SLAVICA HELSINGIENSIA 41 ED. BY JOUKO LINDSTEDT & MAX WAHLSTRÖM BALKAN ENCOUNTERS – OLD AND NEW IDENTITIES IN SOUTH-EASTERN EUROPE HELSINKI 2012 ISBN 978-952-10-8538-3 (PAPERBACK), ISBN 978-952-10-8539-0 (PDF), ISSN 0780-3281 Jouko Lindstedt1 When in the Balkans, Do as the Romans Do —Or Why the Present is the Wrong Key to the Past The history of the Balkans is mostly written as the history of the Balkan nations, especially in the historiography of the Balkan states themselves. This approach produces textbooks and national multi-volume history works that transfer a sense of national identity to ever new generations, but it also gives a skewed perspective on the past and hinders a proper understanding of the past in its own terms. National historiography stresses ethno-linguistic continuity as the main fabric of history and leads to empty quarrels about the ownership of ancient symbols and personalities, such as the violent megalomaniac Alexander the Great, whom both the Greeks and the Macedonians claim as part of “their” history. It also sees the present nation- states (at least the particular nation-state of each native historian themselves) as the necessary and predestined outcome of historical processes. One of the three paradoxes of nationalism mentioned in Anderson’s (2006 [1983], 5) influential study is “[t]he objective modernity of nations to the historian’s eye vs. their subjective antiquity in the eyes of nationalists.” Although Anderson’s main argument of ethno-national consciousness being an essentially modern phenomenon is largely accepted in specialized studies of nationalism, it has not influenced the paradigm of national historiography in the Balkans to any significant degree. The newly independent Balkan states of the 19th century, such as Greece and Serbia, and later Romania and Bulgaria, were among the first states in the world that were ideologically based upon ethno-linguistic (as opposed to state-centered) nationalism, but their rise is still commonly described as a “national revival”, that is, a return to the imagined national identity and glory of the past. In what follows I try to argue for an alternative view of understanding the age of “national revivals” in the Balkans as an age of constructing, not 1 University of Helsinki. 107 Jouko Lindstedt reviving ethno-linguistic consciousness. National identities in the Balkans, as elsewhere, I see as socially constructed institutions in the sense described by Berger and Luckmann (1967) in their classic book. Among the Christian population of the Balkans before the age of “national revivals” there were no various oppressed national identities to be revived, but a common and relative stable system of cultural values centered around the so-called Romaic identity. My main sources of inspiration were the writings of the Ghent historian Raymond Detrez (2008; 2010), to which I try to add some linguistic arguments. I join Detrez in seeing the life and work of the Ohrid-born author Grigor Prličev (1830–1893) as a particularly apt illustration of what the breakup of the Romaic community meant at an individual level. My article should also be read in conjunction with, and as a complement to, Max Wahlström’s article in this volume. 1. Linguistic Constellations in the Romaic Community The medieval East Roman Empire, known as Byzantium in later scholar- ship, was not an ethnically based state. Its Greek-speaking citizens did not call themselves “Greeks” or “Hellenes”, which would have identified them as “pagans” (meaning ‘country people’ > ‘non-Christians’), but as “Ro- mans” (Ρωμαίοι; Haldon 2010, 15–16). In the Ottoman Empire, “Roman” (Ρωμαίος or Ρωμιός) was the word used of a ‘Balkan Orthodox Christian’. The European part of the empire was called Rumeli (as opposed to the Asian part Anadolu, Sugar 1977, 35), and the self-governing confessional commu- nity of all Orthodox Christians was called Millet-i Rûm in Ottoman Turkish, which can be translated as “the Roman nation”—but without the modern connotations of “nation”. Even in English, the adjective Romaic has occasionally been used to refer to modern Greeks and their language. What is important to note, though, is that the Romaic community was not ethnically Greek; it was not ethnically based at all. It included not only ethnic Greeks but also Slavs, Albanians, and Vlachs (speakers of Balkan Romance), who were Orthodox Christians and used Greek as their language of higher culture. In Bulgarian lands, for instance, 1,115 different books in Greek circulated between 1750 and 1840, but only 52 Bulgarian book titles are known from the same period (Detrez 2010, 60, quoting Manjo Stojanov). In later Bulgarian historiography, the Bulgarian readers (and writers!) of books in Greek have often been seen as a “Hellenized” intelligentsia that consisted, in the best case, of misguided 108 When in the Balkans, Do as the Romans Do individuals and, in the worst case, of traitors to the national cause. But this means attributing an ethnic character to a community that did not possess it at that time. Raymond Detrez (2008) has convincingly argued that the Romaic community of the Ottoman Empire in the era before the modern national movements can be considered to have been a kind of proto-nation,2 with several characteristics that later became associated with nations proper. It had a common name Ρωμιοί ‘Romans’ and a common cultural identity ρωμιοσύνη ‘Romanity’; the ethnic name Έλληνες ‘Hellenes’ began to be used for Greeks only towards the end of the 18th century. The Bulgarians used the word grăk (pl. gărci) ‘Greek’, to be sure, but it often had a non- ethnic meaning of ‘a wealthy city-dweller, burgher’ (Detrez 2008, 156–157). The Romaic proto-nation was associated with a definite territory, that of the Ottoman Empire (Orthodox Christians outside the Empire were not called “Romans”), it had a common religion and a common language of higher culture, and it had common administrative institutions in the Roman Millet. From the vantage point of modern non-Greek national histories, the Romaic community is often described as a manifestation of Greek hegemony over other Christian Balkan nations. However, the later Hellenic, that is to say, ethnically Greek national consciousness, was not its direct continuation; instead this new consciousness was, in the words of Socrates D. Petmezas (1999, 51), “as an imagined community […] constituted at its expense.” The use of the Greek language did of course favor its native speakers, as the use of any ethnic language as a lingua franca always does, but it did not entail the assimilation of other ethnic groups into any kind of Greek ethnicity. Greek as a language of higher culture was not completely opposed to all vernaculars inside the Romaic community. Both Ecclesiastic Greek and Church Slavonic were used as sacred languages, and the Greek-speaking hierarchy did not try to hinder the use of Church Slavonic before the 19th century (Detrez 2008, 160). As for the written Greek used by the learned, it 2 Detrez’s concept of “proto-nation” is inspired by Hobsbawm’s (1992, 46–79) notion of “popular proto-nationalism”. Detrez defines “proto-nation” not only as something that later became a nation but as a stable entity in itself: “In order for the essence of the proto- nation to be fully comprehended, it has to be considered as a social formation in itself, with members exhibiting their specific identity—and not as a historical community that is transitional or marked by the absence of a national consciousness and whose essence is defined by what it is only going to be, i.e., a nation, and which deserves attention for that reason only” (Detrez 2008, 154, my transl.). 109 Jouko Lindstedt was opposed not only to vernacular Slavic, Albanian, and Vlach, but also to vernacular Greek (Horrocks 2010, 413–427). All these vernaculars could be written with the Greek alphabet, especially in Macedonia, where Cyrillic letters were no longer known even among the Slavic clergy (Lindstedt 2008b: 395–396). This sociolinguistic situation is graphically seen in the manuscript of the Konikovo Gospel, a handwritten bilingual evangeliarium (Gospel lectionary for Sunday services) created by an anonymous scholar in Southern Macedonia in the late 18th or early 19th century (Lindstedt, Spasov & Nuorluoto, eds., 2008). Each page has in its left column a Greek text, which is a translation of the New Testament koiné into vernacular Greek. This translation follows the vernacular Greek New Testament published in Halle in 1710 by Anastasias Michail of Naousa, or possibly its republication in a slightly modified form a century later in 1810 (Leiwo 2008). The right column on each page contains a line-by-line Slavic translation, written in Greek letters, of this vernacular Greek text into an Aegean Macedonian dialect of the Lower Vardar type. The Slavic Macedonian text of the Konikovo Gospel is thus a translation not directly of the official Greek New Testament, but of its vernacular version. The manuscript contains two vernacular versions in parallel and shows how vernacular Greek and vernacular Slavic were regarded as being on the same level, as opposed to the high variety of official written Greek used by the Church, and also to Church Slavonic. What is more surprising is that the manuscript seems to have been actually used as a liturgical book. This is apparent not only by its beautiful layout, the use of red ink in titles and initials, and the liturgical instructions (in Greek), but also by the fact that the manuscript has been damaged by much use, as shown by numerous stains of candle wax and oil, and by the worn bottom right-hand corners of the folia from the turning of pages. We cannot know which of the two vernaculars was used when chanting the New Testament readings in the Divine Liturgy, but even if it was the Greek text, this must have been a radical step given the negative attitude of the Church authorities towards the use of the Greek vernacular (Leiwo 2008, 249–250).