

mentality’ in its diverse, often legendary, incarnations extends such a

challenge to the historical imagination.

Notes

This is an extensively revised version of a paper commissioned by the organisers of the VII

International Congress of South-East European Studies (Thessaloniki, 29 August4 September

1994) for distribution and discussion at the congress. The original paper was written while

I

was a Visiting Fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford 1993. I

am

grateful

to

the Warden and

Fellows of St Antony’s College for electing me to the Greek Visiting Fellowship which enabled

me to profit from the research resources available at the University of Oxford. For stimulating

discussions and their help and encouragement at successive stages in the writing of this paper

I

am indebted to John

K.

Campbell, Richard Crampton, Alexandru Dutu and Peter Mackridge.

I am also grateful to two anonymous referees for Nations

and

Nationalism, whose comments

helped me to clarify a number of points in the article.

1 Braudel 1972:

I,

pp. 32, 568; 11, pp. 77 1. Braudel’s treatment of the Balkans, although

written thirty years later, relies mostly on CvijiC.

2 Cvijic‘s close scholarly and academic connections with the school of French political

geography and ethnography of his time, represented primarily by Vidal de la Blache and

Emmanuel de Martonne, are well documented in the history of geographical thought. See

T. W. Freeman, The Geograph er’s Cr aft, Manchester 1967, p. 95, and more generally pp. 72-

100 for an appraisal of Cvijic‘s stature as a geographer. What might be. interesting to explore as

well are Cvijic‘s possible connections with his contemporary Durkheimian sociology, which

formed the background for the elaboration of Levy-Bruhl’s ethnology and the introduction of

the scientificuse of the concept of mentality.

3 John Locke,

An Essay Concerning

Human

Understanding,

ed. by Paul Nidditch, Oxford

1975, p. 10.

4 Cf. e.g. Le Goff 1974: 76, 90. Also Vovelle 1985: 9-10.

5 By way of example we might cite two works by leading students of Greek folklore: Alki

Kyriakidou-Nestoros, 1979 113-40 and M.

G.

Meraklis 1985. The latter work records 369

proverbs common among the Balkan nations, including the Turks.



188

Paschalis M. Kitromilides

6 Let me add a few words of caution here as a rather subjective caveat based on personal

experience. Just take a walk through one of the great ethnographic museums of the world, let

us

say the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, or pay a visit to the Finno-Ungric galleries of the

National Museum of Finland in Helsinki or devote some time to looking at the exquisite

collection of embroideries at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and you gradually

realise that the decorative patterns, the combinations of colours, the sense of popular aesthetics

you tended to associate with the more familiar cultural space of the Balkans are simply not

unique to it, although they may possess unique meanings and speak in unique a nd occasionally

hermetic symbolism to different individuals who are drawn to them by subjective experience. It

would appear accordingly rather difficult and analytically risky to insist upon reading any type

of regionally or nationally defined ‘mentality’ int o ethnogra phic evidence.

7 Cf. the comments by B. Valade in Encyclophdie philosophique universelle. es notions

philosophiques, ed. by Sylvain Auroux, Paris 1990, vol. 2, pp. 1598-9, S.V. mentaliti .

8

In Ro bert M androu’s phrase, quoted by Vovelle

1985:

10.

9 Th e phrase belongs to G eorges Duby. See Vovelle 1985: 15. Cf. pp.

8S100.

10

The question of language in the pre-modern Balkans has not received the attention it

deserves. It has been treated generally as a given of Balkan cultural history, projecting

backward the nineteenth-century solidification of linguistic divisions imposed artificially by the

new national states. It was these artificial linguistic divisions that became enmeshed in political

conflicts and played such an imp ortan t role in Balkan politics in the late nineteenth and early

twentieth centuries. n these issues see Leon Dominian 1917: 192-220. Dominian, like his

contemporary Jovan Cvijik, treats language as an unchanging factor in history, worrying very

little about the historicity and malleability of linguistic identities. Yet the sources suggest that

language was a much more fluid cultural trait in the premodern period and linguistic diversity

coexisted with regional and trans-Balkan functional lingua francas, with the consequence that

language never became the focus of social conflict. Language became a factor of conflict only

when it was connected with the modern state in the nineteenth century. The fluidity and

interpenetration of languages in the premodern Balkans is well illustrated by surviving literary

sources, antedating the period of linguistic purification that was an integral component of

nation-building in the nineteenth century. Karl Sandfeld in his truly pioneering work,

Linguistique balkunique, Paris 1930, noted common linguistic features, such as the disappear-

ance of the infinitive in the Balkan languages, but also the existence of ‘Balkanisms’, i.e.

common idiomatic expressions, which were the product of bilingualism but which in turn

facilitated communication between languages.

I

am grateful to Peter Mackridge for bringing

this important source to my attention.

A

more recent study of linguistic ‘Balkanism’ is Joseph

1983.

F o r a case study of wha t could be described as ‘linguistic syncretism’ in the Balkans, see

Henninger

1990.

11 For a pioneering record of relevant evidence see Husluck

1929,

vol. I:

6 6 8 ,

vol.

: 57686 .

12 By Emile Legrand in the preface to his bio-bibliographical profile of Dapontes appended to

his edition of Ephhmhrides daces, Pans

1888,

vol. 111, p.v.

13 My account is based on the critical edition of the text in Emile Legrand, BibliothPque

Grecque Vulgaire ( = B G V ) , vol. 111, Paris 1881: 3-232. Another edition, based on the same

manuscript, appeared in Athens

1880,

edited by Gabriel Sophocles.

14 Th e main autobiographical sections of the text occur

on

pp. 621,41-50, 51-3 in Legrand’s

edition. A sympathetic portra it based o n Dapontes’s texts is given by R . M. Dawkins

1936: 69-72.

15

n

he historical background see N. Camariano, ‘Constantin Dapontes et les principautks

roumaines’,

Revue des Etudes Sud-Est Europiennes

8 1970): 48 1-94.

16

The accuracy of Dapontes’s graphic descriptions

of

these precious works of art can be

checked against the actual treasures surviving in the church of Xeropotamou monastery on

Mount Athos.

17

F or an O rtho dox theological perspective cf. Ware

1979:

1 4 4 6

18

The ‘Canon’ was first published in C. Dapontes 1778: 107-16

and was reprinted in

G.

Sophocles’ edition of Garden of Graces, Athens 1880, pp. 2 5 4 6 0 . It h as recently been made

available in a sumptuous modern edition, edited by

G.

P. Savidis, Athens

1991.




19 A feast such as that for which Dapontes longed is described by Dawkins 1936: 353.

Dapontes’s geography of food as recorded in his

Canon inclusive

o

many excellent things

possesses

special significance for the history of material life in Southeastern Europe

on

account

of the parallels that can

be

drawn between his record of products associated with specific

locations and regions and the similar geography of food we find in the famous

Chronicle of th e

Traveller composed by the Ottoman traveller Evliya Celebi in the seventeenth century. In

recording his travels Evliya Celebi never fails to mention the famous foods associated with each

city he visited and this foreshadows Dapontes’ literary practice in the

Canon.

In view of this

evidence it might

be

interesting to explore the possibility of a history of material taste in

Southeastern Europe that could very well reveal broader cultural commonalities cutting across

religious distinctions and thus providing the basis for an alternative approach to the question of

‘Balkan mentality’ than that suggested in the present article. For the significance of Evliya

Celebi’s testimony for a new understanding of Ottoman history cf. the recent remarks by

Faroqui 199 2 224.

20 Note especially Dapontes’ comments‘ n he misery of our times’ in BGV, 111 138-46.

21 The letter to Dudescu, dated 1760, is published by Legrand in

Ephemerides Daces,

vol. I,

Paris 1880, pp. uL+-up.

22

VraEanski

1981: 76-104.

A n earlier translation of the same text appears in Leger

1885: 85-141.

23 VraEanski 1981:

90

03. It was pointed out to me by Maria Todorova of the University of

Florida, that although my reading is true to the text as it stands on its own as a literary source,

it involves a certain degree of decontextualisation in regard to Sofroni’s political activities at

about the time he composed his autobiography. In his testimony about his life, written circa

1804-5, Sofroni echoes the traditional shared Orthodox outlook prevailing in Balkan society.

However, during the Russo-Turkish war of

1806-12,

which led to a Russian occupation of

Wallachia, where he was living in exile, the bishop of Vratsa along with two other Bulgarian

activists, appealed to the Russian military commanders asking them to rid Bulgaria of Ottoman

rule. Shortly thereafter, in

1810,

Sofroni urged

his

compatriots to rally to the invading Russian

forces in order to achieve their redemption from Ottoman tyranny. This appeal is

conventionally considered the earliest manifestation of Bulgarian nationalism.

24 The case is made by Jelavich 1968 drawing

on

extensive Serbian bibliography. I have

attempted a different reading of the evidence in ‘Orthodox Culture and Collective Identity in

the Ottoman Balkans during the Eighteenth Century’, presented to the First Skilliter Centre

Symposium

on

Ottoman History, Cambridge, April 1992 and forthcoming in the proceedings.

My argument that these eighteenth-centurydevelopments were devoid of nationalist significance

is indebted, in the interpretation of the Serbian case, to Stokes 1976.

25

VraEanski

1981:

104.

Sofroni’s decision resulted in the publication in

1806

of the first

Bulgarian book, which was a translation from the Greek

Kyriukodromion

of Nikiphoros

Theotokis, originally published in Moscow in 1796 and reprinted in Bucharest in 1803.

Considering that Sofroni worked on the translation while in exile in Wallachia, his Bulgarian

translation was probably based on the Bucharest edition of Theotokis’s

Kyriukodromion.

n

this particular edition see I. Bianu, N. Hodos, Bibliogra a Romanesca Veche 1508-1830, vol. 11,

Bucharest 1905, p.

447.

26 Although it may sound rather paradoxical, one of the earliest warnings against the simplistic

and reductionist view that wrote off the Ottoman period in the Balkans as an age of barbarism

and darkness, came from the historian Constantine Papamgopoulos, who is more commonly

known

as

the exponent of the basic historical doctrines of Greek nationalism. See

Paparrigopoulos

188 7 695.

27 A recent study that points to a research agenda for recovering the ‘Ottoman legacy’ in the

life of Balkan society

is

Lory

1985.

See esp. pp.

123

ff. and

151 ff

on daily and cultural life

respectively, supplying enough evidence for delineating an argument about Ottoman features in

‘Balkan mentality’.

28

A detailed description of the manuscript of Dapontes’

Geogr aphicd History

and

its

contents

c n be found in Legrand’s edition of

Ephpmerides Daces,

vol. 111 pp. Ivii-lxxv. Extensive

excerpts from the manuscript have been published by LRgrand in BGV, I11 247-79.




29 For more details on this aspect of Balkan political thought see Kitromilides 1994, Study 11:

'War and Political Consciousness. Theoretical Implications of Eighteenth Century Greek

Historiography'.

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