Religious Nationalism in the Western Balkans

Abstract

“At the end of twentieth century, people spoke as if the Balkans had existed forever. However, two hundred years earlier, they had not yet come into being. It was not the Balkans but ‘Rumeli’ that the Ottomans ruled, the formerly ‘Roman’ lands that they had conquered from Constantinople. The Sultan’s educated Christian Orthodox subjects referred to themselves as ‘Romans’ (‘Romaioi’), or more simply as ‘Christians.’ To Westerners, familiar with classical regional terms such as Macedonia, Epirus, Dacia and Moesia, the term ‘Balkan’ conveyed little. ‘My expectations were raised,’ wrote one traveller in 1854, ‘by hearing that we are about to cross Balkan; but I discovered ere long that this high-sounding title denotes only a ridge which divides the waters, or a mountain pass, without its being a necessary consequence that it offers grand or romantic scenery.’” (2007, xxv)