The Balkans: A Short History (13 page)

The Christian peasantry may have been influenced heavily in their beliefs, tastes and practices by Muslim culture, but at the same time they carefully preserved folk songs and ancestral legends about the rebirth of a Christian empire. Predictions, laments and prophecies had circulated among them ever since the fall of Constantinople that fateful Tuesday in 1453. Serb Orthodox bishops and Maniote chieftains were constantly conspiring with Venetian and Austrian diplomats to revolt against the Turks. In 1657 a patriarch was hanged for rashly predicting the end of Islam and the revival of Christian domination. Russia’s emergence as the first great European Orthodox power prompted prophecies about a race of blond warriors coming from the north to drive the Muslims from Constantinople, the latest in a long line of such forecasts of Christian reconquest and Ottoman defeat. In 1766, a man claiming to be Tsar Peter III, Catherine the Great’s unfortunate (and dead) husband, appeared in Montenegro and led a coalition of clans against the Turks. The impostor’s activities provoked Catherine herself to send envoys there to proclaim her support for an uprising that would extend to “Constantinople itself, capital of the ancient Greek empire.” The Montenegrins were not interested, of course, in recapturing Constantinople, but Catherine certainly was, and delegated her favorite, Count Aleksey Orlov, to incite an Orthodox revolt against the Porte. Local Greek organizers of the 1770 uprising helped out, even if they regarded Orlov as a man whose “imagination was inflamed from reading ancient history and mythological tales.”
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Orlov proclaimed Russia’s desire for “raising and liberating . . . the whole Greek nation.” But although the local Christian peasants of the Peloponnese and Crete responded with enthusiasm, the revolt was crushed without difficulty by Ottoman forces. Forty thousand people were killed, enslaved or fled the region in 1770. Was this a proto-nationalist revolt? Perhaps. After all, in 1774 the Archimandrite Varlaam wrote to Catherine the Great that her successes “will undoubtedly serve to accelerate the much desired moment of our complete liberation.” But in 1779, Greek chieftains cooperated with an Ottoman army in the Peloponnese, and negotiated with the illustrious Greek Phanariot Nicholas Mavroyeni, in order to put down the Albanian irregulars who had been plundering the region. Inside the Ottoman empire there were many Christians, especially in the elite, who saw Russia’s failure as a warning, especially since it falsified widely believed predictions of the Sultan’s defeat. “If God, constrained by our sins—may He forgive me for daring to say so—prevented that which was affirmed by the oracles from happening at the appointed time,” wrote Constantine Dapontes,

if, I say, He saw fit that the utterances of so many astronomers, scholars and saints should prove vain in preference to giving the Empire to men unworthy not only of this Empire but of life itself, how is it possible that the resurrection of the Romaic Empire should happen . . . ? This being so, neither the Greeks nor the Russians will reign in the City unto the end of the world. May merciful God take pity on us, and grant us the Heavenly Kingdom, and never mind about the earthly one.
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Yet curiously, Dapontes himself, for all his resignation, was one of those Orthodox intellectuals who, by spreading the ideas of the European Enlightenment into the Balkans, provided a new vocabulary for imagining a post-Ottoman world. Initially their contribution was not explicitly political at all: trained in the new humanistic learning of central Europe, and keen to synthesize this with Orthodoxy, they preached the virtues of scientific knowledge, classical learning and philosophy and attacked the backwardness and barbarism of their own culture. With the spread of print culture, their writings multiplied: seven times as many books were printed annually in Greek by Greeks at the end of the eighteenth century as at its start.
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Almost all such intellectuals emerged out of the bosom of the church and came to learning through the priesthood. Yet though they did not realize it, their devotion to scientific rationalism on the one hand, and to a secular rather than a biblical sense of history on the other, undermined the traditional bases of religious authority.

It is this small literate elite who, while the vast majority of Ottoman Christians continued to inhabit the mental world described earlier, began to elaborate a new language of nations and ethnicities. The historian Paschalis Kitromilides has described their goal as aiming to integrate “the forgotten nations of the European periphery into the common historical destiny of the Continent.” Replacing the old Orthodox conception of Christian time with a new secular understanding of time as national history, the intellectuals of the Balkan Enlightenment paved the way for modern nationalism. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Phanariot Alexander Mavrokordatos had divided history into six periods—from the Creation to the Second Coming—that would be followed by a seventh period of “endless repose in the eternal mansions.” It was this biblical conception of time—in which historical epochs were believed to correspond to the days of the week—that was eroded by the new emphasis on the unfolding of civilizations and cultures: ancient Greece (in the eighteenth century) and Byzantium (in the nineteenth) became aspects of the past first to be rediscovered, and then to be renewed through political mobilization. History acquired direction.

For much of the eighteenth century, the intellectuals’ dreams of political emancipation rested—as Voltaire’s did—upon an enlightened despot coming to their rescue, a Platonic philosopher-king, a modernizer, in the mold perhaps of Catherine the Great or Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II. The Russians remained a source of potential aid, notably during the 1806–1812 Russo-Turkish War, which brought Russian troops south of the Danube and made it look as if “Grand-father Ivan” would liberate Balkan lands. However, it was the French Revolution which first suggested that emancipation might come through the action of the masses themselves. The toppling of the French monarchy, the rise of Bonaparte and, above all, his invasion of Ottoman Egypt in 1798, radicalized the political thought of Balkan Christian intellectuals.
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Among the new breed of firebrands was a former secretary of the Phanariots, Rhigas Velestinlis, who published Greek-language literature from Vienna calling for the overthrow of the Ottoman dynasty and the formation of a new republic, based on the rights of man. Rhigas’s
New Political Constitution
of the Inhabitants of Rumeli, Asia Minor, the Archipelago and the
Danubian Principalities
(1797) was the blueprint for a new “Hellenic Republic”: the people would be sovereign, irrespective of language or religion. Modern eyes, attuned to future ethnic divisions, are struck by Rhigas’s assumption that the new state should use Greek as its official language. What struck contemporaries even more, though, was the absence of any reference to the church. For Rhigas, the Ottoman dynasty and Orthodox Church were both to be swept aside in favor of an as yet ill-defined “Nation.”
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Such radicalism frightened many, Muslim and Christian alike, by its godlessness and egalitarianism. Ottoman officials denounced “the conflagration of sedition and wickedness that broke out a few years ago in France, scattering sparks and shooting flames of mischief and tumult in all directions.” But in Austria the Habsburg authorities were no happier, and arrested Rhigas and handed him over to the Ottomans, who had him killed in 1798. The Orthodox Church was also worried. The concept of political liberty, according to many bishops, was inspired by the devil, tempting the faithful away from their duty of allegiance to the Sultan. The patriarchal “Paternal Exhortation,” published in the year of Rhigas’s death, inveighed against “the much vaunted system of liberty which . . . is a trap of the devil and a destructive poison” and reminded Christians how God “raised out of nothing this powerful empire of the Ottomans, in the place of the Roman [Byzantine] Empire which had begun in a certain way to deviate from the Orthodox faith, and he raised up the empire of the Ottomans higher than any other kingdom so as to show without any doubt that it came about by divine will.” An anti-intellectual Greek satire that circulated in Constantinople at about the same time mocked the Francophiles: “Romantic youths, enlightened notables” who “say, ‘I am enlightened, and I speak French, I myself will wear clothes in the European style.’ ” There was, in other words, both elite and popular resistance to the political ramifications of the new learning.
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Slowly, too, the old assumption that Greek—like Latin in the West—was the route to learning was being challenged as ideas of romantic nationalism, emphasizing the cultural value of peasant languages, spread into the Balkans. In the early nineteenth century, Bulgarian, Serbian and Romanian intellectuals—often educated in Greek schools—began to define themselves in terms of cultural communities for the first time. They chafed under what they saw as Greek domination, doubting openly whether Greek was their language, or “Hellas” their fatherland. “There are those,” wrote Paisii Khilandarski in his
Slavonian Bulgarian History,
“who do not care to know about their own Bulgarian nation and turn to foreign ways and foreign tongues; they do not care for their own Bulgarian language but try to read and speak Greek and are ashamed to call themselves Bulgarians.”
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But at the time few in Khilandarski’s target audience would have been able to read Bulgarian. The new ideas of political and cultural affiliation took time to trickle from the intellectuals, books and cities down into the small market towns and the homes of the unlettered mass of country folk, from the diasporas of Vienna, Trieste, Jassy and Odessa to the heartlands of the Sultan’s domains. Most people remained illiterate, ignorant of books and the new doctrines they contained, inhabitants of a much more circumscribed rural world. As late as 1810, for instance, there were only two elementary schools in the Pasalik of Belgrade (the core of future Serbia), and in both the language of instruction was Greek; in Montenegro the first elementary school opened in 1834; Romanianism was associated with the desires of the nobility to be rid of their Greek princes, and left the peasantry cold; as for Bulgarian nationalism, it had to await the opening of a few purely Bulgarian schools in the middle of the century.
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As nationalism began to eat away at its old constituencies, the patriarchate tried to respond. Its traditional position, both accepting the distinctiveness of different Christian groups and insisting upon their common religious allegiance, was expressed thus by Archbishop Ignatius:

The Hellenes, the Bulgarians, the Vlachs, the Serbs and the Albanians form today nations, each with its own language. All these people, however, as well as those inhabiting the east, unified by their faith and by the Church, form one body and one nation under the name of Greeks, or Romans [Romaioi ]. Thus the Ottoman government, when addressing its Christian Orthodox subjects calls them generally Romans, and the Patriarch it always calls Patriarch of the Romans.
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But the position of the “Patriarch of the Romans” was being undermined on several sides. Greek intellectuals wrote him off as a quisling “who is either a fool or has been transformed from a shepherd into a wolf.” Slav intellectuals increasingly regarded him as a Greek. The Turks mistrusted him as a disloyal servant of the Porte, and in 1821 Patriarch Grigorios V, despite having issued a letter excommunicating the Greek revolutionaries, was executed.
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The emergence of Balkan nation-states after 1830 whittled away patriarchal power further. Self-governing peoples in southeastern Europe could not tolerate (any more than the Russians had done in the seventeenth century) the supreme religious direction of their citizens remaining in the hands of an Ottoman government official. “The eastern church is everywhere joined to the state, never being separated from it, never divided from the sovereigns since Byzantine times, and always subordinated to them,” wrote one partisan of the new Church of Greece, which was formed in Athens in 1833—without the approval of the Patriarch in Constantinople. Others followed suit: the Bulgarians (even before they had gained an independent state) won a church of their own in 1870—the so-called exarchate—after a long quarrel with the Patriarch over the need for priests who could conduct services in Slavonic. The following year, an autocephalous Romanian church was established. A draft law setting up a Turkish Orthodox church was even submitted to the National Assembly in Ankara in 1921—the logical culmination of the same process. A separate Albanian Orthodox church followed in 1929. Only the Serbs went the canonical route and obtained Patriarchal authorization in 1879 to set up a church of their own. Each of these acts resulted in rupture with the Constantinople patriarchate, which saw its flock gradually dwindling; in each case, the patriarchate was eventually obliged to bow to new political realities. In exactly a century, the Patriarch’s flock shrank dramatically, from the entire Orthodox population of the Balkans and Anatolia to a few tens of thousands of believers, mostly in Constantinople itself. The most powerful, wealthiest and successful Christian institution of the Ottoman empire was virtually destroyed by the rise of Christian nation-states.
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However, the Balkan Enlightenment did not have it all its own way either. Its liberal and increasingly nationalist intellectuals might have attacked the Church as part of their argument for the existence of national communities, but it was the peasants whose uprisings actually created the new nation-states, and they remained firmly attached to their Church. Catholic missionaries had failed to make substantial inroads into Balkan peasant Orthodoxy; American Protestant missionaries in the 1820s printed more than a million tracts and educated scores of young boys at a cost of a quarter of a million dollars—all for three conversions. It is scarcely surprising that the atheism of many eighteenth-century Balkan intellectuals fell on stony ground. Christian Orthodoxy (and religion in general) remained a major political factor in the Balkans after the collapse of the Ottoman empire. But its character changed. Religion became a marker of national identity in ways not known in the past, and therefore more sharply marked off from neighboring religions. It turned into what the novelist George Theotokas called “a national religion” which left no space for the kind of antichurch secularism that emerged in Western Europe and Italy in the struggle against Catholicism. Today, while the Catholic papacy remains a major political force in the world, the Patriarch of Constantinople barely clings to life, with jurisdiction over the few remaining Orthodox inhabitants of Turkey. In southeastern Europe the modern nation-state—an entity no more than two centuries old—has entirely defeated the old Orthodox values.
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