Shared Mental Outlook of 18th Century Balkan Orthodox

Nations and Nationalism 2 (2), 1996, 163-191.
0ASEN 1996
‘Balkan mentality’: history, legend,

imaginat 1on
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.
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 expression fond 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
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:
11l), 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 (1699), Passarowitz (1718) and Belgrade (1739)
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.
The world of Balkan Orthodoxy found a characteristic expression in the life

and autobiographical writings of Constantine Dapontes (1713/14-84), 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~Thus 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 Soda\ groups around the Patriarchate of Constantinople, whose
seat had 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,
111: 9).
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 17369, 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
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’ (BGV, 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 ~ ‘xpufiv nazpi6a’ (BGV, 111: 164), but has no
pod,
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.20In 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;22it 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
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 - justified 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.~~ This 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
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
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 C h r i ~ t i a n sWith
. ~ ~ 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 Geographer’s Craft, 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 scientific use 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.
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 and 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’ into ethnographic evidence.
7 Cf. the comments by B. Valade in Encyclophdie philosophique universelle. Les notions
philosophiques, ed. by Sylvain Auroux, Paris 1990, vol. 2, pp. 1598-9, S.V. mentaliti.
8 In Robert Mandrou’s phrase, quoted by Vovelle 1985: 10.
9 The phrase belongs to Georges 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 important role in Balkan politics in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. On 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. For a case study of what 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. 11: 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 The main autobiographical sections of the text occur on pp. 621,41-50, 51-3 in Legrand’s
edition. A sympathetic portrait based on Dapontes’s texts is given by R. M. Dawkins 1936: 69-72.
15 On the 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 For an Orthodox 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. 25460. It has 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 of 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 ofthe
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 1992 224.
20 Note especially Dapontes’ comments ‘Onthe 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. An earlier translation of the same text appears in Leger 1885: 85-141.
23 VraEanski 1981: 90,103. 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-centurydevelopmentswere 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. On
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 1887 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’ Geographicd History and its contents
can 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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Shared Mental Outlook of 18th Century Balkan Orthodox

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Nations and Nationalism 2 (2), 1996, 163-191.

‘Balkan mentality’: history, legend,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

liveliness by staying close to nature and thus remaining capable of

One further fundamental aspect of the Orthodox outlook was the

The components of the Orthodox mentality that are so eloquently recorded

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

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

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

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

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

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

Papamgopoulos, C. 1887. ‘loropia rod i l h p ~ ~ .FOvoK.

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