Byzantium After the Nation: The Problem of Continuity in Balkan Historiographies

Dimitris Stamatopoulos

ISBN 10: 9633863074 / ISBN 13: 9789633863077

Published by Amsterdam University Press, 2022

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 350497271

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Byzantium After the Nation: The Problem of Continuity in Balkan Historiographies
• Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
• Publication Date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 9633863074
• ISBN 13: 9789633863077
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

Stamatopoulos undertakes the first systematic comparison of the dominant ethnic historio­graphic models and divergences elaborated by Greek, Bulgarian, Serbian, Albanian, Romanian, Turkish, and Russian intellectuals with reference to the ambiguous inheritance of Byzantium. The title alludes to the seminal work of Nicolae Iorga in the 1930s, Byzantium after Byzantium, that argued for the continuity between the Byzantine and the Ottoman empires. Rival Balkan nationalisms engaged in a “war of interpretation” as to the nature of Byzantium, assuming different positions of adoption or rejection of its imperial model and leading to various schemes of continuity in each national historiographic canon.

Stamatopoulos discusses what Byzantium represented for nineteenth-, and twentieth-century scholars and how their perceptions related to their treatment of the imperial model: whether a different perception of the medieval Byzantine period prevailed in the Greek national center as opposed to Constantinople; how nineteenth-century Balkan nationalists and Russian scholars used Byzantium to invent their own medieval period (and, by extension, their own antiquity); and finally, whether there exist continuities or discontinuities in these modes of making ideological use of the past.

About the Author

Jernej Mlekuž is Research Fellow at the Slovenian Migration Institute at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts.