University College London

University College London
Byzantium's Apt Inheritors: Serbian Historiography, Nation-Building and Imperial Imagination,

1882–1941
Author(s): Aleksandar Ignjatović
Source: The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 94, No. 1 (January 2016), pp. 57-92
Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London,
School of Slavonic and East European Studies
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Byzantium’s Apt Inheritors:
Serbian Historiography, Nation-
Building and Imperial Imagination,
1882–1941
ALEKSANDAR IGNJATOVIĆ
Between the second half of the nineteenth and the middle of the
twentieth century, Serbian national historiography underwent a continuous
transition, from a romantic-idealistic to a more rigorous, critical approach
and interpretation. It was determined by changes both of historical method
and the goals of historical inquiry, particularly regarding controversial
issues of medieval Serbian history. In contrast to the glorification of
the past championed by the ‘romantics’, proponents of the ‘critical
school’ advocated the conscientious study of historical sources and the
search for historical truth. Nevertheless, certain subjects of Serbian
national historiography question this established view. One of these is the
complex relationship between medieval Serbia and Byzantium, frequently
interpreted by historians not only as an intrinsic part of the nation’s
past and the essence of its cultural identity, but also as a convenient
frame for examining and justifying contemporary national policies. In
mainstream national historiography of the period between the Kingdom
of Serbia (1882–1918) and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes
(1918–1941, after 1929 the Kingdom of Yugoslavia), Serbia’s medieval past
was set in an ambivalent perspective of simultaneous Byzantinization
and de-Byzantinization. It was employed in various disciplines, including
political and cultural history, archaeology, art and architectural history, but
also went beyond scholarly discourse.
Aleksandar Ignjatović is an associate professor in the Faculty of Architecture at the

University of Belgrade.
Slavonic and East European Review, 94, 1, 2016
58 ALEKSANDAR IGNJATOVIĆ
The historiographical elaboration of Serbian-Byzantine relationships was
based on a twofold interpretive strategy. On the one hand, historiography
reinforced a sense of association of Serbs with Byzantium, which was
explained by the profound influence of Byzantine customs, art and culture
on medieval Serbia. On the other hand, Serbia’s cultural and political
emancipation and its differentiation from Byzantium were emphasized
by historians at greater length and in greater detail. Consequently, the
position of Byzantium became ambivalent in historiography, causing
the Byzantine Empire to be simultaneously seen as ‘national legacy’ and
expressed in terms of the nation’s political adversary and cultural obstacle.
Nevertheless, historiographical narratives about the relationships
between Serbia and Byzantium not only reflected different theoretical
approaches and interpretive strategies, but also different ideological
agendas. On the one hand, historiography took part in the construction
of a national mythology of exclusiveness and the continuity of medieval
Serbia as part of competing nationalistic discourses in the Balkans; on
the other, it reinforced a set of ideological justifications of the nation-
state as well as various supra-national political projects, ranging from
a political programme for a ‘Yugoslav empire’ of 1867, to the interwar
Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. It was in this sense that the
interpretive perspectives on Byzantium made a tremendous impact not
only on contemporaneous historical imagination as a re-enactment of the
national past and the subsequent recreation of communal identity, but also
on the justification of congruous, complementary or competing national
narratives and ideological objectives.
The twofold historiographical process of the simultaneous cultural
association of medieval Serbian culture with that of Byzantium and its
differentiation from it, seen in the context of ideological congruence
between national and supra-national ideas, is the central topic of this
article. Its aim is neither to give a comprehensive overview of the writings
of Serbian historians on the history of the Byzantine Empire, nor to
examine the history of ‘Byzantine Studies’ in Serbia. Nor is it to analyse the
nature of relations between Serbia and the Byzantine Empire, which should
be left to medievalists. Rather, this article will use discourse analysis to
explore the major historical syntheses of the period in order to show how
the historiographical construction of the connections between Serbia and
Byzantium fitted into broader frameworks of nation- and state-building
through the idea of the historical and cultural unification of the Serbs;
how the historiography spurred the mythology of national authenticity and
distinctiveness and how it reinforced the arguments about Serbia’s historical
Byzantium’s Apt Inheritors 59
rights, utilizing the ideas of imperial rule and ‘core-nation’ empire. The
historiographic recovery of the Serbian medieval past ultimately cultivated
a sense of national identification and encouraged political action. Serbian
historians, regardless of methodological differences and lines of dissension,
advocated the historical rootedness and validity of national expansionism,
which sharply marked the political landscape of the late nineteenth- and
early twentieth-century Balkans. They also espoused the idea of the
cultural superiority of Serbs and helped to elevate Serbian cultural and
political identity in the global arena. The key argument of this article,
however, is that historical interpretations of the past were not solely used
to advance and reinforce the ongoing political agendas of Serbian elites,
but that images of the past were made according to a foreseeable future of
the nation. Elaborated theories and explanations of relationships between
medieval Serbia and Byzantium were in conformity with the modern
regime of historicity, which is a process that can be traced back to the
earliest narratives of the so-called romantic school of historiography in the
1880s and can still be found in the 1940s.1
Byzantium and Serbia: interpretive patterns

Despite the apparently conflicted traditions of the romantic and critical
schools in terms of historical sources and their interpretation,2 as well as
the advancement of Byzantine studies in turn-of-the-century scholarship,
similar explanations of Serbian-Byzantine relationships and general
attitudes towards Byzantium span the entire period in question. These
explanations form a complex historiographical canon, based both on
the Byzantinization and de-Byzantinization paradigm, developed and
elaborated by at least three generations of historians. Despite being
separated by time and political circumstances they share comparable
1
On the modern regime of historicity, see François Hartog, ‘Temps et histoire:
“Comment écrire l’histoire de France?”’, Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 6, 1995, pp.
1219–36; see also François Hartog, Régimes d’historicité: présentisme et expérience du
temps, Paris, 2003, pp. 11–30; Chris Lorenz, ‘Unstuck in Time. Or: The Sudden Presence
of the Past’, in Karin Tilmans, Frank van Vree, and Jay Winter (eds), Performing the Past:
Memory, History and Identity in Modern Europe, Amsterdam, 2010, pp. 67–104.
2
St.[anoje] Stanojević, ‘O zadacima srpske istoriografije’, Srpski književni glasnik,
10, 1903, 7, pp. 541–42. On this still understudied topic, see Sima Ćirković, ‘Javljanje
“kritičke istoriografije” na Velikoj školi i Univerzitetu’, in Univerzitet u Beogradu: 1838–
1988: zbornik radova, Belgrade, 1988, pp. 645–54; Srdjan Pirivatrić, ‘A Case Study in the
Emergence of Byzantine Studies: Serbia in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’, in
Paul Stephenson (ed.), The Byzantine World, London, 2010, pp. 481–90 (p. 482); ‘Ilarion
Ruvarac: On Prince Lazar’, in Ahmet Ersoy, Maciej Górny and Vangelis Kechriotis (eds),
Discourses of Collective Identity in Central and Southeast Europe (1770–1945): Modernism –
Representations of National Culture, 5 vols, Budapest and New York, 2010, 3, pp. 15–19.
views. The first generation is best represented by the ‘romantics’ like
Pantelija Panta Srećković (1834–1903), Ljubomir Kovačević (1848–1918)
and Ljubomir Jovanović; the next generation of ‘critical historians’, such
as Stojan Novaković (1842–1915), complemented and only partially revised
the same canon, which was further elaborated by a succeeding generation
of historians including Stanoje Stanojević (1874–1937) and Jovan Radonić
(1873–1956), as well as Vladimir Ćorović (1885–1941) and Nikola Radojčić
(1882–1964), to name but a few. The reasons for the longevity of this
complex historiographical tradition, as this article will show, lie primarily
in the constant negotiation of power relations in questions of national
boundaries and the cultural recognition of Serbs in the context of both
national expansion and the creation of a multi-national Yugoslav state.
While writing their accounts on the relationship between medieval
Serbia and Byzantium, Serbian historians inevitably tackled the vexed
problem of interpreting Byzantine Empire and civilization that not only
preoccupied many European historians but also connoted a range of
cultural values and had a wide resonance far beyond scholarly discourse.
The historiographical approach to Byzantium that the Serbian national
historiography of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century employed
was multifaceted, consisting of both positive and negative models of
perception and interpretation. On the one hand, it reiterated a firmly
entrenched and widely disseminated image of Byzantium as a civilization
in constant decline, which was sometimes seen as a political and cultural
antecedent of the similarly essentialized Ottoman Empire. On the other
hand, there were different views on Byzantium, which was depicted as a
sophisticated civilization, a repository of classical antiquity and true, original
Christianity. The first, negativistic model of perception, entrenched in the
eighteenth century, depicted Byzantium’s chequered history as a process
of continuous political decline and cultural deterioration. In a certain
sense, this model was related to a set of traditional stereotypes about an
impoverished, decadent and autocratic East, which can be traced back to
Greek and Roman antiquity. Juxtaposed to the idea of a single, monolithic
West, this essentialized image had an important place in the discourses
of modernity and identity in many European national narratives. The
Enlightenment’s perception of Byzantium — best represented by Voltaire’s
or Montesquieu’s condemnations of Byzantine history as ‘worthless
collections of declamations and miracles’, a ‘disgrace for the human mind’,3
3
Cited in Dimiter G. Angelov, ‘Byzantinism: The Imaginary and Real Heritage of
Byzantium’, in Dimitris Keridis, Ellen Elias-Bursać and Nicholas Yatromanolakis (eds),
or a ‘tissue of rebellious insurrections and treachery’ and a ‘tragic epilogue
to the glory of Rome’4 — was crucial in the construction of this long lasting
model of perception. Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire (1776–88) was perhaps its most noticeable manifestation which,
while asserting Christianity’s role in enfeebling the Roman Empire, fixed
the image of Byzantium as a thousand years of decline, Oriental despotism
and cultural ossification that heavily influenced succeeding scholars, as
well as general attitudes to Byzantium.5 Having been further driven by a
Hegelian interpretive framework and notions of stages of development of
the nation-state as embodiments of reason, this negative image became
even more fixed throughout the nineteenth century. According to Hegel
himself, the history of Byzantium — which he deemed as being incapable
of cultural development and political evolution — reflected a ‘disgusting
picture of imbecility’.6 ‘Stultifying lack of originality’ 7 in matters cultural,
paired with autocracy and ‘caesaropapism’ in matters political, summarize
the hallmarks of the Byzantine Empire’s dominant perception of the whole
period, best represented by Jacob Burckhardt’s accounts on Byzantine
hypocrisy and ‘despotism, infinitely strengthen[ed] by the union of
churchly and secular dominion’.8
From the second half of the nineteenth century, however, a growing
interest in Byzantine history led to the creation of a new, avowedly
rational and unbiased, albeit equally instrumental model of perception
that was later institutionalized under the name of ‘Byzantine studies’,
initially in Germany and France, and subsequently in England and Russia.
Nevertheless, a shift in the perception, brought about the new discipline,
retained the image of Byzantium haunted by the ghosts of ‘Byzantinism’,
because Byzantine studies continued to keep its subject opposed to the idea
of a single, monolithic West.9 Byzantine departments were first established
New Approaches to Balkan Studies, Dulles, VA, 2003, pp. 3–21 (p. 3).
4
Cited in J. B. Bullen, Byzantium Rediscovered, London and New York, 2003, p. 7.
5
See Averil Cameron, Byzantine Matters, Princeton, NJ, 2014, pp. 1, 10–11; Johann P.
Arnason, ‘Byzantium and Historical Sociology’, in Paul Stephenson (ed.), The Byzantine
World, London, 2010, pp. 491–504.
6
G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of History, New York, 1956, p. 340. See also Hegel’s essay,
‘The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate’, Early Theological Writings, trans. Eleanore R.
Kroner, Philadelphia, PA, 1971, pp. 182–301.
7
Cameron, Byzantine Matters, p. 10.
8
Quoted in Diana Mishkova, ‘The Afterlife of a Commonwealth: Narratives of
Byzantium in the National Historiographies of Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia and Romania’,
in Roumen Daskalov and Tchavadar Marinov (eds), Entangled Histories of the Balkans:
Shared Pasts, Disputed Legacies, Leiden, 2015, pp. 118–273 (p. 143).
9
Angelov, ‘Byzantinism’, p. 18; Milica Bakić-Hayden, ‘What’s So Byzantine About
at universities in Munich (1898) and Paris (1899), where most Serbian
medievalists who wrote about relationships between Serbia and Byzantium
had studied, including Stanoje Stanojević, Vladimir Ćorović, Jovan
Radonić, Dragutin Anastasijević and Božidar Prokić. Byzantine studies
in Serbia were initiated at Belgrade University at the beginning of the
twentieth century, after Božidar Prokić, a disciple of the leading German
Byzantologist Karl Krumbacher, had informally introduced the history of
Byzantium into the curriculum in 1893. A seminar for Byzantine Studies
was formed in 1906, which was later developed and ramified.10 Eventually,
Serbian Byzantine studies became famous since the Russian-born and
German-trained historian George Ostrogorsky settled in Belgrade in
1933.11
Yet there was another interpretive model simultaneously employed by
the period’s Serbian historiography which was a vital shoot of a profoundly
rich tradition of imagining Byzantium as the only true successor to the
Roman Empire and original Christianity. This model had flourished
among Russian intellectuals in the nineteenth century, heavily influencing
South Slavic elites, including the Serbian and Bulgarian.12 Depicting
Byzantium as a source of genuine Christian faith, Orthodox spirituality
and custodian of both Roman imperial traditions and Greek antiquity, it
presupposed an image that was an antipode to the rationality of the West.
At the heart of this interpretive tradition was the question of Byzantine
continuity and succession, which resonated not only among Russian
intellectual and political elite in the discourse of the so-called ‘Third
Rome’,13 but also among competing Christian nations which fought for
political and cultural primacy in the context of the then de-Ottomanizing
the Balkans?’, in Dušan I. Bjelić and Obrad Savić (eds), Balkan as Metaphor: Between
Globalization and Fragmentation, Cambridge, MA, and London, 2002, pp. 61–78. For
the period’s Serbian historians’ accounts on Byzantium’s understated status in European
history and historiography, see Vladan Djordjević, Grčka i srpska prosveta, Belgrade, 1896,
pp. 10–14; Nikola Radojčić, ‘Garland E. Das Studium der byzantinischen Geschichte vom
Humanismus and Jetztzeit’, Prilozi za jezik, književnost, istoriju i folklor, 15, 1935, 1–2, pp.
292–95.
10
Pirivatrić, ‘A Case Study’, pp. 481–90.
11
See Ljubomir Maksimović, ‘Razvoj vizantologije’, in Univerzitet u Beogradu: 1838–
1988: zbornik radova, Belgrade, 1988, pp. 655–71; Pirivatrić, ‘A Case Study’, pp. 485–86.
12
See Dimitris Stamatopoulos, ‘From Vyzantism of K. Leont’ev to Vyzantinism of I.
I. Sokolov: The Byzantine Orthodox East as a Motif of Russian Orientalism’, in Olivier
Delouis and Petre Guran (eds), Héritages de Byzance en Europe du Sud-Est à l’époque
moderne et contemporaine, Athens, 2013, pp. 321–40.
13
See Marshall Poe, ‘Moscow, the Third Rome: The Origins and Transformations of a
”Pivotal Moment”’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, 49, 2001, 3, pp. 412–29.
Balkans. Serbian historians of the period were heavily influenced by
elaborated notions of Byzantine exceptionalism and cultural superiority,
disseminated by Orthodox and nationalist circles in Russia as well
as Pan-Slavists.14 These notions were interwoven with romanticized
interpretations of Byzantine culture originating both in Western and
Russian scholarship. It was this complex image of Byzantium, made
out of both positive and negative cultural stereotypes, an image which
included different historiographical traditions and models of perception
that fuelled the historiographic association of Serbia with the Byzantine
Empire simultaneously with Serbia’s historical differentiation from it. This
dual perspective, as it will be shown, became instrumental in crafting
complex ideological narratives and had topical resonance to Serbs in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth century. These narratives include the
historical elaboration of Serbian national primacy in the Balkans justified
by the nation’s identity of a Byzantine successor, as well as of the cultural
authenticity and exceptionality of the Serbian nation seen in terms of the
contrast between culturally vigorous Serbs and declining Byzantines.
Serbia and Byzantium: cultural affinities and differences

The influence of Byzantium on the entire political and cultural life of
medieval Serbia, especially during the reign of medieval Serbian kings
of the Nemanjić royal lineage (1159–1367), was regarded by historians as
a process which was often described in terms of political and cultural
‘evolution towards Byzantium’.15 This scheme was developed throughout
the period, from Pantelija (Panta) Srećković’s first accounts in the 1880s,
through the second generation of historians including Stojan Novaković
and Stanoje Stanojević, to the interwar historiography best represented
by Vladimir Ćorović and Nikola Radojčić’s works.16 Stanoje Stanojević’s
Vizantija i Srbi (Byzantium and Serbs) published in two volumes in 1903
14
Olga Maiorova, From the Shadow of Empire: Defining the Russian Nation through
Cultural Mythology, 1855–1870, Madison, WI, 2010, pp. 157–62, 183–91; Judith E. Kalb,
Russia’s Rome: Imperial Visions, Messianic Dreams, 1890–1940, Madison, WI, 2008, pp.
3–33. See also, David MacKenzie, The Serbs and Russian Pan-Slavism, Ithaca, NY, 1967.
15
Stojan Novaković, ‘Nekolika teža pitanja srpske istorije. Povodom knjige Geschichte
der Serbien, von Konstantin Jiriček, Gotha, 1911’, in Godišnjica Nikole Čupića, 31–32,
Belgrade, 1912–1913, n.p. Reprinted in R. Samardžić (ed.), Stojan Novaković: Iz srpske
istorije, Novi Sad and Belgrade, 1966, pp. 61–173 (p. 122).
16
Pantelija S. Srećković, Istorija srpskog naroda: Vreme kraljevstva i carstva (1159–1367),
2 vols, Belgrade, 1888, 2, pp. 524–25; Stojan Novaković, ‘O ulozi vladaoca u državnom
organizmu’, in Političke studije, ed. Živojin M. Perić, Belgrade, 1908, p. pp. 303–13 (p. 307);
Vladimir Ćorović, Istorija Jugoslavije, Belgrade, 1933, p. 154.
and 1906 — although it had initially been planned as a ten-volume book
— represents an apex of this particular interpretational tradition, which
can be traced back to the mid nineteenth century and which continued
to dominate the field well into the 1930s. In the introduction of the first
volume of the book, Stanojević empathically declared that:
The entire political and cultural life of Serbs was […] woven together with
the history of Byzantium and so impregnated with Byzantine influences
that one can say that Byzantine-Serbian relations during the first ten
centuries of Serbian history made a very basis of the Serbian nation and
its identity.17
In his later writings Stanojević reiterated the same question of

Byzantinization, in terms of both political and cultural encounters
between Byzantium and Serbs,18 influencing generations of subsequent
historians. Stojan Novaković further developed the same Byzantinization
thesis, which was a historiographical trend that would reach its peak in the
works of interwar Byzantinists, such as George Ostrogorsky and Vladimir
Mošin; the latter elaborated three major ‘waves of Byzantinization’, namely,
in the ninth, thirteenth and fourteenth century.19 Nonetheless, some
dissonant voices could also have been heard. For example, the historian
Vladimir Ćorović, echoing Jovan Cvijić’s theses about a cultural resilience
of Serbs, wrote that profound Byzantinization of Serbia came only in the
fourteenth century and not in the earlier periods. He elaborated this in the
influential book Istorija Jugoslavije (History of Yugoslavia, 1933) as well as
in his capital work Istorija Srba (History of Serbs) written in the late 1930s
and fully published only in 1989.20
To justify statements about the widespread cultural and political
influence of the Byzantine Empire, historians provided a variety of
explanations. Despite close relationships between the Nemanjićs and the
Papacy (both in Rome and Avignon), and the Serbian medieval kings’
occasional flirtation with Catholicism, Serbia’s historical orientation
toward Orthodoxy and Byzantium remained, beyond any doubt, a key
feature of Serbian identity inherited from the time of the missionaries,
17
Stanoje Stanojević, Vizantija i Srbi, 2 vols, Novi Sad, 1903, 1, pp. ii–iii.
18
Stanoje Stanojević, Istorija srpskog naroda, Belgrade, 1910, p. 40.
19
Vladimir Mošin, ‘Srednjovekovna Srbija i vizantijska kultura’, Srpski književni
glasnik, 56, 1939, 5, pp. 354–65.
20
Vladimir Ćorović, Istorija Srba, ed. Rade Mihaljčić and Radoš Ljušić, Belgrade, 1989,
p. 158.
Saints Cyril and Methodius.21 Historians praised Byzantium as a superior
civilization emulated by medieval Serbs; for Nikola Radojčić, whose
Razvitak srpske države u srednjem veku (Development of the Serbian State
in the Middle Ages, 1942) summed up the entire historiographical canon,
Byzantium was the ‘one and the only civilized country of its time’ that had
the closest kinship with Serbs.22 Historians regarded Byzantine influences
on ‘Serbian national’ culture as complete and indelible, witnessed by
a variety of sources, from political organization to social and cultural
formations.23 A conspicuous example of this civilizational influence
was the state’s legislation and architecture of medieval churches and
monasteries, a topic widely discussed not only among art historians and
specialists24 but political historians too.25 What historians viewed as the
‘enormous civilizational power of Byzantium’ was utilized to portray the
Serbs, the ‘former Byzantine enemies’, as Byzantium’s cultural kinsmen,
empowered by a noble culture. ‘Anyone knowing our past’, wrote Stanoje
Stanojević in 1898, ‘is certainly familiar with the fact that Byzantium
enormously affected our nation in all aspects of its political and national
life’.26 One of Serbia’s first trained Byzantologists, Božidar Prokić, declared
that ‘Byzantine history is a prerequisite for understanding the Serbian
nation’s cultural and political formation in the past’,27 encapsulating
21
See Ljubomir Kovačević and Ljubomir Jovanović, Istorija srpskog naroda, 2 vols,
Belgrade, 1894, 2, pp. 77, 95–96; Vladimir Karić, Srbija: opis zemlje, naroda i države,
Belgrade, 1887, pp. 263 ff; Stojan Novaković, ‘Sloveni balkanski i njihova obrazovanost’,
Zora, 5, 1900, pp. 153–56; Stojan Novaković, ‘Srednjovekovna Srbija i rimsko pravo’, Arhiv
za pravne i društvene nauke, 1, 1906, pp. 208–26 (p. 216); Jovan Radonić, Prošlost Stare
Srbije, Belgrade, 1912, p. 12; Istorija Jugoslavije, p. 63; Jovan Radonić, ‘Prošlost Stare Srbije’,
Srpski književni glasnik, 29, 1912, 10, pp. 754–80.
22
Nikola Radojčić, Razvitak srpske države u srednjem veku, Belgrade, 1942, p. 115.
23
Srećković, Istorija srpskog naroda, 2, pp. 109 f; Konstantin Jiriček, Istorija Srba:
politička istorija do 1537. godine, 2 vols, Belgrade, 1911, 2, pp. 238, 298 ff; Radojčić, Razvitak
srpske države. See also, Sima Ćirković, ‘Der Hof der serbischen Herrscher: von der Burg
zur Rezidenzstadt’, in R. Lauer and H. G. Majer (eds), Höfische Kultur in Südosteuropa,
Göttingen, 1994, pp. 74–85.
24
The most conspicuous example is undoubtedly Andra Stevanović, ‘Srpska crkvena
arhitektura i njen značaj’, Srpski književni glasnik, 8, 1903, 7, pp. 514–22; 11, 1903, 1, pp.
47–54; 11, 1903, pp. 123–33; 11, 1903, 3, pp. 213–25; 11, 1904, 4, pp. 295–303; 11, 1903, 6, pp.
445–55. See also, Svetozar Stojanović, Srpski neimar, Belgrade, 1912. A valuable collection
of written sources on the topic is republished in Tanja Damljanović (ed.), Valtrović i
Milutinović. Dokumenti II – terenska gradja, Belgrade, 2007.
25
S. Novaković, ‘Nemanjićke prestonice: Ras-Pauni-Nerodimlja’, in Sima Ćirković
(ed.), Stojan Novaković: spisi iz istorijske geografije, Belgrade, 2003 [1910], pp. 215–50; Karić,
Srbija, pp. 297–99.
26
Stanoje Stanojević, ‘Grci i Srbi Vase Vujića’, Delo, 5, 1898, 18, pp. 482–83.
27
Božidar A. Prokić, ‘Vizantijske istorijske studije u Francuskoj’, Delo, 1906, 27, pp.
56–57 (p. 56).
the historiographical canon that would dominate the field in decades to
come. Importantly, historiography established a premise that the Serbs
of the thirteenth and fourteenth century became one of Byzantium’s key
inheritors and principal ‘developers’ of its culture, which was an idea
widely shared by historians not only throughout the period, but also much
later.28
Yet simultaneously with the narratives of Serbo-Byzantine kinship and
continuity, the relationships between medieval Serbia and Byzantium were
interpreted through the lens not just of political conflicts but of cultural
difference. In that sense, Serbian culture was simultaneously seen as a
continuation of that of Byzantium’s but also having been ennobled with a
new, fresh and ‘authentic’ national element. This dual perspective framed
a consequently established national narrative about Serbian culture and
history, which were seen as a shoot grown from a dual Slavic-Byzantine
heritage, a hybrid of Byzantine and Slavic cultures.29 This means that
the Serbian national historiography of the time purposely dismantled
the heritage of Byzantium into two essentialized facets, which largely
corresponded to the above-mentioned models of interpretation.
Byzantium’s dual status in Serbian medieval history was conveniently
reinforced by the interpretation of Emperor Stefan Dušan’s Code of Law
(1349, 1354),30 as well as medieval monastic architecture, especially that
of the fourteenth and early fifteenth century. Historiography developed
theses about both the cultural and political independence of Serbia,
which is a pattern that can be traced back to the earliest historiographical
accounts of the so-called romantic period in the mid-nineteenth century,
mirroring a common myth of national authenticity. Yet it was firmly
established only with the writings of Pantelija Srećković in the 1880s and
reiterated by succeeding historians. According to Srećković, the Serbian
medieval ruler Stefan Dušan (king from 1331–45, emperor from 1346–55),
determined to demolish Byzantium and to assert Serbia’s primacy in
the Balkans and created the ‘Serbo-Byzantine Empire’ (1346–55) which
28
See, for instance, Svetozar Radojćić, ‘Umetnost novog milenija’, in Odabrani članci i
studije, 1933–1978, Belgrade, 1982, pp. 62–64.
29
Interrelations between the Byzantine and Slavic culture is part of the history of
cultural transfer in general. This two-way process of influence was a widely discussed
topic among early Byzantine scholars, from Ivan Ivanovich Skolov to Nicolae Iorga. On
Sokolov and his legacy, see ‘From Vyzantism of K. Leont’ev to Vyzantinism of I. I. Sokolov’,
pp. 321–40.
30
Teodor Taranovski, Dušanov zakonik i Dušanovo carstvo, Novi Sad, 1926; Aleksandar
Solovjev, Zakonodavstvo Stefana Dušana, cara Srba i Grka, Skopje, 1928.
would replace Byzantium’s decaying political and cultural organism.31
This interpretational trope remained present in most of the subsequent
historiographical accounts up to the 1940s.32
While writing on the ‘Serbo-Byzantine Empire’ historians discussed
extensively the nature of Stefan Dušan’s emulation of Byzantine imperial
order and the exceptionally original character of his state, applying both
negativist and positivist perceptions of Byzantium. ‘The new, Serbian
Empire’, as Stojan Novaković put it, ‘was nothing but a Slavic form of the
Byzantine Empire!’ 33 Jovan Radonić, too, justified the vigour and freshness
of medieval Serbs which, although being under the thorough political
and cultural influence of Byzantium, were clearly characterized by an
‘independent creativity in literature, legislation and architecture’, which
made them the most advanced nation of the Balkans.34 This long-lasting
historiographical trend, which spanned the entire period in question,
is best represented by Konstantin Jireček’s accounts of medieval Serbs
being simultaneously ‘allies and rivals of the Byzantine Empire, yet never
direct subjects of the Constantinopolitan emperors’, neither political, nor
cultural.35
The political resonance of these overlapping models of interpretation,
which comprised the cultural association of medieval Serbia with
Byzantium and its differentiation from it, was tremendous. Since the
time of Ilija Garašanin’s Načertanije (The Draft, 1844), the first written
treatise to outline Serbian territorial aims and political objectives that was
kept secret for a long time,36 Serbian elites were trying to expand their
national territory and sovereignty, as well as conceptualize a nation-state,
ideally characterized by the congruence of ethnic and political boundaries.
However, modern Serbs (dubiously and ambivalently defined as a compact
nation by a variety of shifting criteria, ranging from religion to language,
depending on particular contexts) were widely scattered across regions
that were considered ‘national’ and ‘historical’, living in cohabitation with
other ethnic groups. In order to achieve the above-mentioned congruence
31
Srećković, Istorija srpskog naroda, 2, p. 344.
32
See Istorija Jugoslavije, pp. 162–63; Vizantija i Srbi, 2, p. 13; Stanojević, Istorija srpskog
naroda, pp. 145–46; ‘Prošlost Stare Srbije’, pp. 764–65; Stanoje Stanojević, ‘Prilike u
Vizantiji i na Balkanu za vreme prodiranja i naseljavanja Slovena’, Srpski književni glasnik,
17, 1906, 8, pp. 583–98.
33
‘Srednjovekovna Srbija i rimsko pravo’, p. 221.
34
Prošlost Stare Srbije, pp. 11–12.
35
Konstantin Jireček, Istorija Srba, 4 vols, Belgrade, 1922 [1911], 1, p. v.
36
It was first published in 1906 as ‘Program spoljne politike Ilije Garašanina na koncu
1844. godine’, Delo, 38, 1906, 1, pp. 321–36.
and to unite the nation culturally, Serbian elites were frequently trying
to substitute a simple concept of an ethnically defined nation-state with
a more convenient political entity, based on a multi-national idea. This
alternative concept, nevertheless, would have encompassed all the regions
inhabited by Serbs, providing them with a leading role in a future state.
This was the context in which national historiography helped justify these
modern political attitudes, when the idea of a Serb-led supra-national state
was developing simultaneously with the concept of an exclusively Serbian
national state.
Throughout the entire period, historians encouraged ideas of Serbian
political and cultural superiority in medieval history. This included the
importance of the nation’s state-crafting traditions in the context of Serbia’s
Piedmontal role within the South Slav national question. The usual tropes
of modern Serbia, which was ‘called upon to become a centre of strength in
the battle for national survival not only among Serbs, but all South Slavs’,37
as Vladimir Jovanović put it in 1885, were intertwined with enduring and
effective stereotypes of a culturally separate Serbian nation, which ‘had
achieved a greatly superior degree of cultural development’ already in the
Middle Ages.38 Even those firmly opposed to romantic historiography, like
Stojan Novaković, were engaged in a process of historical legitimization of
Serbian statecraft. ‘Serbs were the only Yugoslav tribe within the realm of
the Byzantine Empire’, wrote Novaković in 1880, ‘which firmly opposed
the Greeks, holding a banner of national independence. This is the reason
why the Serbian state, for the first time […] embarked on expansionism
and brought freedom and a national state to the neighbouring tribes’.39 As
the ideas of ‘bringing freedom’ to the neighbours undoubtedly resonated
in contemporary nation- and state-building context in the pre-First World
War era, many historians were further developing similar theses about a
multiethnic medieval Serbian empire. According to Milenko Vukićević,
the author of widely popular textbooks on Serbian history 40 — one of
those rare historians praised by Stanojević — ‘Serbian medieval rulers were
determined to create a mighty and powerful state, which would replace the
37
Vladimir Jovanović, ‘Društvena i međunarodna borba za opstanak’, Glasnik Srpskog
učenog društva, 60, 1885, pp. 165–256 (p. 251).
38
Dragutin J. Ilijć, ‘Srpska demokratija u srednjem veku’, Letopis Matice srpske, 163,
1890, 3, pp. 1–28 (p. 9).
39
Stojan Novaković, ‘Srpske oblasti u X i XII veku (pre vladavine Nemanjine).
Istorijsko-geografska studija’, Glasnik Srpskog učenog društva, 48, 1880, pp. 148–49.
40
See Charles Jelavich, ‘Serbian Textbooks: Towards Greater Serbia or Yugoslavia?’,
Slavic Review, 42, 1983, 4, pp. 601–19.
infirm Byzantine Empire and conduct the gathering of the other nations
of the Balkans’.41 Furthermore, he concluded, ‘Emperor Dušan constantly
had in his mind a great, powerful and well-ordered Serbian state […] which
would be a haven of peace for Greeks and Albanians’.42 In his later works,
Vukićević emphatically declared that Dušan ‘had always granted primacy
to Serbs, although trying to provide a free life and prosperity to all other
nations’.43
The same interpretive stream was widely shared not only by academic
historians, but also a wide spectrum of intellectuals and public workers
who encouraged the perception of the medieval Serbian empire not as
an ‘exclusively Serbian national state’, as Sreten J. Ristić explained in his
popular Razvitak vladalačke vlasti u srpskom narodu (Development of
Ruling Authority in the Serbian Nation, 1902), but a state that was ‘like
Byzantium in the past […] or the Habsburg Monarchy or Russia of today’.44
Similar accounts were not exclusively reserved to overtly nationalistic
authors, but were also explicit in the writings of declared pro-Yugoslavs,
such as Niko Županič or Jovan Cvijić. While in 1903 Županič firmly
believed that ‘There was no other nation than Serbia being predestined
to bring a new life to an old, enervated culture [of Byzantizum]’,45 Cvijić
authoritatively admonished in 1907 that ‘The world should know and be
sure that Serbia can operate a much larger territorial unit than it does
at the moment’.46 Cvijić would reiterate his assertion about Serbia being
restricted by its current borders a few years later.47
In the post-First World War period, this interpretational paradigm
received widespread public support which was further developed equally
by para-scholarly literature and the writings of distinguished historians.
Conclusions or premises, drawn even in 1929, in a heyday of integral
Yugoslavism, that it was ‘providence [that] has granted Serbs a leading
role in Yugoslavia’48 were duly historicized by the accounts of absolute
Serbian supremacy in the past. ‘With their martial virtues and consequent
41
Milenko Vukićević, Istorija srpskog naroda. Od dolaska Srba na Balkansko poluostrvo
do polovine XV stoleća, 2 vols, Belgrade, 1904, 1, p. 163.
42
M. Vukićević, Istorija srpskog naroda, 1, p. 178.
43
Milenko M. Vukićević, Istorija srpskoga naroda u slici i reči, Belgrade, 1912, pp. 204–05.
44
Sreten J. Ristić, Razvitak vladalačke vlasti u srpskom narodu, Belgrade, 1902, p. 48.
45
Niko Županič, ‘Maćedonija i turski problem’, Delo, 8, 1903, 2–3, pp. 161–206 (p. 170).
46
Jovan Cvijić, ‘O nacionalnom radu’, Srpski književni glasnik, 18, 1907, 5, pp. 340–62
(p. 358), emphasis added.
47
Jovan Cvijić, ‘Balkanski rat i Srbija’, Srpski književni glasnik, 29, 1912, 9, pp. 651–64
(p. 660).
48
Nikola Stojanović, ‘O zadatcima Bosne’, Letopis Matice srpske, 321, 1929, 2, pp. 271–72.
state-crafting aptitudes’, wrote Nikola Radojčić in 1940, ‘Serbs have far
surpassed their Slav kinsmen’.49 Indeed, a need for historical justification
of Serbian primacy did not cease to exist even after the Cvetković-Maček
Agreement had been signed in 1939, in the context of a bi-polar political
reorganization of Yugoslavia. In 1940, for instance, the historian and
university professor Dragoslav Stranjaković contextualized Garašanin’s
Načeranije as a programme for South Slav unification, with Serbia having
the power to become an ‘attractive core’ for Yugoslavs.50
One can therefore devise a hypothesis that the idea of a modern state,
in which Serbia would represent a core territory with Serbs as a dominant
nation, entailed inventing the nation’s historical antecedents. This, of
course, included the elaboration of the dynamics of historical development.
Serbian historians constructed their nation’s medieval history as a history
of the ‘national’ kingdom, which was believed to have been established
with the first Nemanjićs, reaching its historical apex with King Milutin’s
reign (1282–1321).51 As the state was succeeded by Emperor Dušan’s short-
lived empire, it transcended Serbian ethnic boundaries but still kept its
original ‘national’ character. As already suggested, the historiographical
construction of Stephen Dušan’s ‘multinational’ empire could easily
have suited political prospects of late nineteenth- and early-twentieth-
century Serbia as its modern equivalent and successor. For example, Vasa
Čubrilović’s praise of Stanojević’s Istorija srpskog naroda (History of the
Serbian Nation, 1908) as a key mobilization narrative in the context of the
‘great events of 1912–1918’,52 undoubtedly referred to the wider influence
of national historiography, saturated with the rhetoric of the ‘empire’s
renewal’. This particular interpretation was, of course, fully developed as
early as the 1880s. A few examples will suffice. In 1880 Stojan Novaković
believed that the powerful Serbian medieval state ‘became a foundation of
a more extensive national life […] representing a covenant for us, its late
descendants’.53 Three decades later, on the brink of the Balkan Wars, he
was still convinced that Serbia would have to keep its ‘imperative task of
serving as a core to numerous Yugoslav groups’.54 In the second edition
49
Nikola Radojčić, ‘Ratničke vrline Srba u srednjem veku’, Letopis Matice srpske, 353,
1940, 5–6, p. 325.
50
Dragoslav Stranjaković, ‘Srbija, privlačno središte Jugoslovena’, Srpski književni
glasnik, 61, 1940, 7, pp. 508–24.
51
See ‘Prošlost Stare Srbije’, pp. 754–80.
52
Vasa Čubrilović, ‘Stanoje Stanojević’, Srpski književni glasnik, 51, 1937, 8, p. 597.
53
Stojan Novaković, ‘Srpske oblasti u X i XII veku’, p. 150.
54
Cited after Radovan Samardžić, ‘Stojan Novaković u srpskoj istoriografiji’, in R.
Samardžić (ed.), Stojan Novaković: Iz srpske istorije, Novi Sad and Belgrade, 1966, pp. 7–57
of his Istorija srpskog naroda, published in 1910, as well as in his later Od
Velbužda do Kosova (From Velbazhd to Kosovo, 1931), Stanoje Stanojević
declared that Dušan’s empire was doomed to failure as it was ‘composed
of very different national, religious and cultural elements’,55 implicitly
suggesting that a remedy might have been provided only by their cultural
levelling — a practice that reflected the preoccupations of Serbian elites
in Yugoslavia. Interwar popular historiography was, nevertheless, more
explicit. ‘A great idea of Dušan’s,’ wrote Dr Vladimir Nikolić in 1927, ‘was
to transform the Balkans […] and to create a new order with Serbia as a
leader.’ 56 Furthermore, the same historian explained that ‘To transfer his
[Dušan’s] ideas in the present, if they still can germinate, is the task of our
society’, emphatically concluding that ‘Wholesome ideas never die, even if
their creators have been dead for centuries’.57
These historical concepts were constantly actualized and negotiated
among Serbian intellectuals who pursued expansionist designs either
through the model of a Serbian nation-state or supra-national political
integration, a process which eventually ended in the establishment of the
Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in 1918. However, the historical
justification of Serbian national supremacy, spurred by historiographical
narratives on Serbian-Byzantine relationships, did not cease to be relevant
in the new Yugoslav multiethnic context, which was sharply marked by
competing nation-building ideologies.
Between transfer and renewal

Historical interpretations of the relationship between Serbia and
Byzantium had a number of ideological functions that roughly fit into
two major ideological perspectives, those of nationalism and imperial
rule. The simultaneity of these perspectives testifies to the overlapping
of complementary, and not necessarily competing, political discourses
in Serbia of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The example
of Serbian historiography rather problematizes the traditional antithesis
between imperialism and nationalism, showing that a conjoined ideological
agenda of the two may not be incongruent. Traditional antitheses between
‘nation’ and ‘empire’, rooted in post-1918 theory and pointed out by
Ernest Gellner and many other modern scholars on nationalism, are not
(p. 53).
55
Stanoje Stanojević, Istorija srpskog naroda, Belgrade, 1910, p. 142. See also, St.
Stanojević, Od Velbužda do Kosova, Belgrade, 1931, pp. 2–9.
56
Dr Vladimir Nikolić, Istorija cara Stevana Dušana, Belgrade, 1927, p. 145.
57
Dr V. Nikolić, Istorija cara Stevana Dušana, p. xix.
58
always suitable. It seems the historically entangled opposition between
the empire and nation-state has more to do with abstract ideals and
interpretive models than with political or/and cultural realities.59 Indeed,
imperialism and nationalism are not necessarily set against each other but
are interwoven, and ‘appear as twin expressions of the same phenomenon
of power’.60 Modern empires of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century were relational in character, sharply marked by the hegemony
of ‘core-nations’. This means that modern imperial ideas were mostly
characterized by the political and cultural supremacy of one national
group which ruled over geographically, culturally and ethnically diverse
entities and not necessarily vast territories.61 Furthermore, it seems that in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there were neither sharp
oppositions between nation-states and empires, nor were any fundamental
differences apparent between empires and nation-states as regards the
models of legitimizing political power, historiography included.62 While
the key attributes of modern empires seem to be the ‘management of
space and multi-ethnicity’ along with ‘“hard power” in the international
context’,63 the political rationale of modern empires was usually highly
compatible ‘with the idea of the sovereign nation-state that projects […]
power beyond its borders’.64 All these features are entirely applicable to the
context of developing nationalisms justified by national historiographies in
the early-twentieth-century Balkans.
58
Joseph W. Esherick, Hasan Kayali & Eric van Young, ‘Introduction’, in J. W. Esherick,
H. Kayali & E. van Young (eds), Empire to Nation: Historical Perspectives on the Making of
the Modern World, Oxford, 2006, pp. 1–31; Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: History’s
Age of Hatred, London, 2006; Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, Oxford, 1983.
59
See Ilya Gerasimov et al., ‘New Imperial History and the Challenges of Empire’, in
Ilya Gerasimov, Jan Kubsner & Alexander Semyonov (eds), Empire Speaks Out: Languages
of Racionalization and Self-Description in the Russian Empire, Leiden, 2009, pp. 3–32;
Dominic Lieven, ‘Dilemmas of Empire 1850–1918: Power, Territory, Identity’, Journal of
Contemporary History, 34, (1999), 2, pp. 163–200.
60
Krishan Kumar, ‘Empire and English Nationalism’, Nations and Nationalism, 12,
2006, 1, p. 2. See also, Chris A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World: 1780–1914. Global
Connections and Comparisons, Oxford, 2004, p. 230.
61
See Richard Koebner, Empire, Cambridge, 1961; Erik J. Hobsbawm, The Age of
Empire, 1875–1914, London, 1987. See also, Alexander J. Motyl, ‘Why Empires Reemerge:
Imperial Collapse and Imperial Revival in Comparative Perspective’, Comparative Politics,
21, 1999, 2, pp. 127–45; Michael Dole, Empires, Ithaca, NY, 1986.
62
Maciej Janowski, ‘Justifying Political Power in 19th Century Europe: The Habsburg
Monarchy and Beyond’, in Alexei Miller and Alfred J. Rieber (eds), Imperial Rule,
Budapest and New York, 2004, p. 78. See Heather Jones, ‘The German Empire’, in Robert
Gerwarth and Erez Manela (eds), Empires at War 1911–1923, Oxford, 2014, p. 57.
63
Lieven, ‘Dilemmas of Empire 1850–1918’, p. 133.
64
Gerasimov et al., ‘New Imperial History and the Challenges of Empire’, p. 7.
Mainstream historical narratives of the Balkan nations at the time were
based on similar perspectives and comparable adoption of the Byzantine
legacy. For example, Nicolae Iorga (1871–1949), a key Romanian historian
of the first half of the twentieth century, established a Romanian national
canon in historiography by placing the Romanian nation and its history
in the midst of a historical-geographical entity which he conveniently
called Byzance après Byzance.65 In spite of creating a supra-national
interpretational pattern, which differed from the predominant nationalistic
historiography of his contemporaries, Iorga simultaneously supported the
idea of Byzantium as common Balkan heritage and asserted a leading role
of Romanians as Byzantium’s prime heirs and a paramount nation of the
Balkans.66 Following the interpretational model of Byzantine succession
which, apart from Serbia, was also developed in Greek historiography,
Iorga wrote that Romanian post-medieval history, along with that of the
Ottoman Empire, clearly demonstrated the continuity of Byzantium,
providing a point of departure for what he named ‘Greek Byzantium’
and ‘Slavic Byzantium’,67 while at the same time denouncing both Serbs
and Bulgarians as mere imitators (and not inheritors) of Byzantium.68
At the same time, Greek historians and followers of Konstantinos
Paparrigopoulos, the founder of modern Greek history, such as Dimitrios
Vikelas (1835–1908) and Spyridon Lambros (1851–1919), formulated a
structurally similar concept of continuity with the Byzantine Empire,
conceived through the ideological perspective of Megale Idea (The Great
Idea), by which Byzantium was Hellenized and consequently seen as a
sublime expression and continuation of the Hellenic national genius.69
These competing historical discourses, which reflected the political
65
See Nicolae Iorga, Byzance après Byzance. Continuation de l’Histoire de la vie
Byzantine, Bucharest, 1935 (Nicolae Iorga, Byzantium after Byzantium, trans. Laura
Treptow, Iaşi, 2000).
66
Lucian Boia, History and Myth in Romanian Consciousness, Budapest, 1997, pp. 63–67,
177–180; Virgil Cândea, ‘Introduction’, in ‘Byzantium after Byzantium, pp. 7–23.
67
Nicolae Iorga, Formes byzantines et réalités balcaniques, Bucharest-Paris, 1922;
Nicolae Iorga, Istoria statelor balcanice în epoca modernă, Vălenii-de-Munte, 1913, p. 11.
68
Nicolae Iorga, Choses d’Orient et de Roumanie, Bucharest, 1924, p. 40.
69
See Paschalis Kitromilides, ‘On the Intellectual Content of Greek Nationalism:
Paparrigopoulos, Byzantium and the Great Idea’, in David Ricks and Paul Magdalino (eds),
Byzantium and Modern Greek Identity, London, 1998, pp. 25–33; Paschalis Kitromilides,
‘”Imagined Communities” and the Origins of the National Question in the Balkans’,
European History Quarterly, 19, 1989, 2, pp. 149–92; Gregory Jusdanis, The Necessary
Nation, Princeton, NJ, 2001, p. 108; Antonis Liakos, ‘Hellenism and the Making of Modern
Greece: Time, Language, Space’, in Katerina Zacharia (ed.), Hellenisms: Culture, Identity
and Ethnicity from Antiquity to Modernity, Aldershot, 2008, pp. 201–36.
landscape of the Balkans, were closely linked with the contemporaneous
Serbian historiography of the period, which centred on Serbia as the
cultural and political heir to Byzantium.
Although Serbian national historiography remained decisively
important in justifying political power and territorial aspirations, it was
not only scholarship that enabled the ideas of Serbian imperial heritage
and Byzantine succession to become instrumental and active in shaping
modern political objectives. The deep impact of the intellectual ferment
from which Garašanin’s Načertanije arose, which utilized the same
arguments about Serbia’s succession to Byzantium that permeated national
historiography, helped to outline a framework of national mission in
following decades.70 A crucial argument of Garašanin’s treatise and its
early-twentieth-century ramifications was based on the powerful hold of
historical state rights and a need for the ‘resurrection of medieval Serbian-
Slavic empire’ seen as arising from the ‘fallen Byzantium’.71
As already explained, the same premise was constantly examined in
Serbian nation-building historiography. This involved the comparison
and identification of medieval Nemanjićs with modern Serbian royal
dynasties, both the Obrenovićs and Karadjordjevićs,72 which was a typical
nationalistic attempt to link ‘present dynasties and peoples with illustrious
ancient pedigrees’.73 Serbian historians elaborated ideas of continuity and
historical rights, reinforcing the fusion of nationalism and imperialism
that otherwise permeated public discourse.74
The appropriation of Byzantium and the consequent interpretation
of a national past were developing under the pressure of competing
national ideologies of the Balkan nations,75 as well as a paternalizing
Western discourse which was a perennial issue associated with the Eastern
Question.76 At the same time, the political landscape of the Balkans of the
70
Marie-Janine Calic, Geschichte Jugoslawiens im 20. Jahrhundert, Munich, 2010, pp. 48–55.
71
Cited after Radoš Ljušić, Knjiga o načertaniju: nacionalni i državni program
Kneževine Srbije (1844), Kragujevac, 2003, p. 190.
72
Djura Vrbavac, Nemanjići i Obrenovići ili upoređenje dva svetla perioda u našoj
prošlosti, Kragujevac, 1899; Sreten J. Ristić, Razvitak vladalačke vlasti u srpskom narodu,
Belgrade, 1902, pp. 89–90; Novaković, ‘O ulozi vladaoca’, pp. 306–07. See also Nenad
Makuljević, Crkvena umetnost u Kraljevini Srbiji 1882–1914, Belgrade, 2007, pp. 14–28.
73
Anthony D. Smith, The Antiquity of Nations, Cambridge, 2004, p. 215.
74
See Victor Roudometof, Nationalism, Globalization and Orthodoxy: The Social
Origins of Ethnic Conflicts in the Balkans, Westport, CT, 2001, pp. 101–30.
75
Anthony D. Smith, Chosen Peoples: Sacred Sources of National Identity, Oxford, 2003,
pp. 203–04.
76
See Ristić, Razvitak vladalačke vlasti, pp. 88–105; Aleksandar Pogodin, ‘Da li je
rešeno Istočno pitanje?’, Srpski književni glasnik, 25, 1928, 4, pp. 289–93.
late nineteenth and early twentieth century was marked by the ideology
of the ‘liberation and unification’ of South Slavs, which went hand in
hand with the idea of Serbian national supremacy. Serbian national
historiography was also involved in the ‘historical justification’ of political
culture in Serbia, as well as Yugoslavia, distinguished by authoritarian rule
and monarchism, rigid centralism of the state administration, as well as
the influence of the Serbian Orthodox Church on public affairs. Although
these political attitudes were present in the work of earlier generations
of Serbian historians, primarily Panta Srećković, Milan Ubavkić and
Ljubomir Kovačević,77 they never cease to capture historians’ imagination.
This was most notable in the interwar period when the need for justifying
growing authoritarianism was constantly on the rise — not only during
King Alexander Karadjordjević’s reign (1921–34) but throughout the 1930s
as well.78
The historiographical construction of medieval Serbs as heirs to
the Byzantine Empire and concurrent ideas about the restitution of the
medieval ‘Serbo-Byzantine’ state were generically linked to the classical
doctrines of translatio imperii and renovatio imperii,79 the doctrines which
were otherwise employed in various contemporary national narratives and
the romantic tradition of history writing.80 Serbian national historiography
was suffused with echoes of the concept of renovatio which was, as in many
other cases in modern history, adapted to the aims of genuine nationalism
in order to justify political and cultural dominance or to secure power.
Many Serbian historians of the period advanced a thesis about medieval
‘nation-states’ reaching their apogees and endeavouring to surpass ‘ethnic’
limits and conquer vast territories, far beyond ethnographic boundaries.
This schema was often utilized to explain the genesis of the ‘multinational’
medieval Serbian empire81 which was nevertheless ‘based on the national
idea’.82 The ideological relevance of these historiographical accounts went
into public discourse simultaneously with the political maturity of Serbian
elites preoccupied with the enlargement of the state — either through a
77
This is best represented in Pantelija Srećković, Iz istorije srpske: Česlav (933–962),
Belgrade, pp. 32, 45–46, 56; Milan S. Ubavkić, Istorija Srba, Belgrade, 1891, pp. 8–9, 27,
36–38, 136–37; Lj. Kovačević and Lj. Jovanović, Istorija srpskog naroda, 2, pp. 155–56.
78
See particularly, Radonić, Prošlost Stare Srbije, pp. 6–7; Ćorović, Istorija Jugoslavije,
pp. 162–63; Radojčić, Razvitak srpske države, pp. 112–13.
79
See, for instance, Randall Lesafer, European Legal History: A Cultural and Political
Perspective, Cambridge, 2009, pp. 145–48.
80
See Janowski, ‘Justifying Political Power’, pp. 78–79.
81
Radojčić, Razvitak srpske države, p. 116.
82
programme of Serbian ‘national liberation’ or, alternatively, South Slavic
unity (which was sometimes constructed and seen as a euphemism for
Serbian territorial enlargements).83 In any case, the ideas of re-creating
the medieval Serbian state were widely shared and discussed by historians
in reference to the restitution of Stefan Dušan’s Empire, either in the
perspective of a genuinely national or enlarged, multinational state.84 This
ambivalent but instrumental attitude concerned most nation-building
historians. Panta Srećković, for instance, while writing on the lessons of
the medieval past, advocated a ‘restoration of our empire’ and ‘renewal
of [Stefan] Dušan’s Empire’.85 His and other contemporary historians’
accounts, which mirrored concurrent preoccupations with the nation’s
glory in its medieval past, were followed by writers such as Stanoje
Stanojević who spoke about the restoration of the medieval Serbian state
as a remedy for the nation’s prospective unity.86 Eventually, a belief in the
return of a national golden age became a ‘symbol of the communal desires
and ideals of the Serbian people’ and the ‘covenant of all Serbs’.87
The discourse of the empire’s restoration went hand in hand with a
complementary concept of translatio imperii, which was used to explain
and justify medieval Serbia as a successor to the Eastern Roman Empire
seen from the perspective of its decline. It has already been explained
that unlike the ‘Serbian national’ kingdom of the early Nemanjićs, which
was thought to be characterized by an ‘ethnical kernel cherished and
protected in a hard shell of the national state’,88 Stefan Dušan’s ‘Serbo-
Byzantine Empire’, along with King Milutin’s kingdom as its immediate
ideological predecessor, were believed to be predestined to replace declining
Byzantium. Following the negativist model of Byzantium’s perception, all
Serbian historians of the period depicted the Eastern Roman Empire of the
thirteenth and fourteenth century as a mere shadow of its former glory, a
83
Dennison Rusinow, ‘The Yugoslav Idea before Yugoslavia’, in Dejan Djokić (ed.),
Yugoslavism: Histories of a Failed Idea, 1918–1992, London, 2003, pp. 20–21; Kosta St.
Pavlowitch, ‘The First World War and the Unification of Yugoslavia’, in Yugoslavism, p. 28;
Ivo Banac, National Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics, Ithaca, NY, 1988, pp.
98–102.
84
See H. Sundhaussen, Geschichte Serbiens im 19.–20. Jahrhundert, Vienna, Cologne
and Weimar, 2007, p. 32; George W. White, Nationalism and Territory: Constructing Group
Identity in Southeastern Europe, Lanham, MD and Oxford, 2000, pp. 187–89,
85
86
Stanojević, Istorija srpskog naroda, pp. 206–09, 296–346.
87
Stanoje Stanojević, Car Dušan, Belgrade, 1922, pp. 3, 5. See also, Ubavkić, Istorija
Srba, p. 100.
88
Sima M. Ćirković, ‘Moravska Srbija u istoriji srpskog naroda’, in Vojislav Djurić (ed.),
Moravska škola i njeno doba, Belgrade, 1968, p. 104.
notoriously moribund organism which had to be ‘supplanted’ by the most
vital and strongest state of the Balkans, which was that of the Nemanjićs.
Serbian historiography depicted Emperor Dušan’s state as Byzantium’s
only legitimate heir in spite of the fact that the same heritage had been
frequently associated with several other states of the same era, such as
the Second Bulgarian Empire (1185–1422) or the Empire of Trebizond
(1204–1461). Some historians, especially Konstantin Jireček and Vladimir
Ćorović, firmly believed that the creation of Stefan Dušan’s Empire was
inspired by the Bulgarian case,89 which was an idea also shared by Stojan
Novaković.90 Regardless of these variants of interpretation, historians
associated what they saw as basic features of Byzantine politics — such
as ‘Roman imperialism’ and ‘autocracy’ — with the political culture of
medieval Serbia. Its depiction as a ‘classic realm of autocracy in Europe’
acquired strong political connotations, both positive and negative. Stojan
Novaković in particular developed these theses while describing the
idea of continuity of the ‘autocrats of Rome and Constantinople’, which
was ostensibly adopted by the Nemanjićs and believed to have been
consciously re-established by rulers of modern Serbia.91 Emperor Stefan
Dušan was accordingly called the ‘new Constantine’92 and the royal
lineage of medieval Nemanjićs was thought to have descended from the
first Christian emperor — a nebulous trope, taken from medieval sources,
which was reiterated in the period’s historiography and beyond.93
All these features explain why relationships between Byzantium and
medieval Serbia were interpreted through a double prism of political
conflict and cultural succession, with the Serbian royal dynasty —
interpreted as ‘national’ by historians — seen as the only capable
inheritor of the Byzantine throne. This was a common characteristic of
the whole historiographical tradition, including both the first ‘romantics’
and subsequent ‘critics’. The image of Byzantium as a ‘corrupted and
thoughtless society’,94 a country of ‘sly proprietors’95 characterized by
‘poverty and moral decay’96 as well as ‘chaos and anarchy’,97 was narrated
89
Jireček, Istorija Srba, 2, p. 222; Istorija Jugoslavije, p. 153. See also, Ljubomir
Maksimović, Vizantijski svet i Srbi, Belgrade, 2008, p. 205.
90
Novaković, ‘Nekolika teža pitanja’, p. 69.
91
Novaković, ‘O ulozi vladaoca u državnom organizmu’, pp. 306–07.
92
93
Ibid., pp. 484–85; Stanojević, Car Dušan, pp. 8–23. See also, Vizantijski svet i Srbi, p. 139.
94
Srećković, Istorija srpskog naroda, 2, pp. 36 ff.
95
Ibid., p. 189.
96
Ibid., p. 358. See also: Stanojević, Vizantija i Srbi, 2, pp. 119–20.
97
repeatedly — from Srećković in the 1870s and 1880s to Stanojević in the
1930s — and became the emblem of the national historiographical canon of
the interwar period. Stanojević, for instance, depicted the Eastern Roman
Empire as an enfeebled organism which had continuously ‘languished and
vegetated’ since the time of Justinian, in sharp contrast to a Slavic potency
and vigour. As Milan Ubavkić put in 1891, succinctly expressing the same
interpretive tradition whilst using the metaphor of David and Goliath,
‘once vast, glorious, and haughty Byzantium was to submit to a small, but
courageous Serbian fist’.98
An integral part of the translatio explanatory model, which was closely
linked to the negativist perception of Byzantium, was the idea of the
‘Greek yoke’. Being reiterated throughout the entire historiographical
tradition, it originated in Srećković’s accounts on Byzantium’s continuous
ambitions to conquer and dominate medieval Serbs (either politically,
culturally or both), which was a process that paradoxically coincided
with the growing deterioration of the Eastern Roman Empire from the
twelfth to the fourteenth century.99 The same historian acknowledged
the various kinds of negative influences deriving from Byzantine political
and cultural traditions on medieval Serbia, affecting primarily its ‘Slavic
core’ and what was commonly believed to represent a primordial form of
Serbian self-government embodied in the state of the first Nemanjics.100
The next generation of historians, including Srećković’s staunchest critics
such as Dimitrije Ruvarac and Stojan Novaković, nonetheless kept the
same strain of interpretation while writing on the relationship between
Serbia and Byzantium. Novaković in particular developed a thesis about
the detrimental influence of Byzantium on medieval Serbia in terms of its
pursuit of imperialist attitudes and its unnatural striving for expansion.101
On the other hand, the opposition between vigorous Serbs and decadent
Byzantines, which was initially constructed by historians of Srećković’s
generation, continued to have a prominent place in historiography.
Amongst many others, Stanoje Stanojević was a principal proponent of an
ancient cultural and moral divide between Serbs and Greeks.102 This idea
supported his and his follower’s historical determinism and theories of the
inevitability of the Serbian translatio.103 The vivid contrast of prosperous
98
Ubavkić, Istorija Srba, p. 172.
99
Srećković, Istorija srpskog naroda, 2, pp. 36–42.
100
Ibid., pp. 811–16.
101
Novaković, ‘Nekolika teža pitanja’, pp. 87–91.
102
Stanojević, Istorija srpskog naroda, pp. 84–85, 91–94.
103
Ibid., pp. 139, 155.
Serbs versus ‘decaying and atrophied’ 104 Byzantines served as a subtle
justification of medieval Serbia’s supposed transition from a small tribal
state to become the sole successor to the Eastern Roman Empire.
In the political context of the late nineteenth and especially during
the first decades of the twentieth century, the ideological backdrop of
these epistemological-ideological concepts was becoming more and more
appealing and applicable. Historians regarded the ‘Serbian element’
as a ‘mainstay of [multinational] Stefan Dušan’s Empire’,105 with Serbs
representing an imperial core-nation and ‘principal community’,106 a
nation predestined to become a leader in the modern era. Like its medieval
predecessor, a new multinational political entity, be it ‘Greater Serbia’ or
a unified South Slavic state, would be dominated by Serbs as the major
ethnic group of the Balkans. This attitude, which pretty well sums up
the viewpoints of many Serbian scholars, and not only historians, was
explicit from the formative works of the nation-building historiography
and elaborated by Jovan Radonić 107 and Milan Ubavkić,108 as well as
Kovačević and Jovanović.109 The fact that Serbian linguists and ethnologists
simultaneously fortified the same argument using anthropological
evidence, as Jovan Cvijić did in his influential work O nacionalnom radu
(On National Action, 1907) — a work that Vladimir Ćorović would later
praise, calling it ‘a national gospel of a kind’ 110 — further induced a
tension between the ‘glorious’ past, puny present and promising future
of the nation.111 The idea of Serbs as great masters of statecraft, and of
Serbs as a cornerstone of the medieval empire which would retain its
status in a future multinational state, gained momentum with the rise of
Yugoslavism in the 1910s and 1920s. This idea was further propelled by
interwar Serbian historians, most notably Vladimir Ćorović.112 However,
it was Stanoje Stanojević’s seminal book, Istorija srpskog naroda (History
of the Serbian Nation, 1908) that firmly established Serbs as historical
state-builders and the imperial core-nation. He elaborated an inherent
Serbian propensity for state-building, which had supposedly marked the
entire history of Serbia since the early Middle Ages and had had magnetic
104
Stanojević, Od Velbužda do Kosova, p. 1.
105
Stanojević, Istorija srpskog naroda, p. 13.
106
Ćorović, Istorija Jugoslavije’, p. 153.
107
Radonić, Prošlost Stare Srbije, pp. 14–15.
108
See Ubavkić, Istorija Srba.
109
See Kovačević and Jovanović, Istorija srpskognaroda, vol. 2.
110
V. Ćorović, ‘Nacionalni značaj Jovana Cvijića’, Srpski književni glasnik, 50, 1937, 3,
pp. 182–89 (p. 186).
111
Cvijić, ‘O nacionalnom radu’, pp. 340–62, esp. 342, 352, 358.
112
Ćorović, Istorija Jugoslavije, pp. 127–31.
effects on all Balkan ethnic groups, both Slavic and non-Slavic. Stanojević’s
thesis profoundly affected interwar historians.113 In his later works on the
subject, he further developed these theses which strongly resonated not
only among professional historians but had a tremendous impact on the
wider historical imagination.114
From the mid 1930s, historical arguments about Serbian national and
racial supremacy in the medieval Balkans were reinterpreted through
more systematic explorations of how medieval Serbs had reached ‘ethnic
and state advancement’ and eventually managed to craft an empire. They
had managed to do this through what Stanojević called the ‘ethnic and
state offensive of the Serbian nation’,115 which Vladimir Dvorniković and
others further developed in the late 1930s.116 Possessing ‘state-crafting
genes’ inherited from their Slavic ancestors, medieval Serbs advanced
successfully through the Balkans, enhancing and refining the adopted
Byzantine heritage, disseminating a uniquely superb national culture,
levelling ethnic differences and uniting the entire population of the
Balkans. This model of interpretation, which obviously reflected the
contemporaneous theories of Gleichschaltung,117 as well as the concurrent
trend of the cultural unification of the Serbian nation through various
cultural and political means, was a topically resonant theme in the context
of increasing conflicts between the country’s major national groups,
most notably Serbs and Croats. The interwar period was distinguished
by the further development of these ideas, with a number of works being
produced to justify the uneven distribution of political power in the
country, sharply marked by the dominance of Serbs — in politics, military
service and culture.118 Furthermore, the interpretations of Stefan Dušan’s
113
Stanojević, Istorija srpskog naroda, pp. 40–51; Božidar Kovačević, ‘Srpski udeo u
bugarskoj kulturi’, Srpski književni glasnik, 59, 1940, 4, pp. 264–70; 5, pp. 366–76; Drag.
[oslav] Stranjaković, ‘Srbija, privlačno sedište Jugoslovena’, Srpski književni glasnik, 61,
1940, 7, pp. 508–24.
114
See, for instance, Stanoje Stanojević, Istorija srpskog naroda za srednje i stručne
škole, Belgrade, 1919, pp. 35–83.
115
Stanojević, Od Velbužda do Kosova, pp. 1–2; St.[anoje] Stanojević, ‘Postanak srpskog
naroda’, Srpski književni glasnik, 41, 1934, 2, pp. 110–17.
116
Vladimir Dvorniković, Karakterologija Jugoslovena, Belgrade, 1939, pp. 851–54.
117
The term Gleichschaltung was used in the German context of the 1930s to express the
meaning of a compact and unitary nation based on cultural, social and political harmony.
See Catherine A. Epstein, Nazi Germany: Confronting the Myths, Oxford, 2015, pp. 50–51;
Roderick Stackelberg, Hitler’s Germany: Origins, Interpretations, Legacies, London, 2014,
pp. 106–06.
118
See, for instance, Ćorović, Istorija Jugoslavije, pp. 127–31, 147–54; Kovačević, ‘Srpski
udeo u bugarskoj kulturi’, pp. 264–70; Stranjaković, ‘Srbija, privlačno sedište’, pp. 508–24.
appellation as the ‘Serbo-Byzantine Emperor’ 119 and, more formally, the
‘Emperor of the Serbs and Greeks’,120 historicized the idea of a multiethnic
state ruled by a Serbian monarch and dominated by Serbs, which would
suit the modern nation- and state-building context. The ideological
flexibility of historical narratives was the main reason for the endurance
of this particular interpretational paradigm.
A widespread tradition of likening King Alexander I Karadjordjević to
Emperor Dušan might further have reinforced the parallelism of medieval
Serbian empire and the South Slav modern kingdom. Having been initially
developed on the eve of the Balkan Wars, when the then Prince Alexander
started his military career, this tradition was particularly amplified after
the king’s assassination in 1934, not only by patriotic panegyrists,121 but
also academic historians.122 Drawing explicit parallels between Dušan’s
and Alexander’s political projects was not an uncommon practice, with
the famous French Byzantologist Gabriel Millet’s inaugural speech at
the Second Congress of Byzantine Studies held in Belgrade in 1927 being
amongst its most conspicuous examples. He identified Emperor Stefan
Dušan’s state with that of ‘our time, in which a mighty state of Serbs,
Croats and Slovenes was created under the sceptre of our [Serbian] king’.123
This was particularly resonant in the atmosphere of heightened ideological
consciousness among many Serbian intellectuals and the political elite of
the time.
A crucial aspect of the entire historiographical tradition was the
question of national distinctiveness and cultural exceptionality. It is true
that medieval Serbian culture was seen by historians as being heavily
influenced by Byzantium, but only partly Byzantinized. At the heart of
the economy of the Serbian translatio imperii were cultural difference
and cultural parentage, notions explained through apparent contrasts
between two historical cultures, namely, the Serbian and Greek. This, for
instance, led not only Vladimir Ćorović to say that the forceful ‘Serbo-
Byzantine Empire’ was predestined to replace the ‘exhausted and decaying’
Byzantium, but also many other historians to base their work on the
119
Stanojević, Car Dušan, p. 16.
120
See Maksimović, Vizantijski svet i Srbi, pp. 133–49, 191–206.
121
Al.[eksandar] Jovanović, Postanak Egzarhije i Turska, Rusija i Srbija: istorijsko-
politička rasprava, Skopje, 1936, p. 168.
122
Vladimir Ćorović, ‘Kralj Aleksandar’, Srpski književni glasnik, 43, 1934, 4, pp. i–viii
(p. i).
123 ‘
Juče je u kraljevom prisustvu otvoren kongres vizantologa u Beogradu’, Vreme
(Belgrade), 12 April 1927. See also, ‘Svečano otvaranje vizantološkog kongresa’, Politika
(Belgrade), 12 April 1927.
economy of cultural contrasts.124 The images of the Byzantine Empire as
an enervated ‘Serbian mother’ were complemented by an image of Serbia
as a vigorous ‘daughter of Byzantium’.125 These ideas were reinforced
by interpretations of culture, especially medieval Serbian frescoes and
monastic architecture, which were seen as ‘branches’ of a Byzantine ‘stem’,
or a Byzantine seed ‘grown on the domestic soil’.126 To overcome the
detrimental influence of Byzantium’s political decadence and continue
its sophisticated but ossified culture that had already been in decline127
— all these aims represented a very essence of the discourse. The ‘Serbo-
Byzantine Empire’ of the Nemanjićs was consequently seen as a shoot
grown from a dual Slavic-Byzantine heritage, a hybrid of Byzantine and
Slavic cultures. As the historian Stanoje Stanojević put it in his seminal
work in 1903, ‘A great part of Serbian [medieval] culture — state affairs,
administrative, military and church organization, as well as education and
material culture — were taken from Byzantium and grafted onto [Serbian]
national distinctiveness’.128 Employing parental and botanical metaphors
to support the theses of cultural distinctiveness was a common practice
among historians who wrote extensively of a cultural and moral supremacy
of Serbia over Byzantium. This tradition, which can also be followed
in art history, lasted more than fifty years, starting with Srećković and
ending with Ćorović, who concluded in an exhilarating mood that Serbia’s
‘self-propelled state became an improved [form of] empire, whilst the old
Byzantium, by reason of its feebleness, had fallen into ruins like a worm-
eaten timber’.129
Serbian historians by and large remained amenable to the idea that
the ‘Byzantine element’ had been perfected and improved by the Serbian
‘popular spirit’ and ‘national traditions’,130 for which they provided a variety
of evidence, such as a genuine Serb peasant system of self-government,
124
Ćorović,Istorija Jugoslavije, p. 152.
125
Mihailo Valtrović, ‘Studenica’, Srpske ilustrovane novine za zabavu, pouku, umetnost
i književnost, 1, 1881, 8, p. 122; Mihailo Valtrović, ‘Govor kojim je izaslanik Srpskog učenog
društva za snimanje umetničkih starina po Srbiji, Mihailo Valtrović otvorio drugi izlog
snimaka arhitektonskih, skulptornih i živopisnih; 14. aprila 1874. god’, in Valtrović i
Milutinović, p. 106.
126
Dragutin S. Milutinović, ‘Kratka rasprava pri otvaranju petog izloga snimaka
arhitektonskih, živopisnih i skulpturnih, 14. maja 1878. godine’, Glasnik Srpskog učenog
društva, 74, 1879, 264, pp. 182–83; Mihailo Valtrović, Ο προδρομοσ: Mittheilungen über
neue Forschungen auf dem Gebiete serbischer Kirchenbaukunst: mit einer Tafel, Vienna,
1878, p. 160; Radojčić, Razvitak srpske države, p. 140.
127
Novaković, ‘Srednjovekovna Srbija i rimsko pravo’, p. 221.
128
Stanojević, Vizantija i Srbi, 2, p. iv (emphasis added).
129
Ćorović, Istorija Jugoslavije, p. 152.
130
Radojčić, Razvitak srpske države, p. 119.
popular democracy, communal assemblies and peasant communes, as well
as Byzantine-inspired, improved and authentically rendered architecture
and visual arts. This may indicate the ideological instrumentality of
Serbian national historiography and the fact that both the renovatio and
translatio concepts were utilized according to modern political standards
and ideological needs. Indeed, the question of Serbian inclinations to
imperial rule being historicized and justified by the purported superiority
of medieval Serbs over the rest of the Balkan nations was central to
many contemporaneous historical narratives. This is the reason why the
adopted and ‘perfected’ Byzantine cultural heritage became so significantly
purposeful in the context of modern Serbian nation- and state-building. Yet
there was another aspect of Serbian imperial imagination which became
crucial for the ideological employment of Serbian-Byzantine relationships
in the context of competing nation-building agendas of the time. This was
the question of an autocephalous Serbian Orthodox Church.
Nationalized church, national empire

During the ‘long nineteenth century’ the strengthening of nationalism
among the Christian nations of the Balkans was spurred by the process
of gaining both political independence from the Ottoman Empire and
autocephaly from the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople. The
parallelism of independent national states and churches played a key role
in the political life of the Balkans of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century. The Greek Orthodox Church was the first to declare religious-
national independence in 1833, followed by the Bulgarians in 1870, the
Serbs in 1879 and, finally, the Romanians in 1885.131 As John Meyendorf
put it, ‘since the political goal of all the nationalities consisted of seeking
the creation of nation-states — which were seen as the ultimate fulfilment
of cultural growth and maturity — the idea of “autocephaly” came to be
thought of as the nation’s ecclesiastical equivalent’.132
The question of the autocephalous Serbian Orthodox Church was
extremely important for the legitimization of national independence
and encouragement of the constantly evolving and diversifying political
131
See Paschalis M. Kitromilides, ‘The Ecumenical Patriarchate’, in Lucian N. Leustean
(ed.), Orthodox Christianity and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Southeastern Europe,
New York, 2014, pp. 14–32; Paschalis M. Kitomilides, ‘The Orthodox Church in Modern
State Formation in South-Eastern Europe’, in Alina Mungiu Pippidi and Wim van Meurs
(eds), Ottomans into Europeans: State and Institution Building in South Eastern Europe,
London, 2010, pp. 31–50; Roudometof, Nationalism, pp. 101–30.
132
John Meyendorff, The Byzantine Legacy in the Orthodox Church, Crestwood, NY,
2001, p. 271.
133
agendas. As a framework for imagining the renewal of the ‘Serbo-
Byzantine Empire’, autocephaly was thought to represent a rebirth of the
Serbian medieval ‘ancestral’ church. This was regarded as a crucial step
in the reestablishment of the Peć Patriarchate, the church organization of
medieval Serbia, which had been elevated to the status of a Patriarchate
from the previously established archbishopric simultaneously with the
declaration of the empire in 1346. The Patriarchate itself had a chequered
history: first abolished by the Ottoman Turks in the 1460s, it was restored
in 1557 to be suspended anew in 1766.134 In the Serbian historiography of
the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (which shared common
views of many Balkan historians about the interdependence of medieval
churches and states, as well as the association of religion and national
identity)135 the Serbian Orthodox Church was considered a custodian of
genuine national traditions and deemed a stakeholder of the restitution of
medieval empire.136 Historical writing advanced the thesis that the Serbian
national idea had persisted owing to the survival of the ‘national’ church
after the country had been conquered by the Ottomans,137 which was a
very similar pattern of seeing the national past as in Greece, Bulgaria and
Romania.138 The nationalization of Orthodoxy in Serbian historiography
began with Panta Srećković in the 1880s,139 and was further developed
in the writings of the early twentieth-century historians.140 Even the
rigorously critical Novaković asserted in 1911 that ‘Serbian identity and
Orthodoxy are inseparable’.141
The intertwined question of ecclesiastical independence and nation-
building was important particularly in the context of competing narratives
of Serbian and Bulgarian nationalism in the late nineteenth and early
133
See Bojan Aleksov, ‘The Serbian Orthodox Church’, in Lucian N. Leustean (ed.),
Orthodox Christianity and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Southeastern Europe, New
York, 2014, pp. 65–100.
134
See John Anthony McGuckin (ed.), The Encyclopaedia of Eastern Orthodox
Christianity, Oxford, 2011, pp. 560–65.
135
See Frederick F. Anscombe, State, Faith and Nation in Ottoman and Post-Ottoman
Lands, Cambridge, 2014, pp. 151–52; Vjekoslav Perica, Balkan Idols: Religion and
Nationalism in Yugoslav States, Oxford and New York, 2002, pp. 8–9.
136
See Sima Ćirković, The Serbs, Oxford, 2004, p. xx; Rajko Veselinović, Istorija Srpske
pravoslavne crkve sa narodnom istorijom: (1766–1945), 2 vols, Belgrade, 2004, 2, pp. 241–42;
Djoko Slijepčević, Istorija Srpske pravoslavne crkve II: Od početka XIX veka do kraja
Drugog svetskog rata, Belgrade, 1991, pp. 296, 442–46.
137
Jovan Hadži Vasiljević, Bugarska egzarhija i njen uticaj na balkanske Slovene,
Belgrade, 1913.
138
Lucian N. Leustean, ‘Introduction’, in Orthodox Christianity and Nationalism, pp. 1–13.
139
Srećković, Istorija srpskog naroda, 2, pp. 669–70.
140
Radonić, Prošlost Stare Srbije, pp. 6–12.
141
twentieth centuries, after the autonomous Bulgarian Exarchate was
established in 1870.142 The Exarchate gained jurisdiction over the lands
claimed by the Serbian political and intellectual elite; it was particularly
the question of Macedonia which provoked condemnation and disdain.
The fact that the newly formed Bulgarian church organization (that was, to
say, the Bulgarians) had occupied Serbian ‘historical lands’ 143 engendered
noisy opposition from Serbian scholars, from historians to linguists, who
strove to provide tangible evidence that the medieval Serbian state and
its church were truly ‘national’. Arguments over the disputed territories,
which were dotted with numerous medieval churches considered to
be ‘Serbo-Byzantine’ in both style and iconography, were followed by
accounts of Bulgarians ‘appropriating’ and ‘Bulgarianizing’ architectural
monuments and defacing medieval frescoes across the newly established
Exarchate. This ultimately became a key argument in the debate that
continued to be discussed even in the interwar years.144 Seen in the nation-
building context of contemporary South Eastern Europe sharply marked
by ethnic grievances, the Balkan Wars and the consequent dissolution
of both the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires, the nationalized medieval
heritage had many battles to fight.
Of course, the assumptions about the interdependency of modern
national states and churches spilled out into the popular imagination
and public discourse. The territories which had once been under the
jurisdiction of the Patriarchate were associated with the natural habitat of
the nation. On the eve of the campaigns in the 1910s and World War One,
historians often declared that the ‘Peć Patriarchate had encompassed not
142
See Daniela Kalkandjieva, ‘The Bulgarian Orthodox Church’, in Orthodox
Christianity and Nationalism, pp. 164–202; Daniela Kalkandjieva, ‘The Bulgarian
Orthodox Church at the Crossroads: Between Nationalism and Pluralism’, in Andrii
Krawchuk & Thomas Bremer (eds), Eastern Orthodox Encounters of Identity and
Otherness: Values, Self-Reflection, Dialogue, Basingstoke, 2014, pp. 47–68; Anastasia W.
Karakasidou, Fields of Wheat, Hills of Blood: Passages to Nationhood in Greek Macedonia,
1770–1990, Chicago, IL, 1997, pp. 77–107.
143
Živan Živanović, Politička istorija Srbije, 4 vols, Belgrade, 3, 1924, p. 318.
144
Andra J. Stevanović, ‘Jedno zanimljivo otkriće u izgledu’, Srpski književni glasnik,
1, 1920, 5, pp. 371–76; Andra J. Stevanović, ‘Nekoliko profanih fresko-slika otkrivenih
u Markovom manastiru’, Srpski književni glasnik, 5, 1922, 3, p. 217; Lazar Mirković and
Žarko Tatić, Markov manastir, Belgrade, 1925, p. 1; Vlad.[imir] R. Petković, ‘A. Protich, Un
modèle des maîtres bulgares du XV et XVI siècle. Prague 1926’, Prilozi za književnost, jezik,
istoriju i folklor, 6, 1926, 1, pp. 150–53; Vlad.[imir] R. Petković, ‘A. Protič, Jugozapadnata
škola v blgarskata stenopis pred XIII i XIV v.’, Prilozi za književnost, jezik, istoriju i folklor,
6, 1926, 1, pp. 153–56; Al[eksandar] Jovanović, Postanak Egzarhije i Turska, Rusija i Srbija.
Istorijsko-politička rasprava, Skopje, 1936, pp. 25–26, 104–37; Milan Kašanin, ‘La Revue
bulgare’, Srpski književni glasnik, 30, 1930, 8, p. 635; Djurdje Bošković, ‘N. Mavrodinov’,
Prilozi za književnost, jezik, istoriju i folklor, 13, 1933, 1, pp. 216–28.
only Serbia (including Macedonia) but also South Herzegovina, Dalmatia,
Slavonia, Croatia and Southern Hungary’, which were all considered
Serbian lands.145 The associations of Orthodoxy and ‘Serbianess’ were
so deeply entrenched in historiography that they led an otherwise
sensible modern historian to conclude, rather clumsily, that the Serbian
Orthodox Church was the ‘only Balkan church organization capable of
stamping its own national movement with its own imprint’.146 Despite the
apparent paradox of the nationalization of the medieval and early modern
patriarchate — which was initially forged in the context of the Habsburg
Serbs’ proto-nationalism in the eighteenth century — these associations
had a particular impact and were frequently used to foster political goals.
The primary one was first to conceptualize, and then to encircle, what
was considered to represent ‘Serbian lands’, as well as to underline their
imperial-national status and potentials in future political discussions and
campaigns, especially in the context of the Balkan Wars and World War
One. Merging two territorial units, that of Stefan Dušan’s empire and the
Patriarchate of Peć, neatly outlined Serbian territorial aspirations. Just as
Serbian historians nationalized the Byzantine heritage, the same occurred
with Orthodoxy, such that the ‘legitimate and canonical regionalism
sanctioned by the canons of the early church was transformed, in modern
Orthodoxy, into divisive ecclesiastical nationalism’.147
It was only in 1919 when the Serbian Orthodox Church was finally united
and gained full ecclesiastical independence, on the cusp of the Serbian
national project148 which — only seemingly paradoxically — paralleled
the creation of Yugoslavia.149 The seeming paradox of encouraging
integral Yugoslavism simultaneously to strengthen Serbian nationalism
can be unravelled if the latter is seen as a hidden rationale lying behind
the Yugoslav project. This opens up a perspective in which the Kingdom of
145
Petar Popović, ‘Srpska Makedonija’, Bratstvo, 15, 1903, p. 103; Stanojević, Istorija
srpskog naroda, pp. 206–09.
146
Banac, National Question in Yugoslavia, p. 68.
147
Meyendorff, The Byzantine Legacy, p. 228. On the perplexed issue of religion and
nationalism in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and the role of the Serbian Orthodox Church,
see Pieter Troch, ‘The Intertwining of Religion and Nationhood in Interwar Yugoslavia:
The School Celebrations of St Sava’s Day’, Slavonic and East European Review, 91, 2013, 2,
pp. 235–61.
148
Vladimir Ćorović’s exalted accounts on the Patriarchate’s ‘renovatio’ is telling. See
his ‘Proglas Srpske patrijaršije’, Srpski književni glasnik, 1, 1920, 4, pp. 300–03.
149
See Rajko Veselinović, Srpska pravoslavna crkva 1920–1970, Belgrade, 1971, pp. 13–35;
Radmila Radić, Država i verske zajednice, 2 vols, Belgrade, 2002, 1, pp. 20–22; Branislav
Gligorijević, ‘Ujedinjenje Srpske pravoslavne crkve i uspostavljanje Srpske patrijaršije u
Jugoslaviji’, Istorija XX veka, 15, 1997, 2. pp. 7–18.
Yugoslavia can be understood in terms of the ultimately achieved ideal of
the congruence of Serbian ethnic and political boundaries, similar to the
Croatian and Slovene nations’ case. Indeed, Yugoslavism was frequently
seen, both by contemporaries and modern scholars, as a mask for
competing national interests and aims.150 However, despite representing
the majority in the new state, Serbs made up only around 40 per cent of
the country’s population.151 In this context, crafting imperial pedigrees
and spurring the mythology of Serbian historical statecraft helped justify
the political and cultural supremacy of Serbs in a country constitutionally
committed to the ethnic equity of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.
Beyond imperial imagination?

It is beyond doubt that the historiographical construction of the Serbian
nation’s imperial legacy was pertinent not only to intra-Balkan rivalries
and political actions of Serbian elites. Byzantine-Serbian relationships
as a subject of national historiography were also highly relevant to the
international late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century context, when
the ‘criteria’ of civilization and imperial pedigrees were commonly
associated with ‘standards’ of modern states.152 The fact that Serbia
needed to present itself as a civilized state endowed with a suitable past
was a crucial aspect of this historiographical construction. The idea of a
restored medieval empire, in which Serbia would represent a core territory
with Serbs as a dominant nation, entailed inventing the nation’s imperial
antecedents even after the process of creating a unified South Slavic state
had begun, which went in parallel with the First World War.153 Yet, despite
the official ideology of integral Yugoslavism, the idea of Serbs exercising
the most power, control and cultural influence continued to be justified
and carefully historicized throughout the 1920s and 1930s. In the new
Yugoslav context, mainstream Serbian historiography advanced the old
theses about Serbian ethnic and cultural dominance in the medieval
Balkans and elaborated on Serbo-Byzantine culture as a testament of the
150
See Rusinow, ‘The Yugoslav Idea before Yugoslavia’, pp. 20–21; Pavlowitch, ‘The First
World War and the Unification of Yugoslavia’, p. 28; Sundhaussen, Geschichte Serbiens, pp.
240–51.
151
Ibid., p. 251; Stevan K. Pavlowitch, Serbia: The History Behind the Name, London,
2002, pp. 113–14; Banac, National Question in Yugoslavia, p. 58.
152
See Brett Bowden, The Empire of Civilisation: The Evolution of an Imperial Idea,
Chicago, IL, 2009.
153
See Rusinow, ‘The Yugoslav Idea before Yugoslavia’, pp. 11–26; Banac, National
Question in Yugoslavia, pp. 141–225. See also Milorad Ekmečić, Stvaranje Jugoslavije
1790–1918, 2 vols, Belgrade, 1989.
nation’s innate ability and perennial commitment to imperial rule. The
image crafted by historians about a once-great state, whose progress had
been cut off by Turkish invasions in the fourteenth and fifteenth century,
became particularly vivid if seen from the perspective of the Serbian
national revival in the 1920s and 1930s. This revival was encouraged by
the historiographical construction of Serbian primacy in the medieval
empire that resonated in the new political context of Yugoslavia, marked
by the competing and vitriolic nationalism of Croats and Serbs. Interwar
historiography’s accounts about a Serbian national past — but also some
contemporaneous works dealing with the ‘history of Yugoslavia’, such as
Vladimir Ćorović’s — were saturated with the idea that the Serbian ‘state-
crafting element’ was a mainstay of the entire political life of the medieval
empire which survived up to modern times.
These ideas formed a kind of continuous ideological backdrop for
imagining a new Serbia-centred state and the consequent legitimization of
Serbian supremacy in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. It was only in this new
political context that Serbian history served as a means of and justification
for Serbian cultural prowess and political power. Portrayed by historians
as the principal state builders and imperial heirs, Serbs were predestined
to continue their Piedmontal role in the South Slavic world and to become
leaders of a new, post-First World War region, stretching their ‘state-
crafting’ aptitudes over and above their ethnic boundaries. Of course,
the perspective can be reversed, and if we assume that both the Kingdom
of Serbia and the subsequently formed South Slavic state represented
‘nation-states’ (of Serbs and Yugoslavs respectively), then we can claim they
underwent a process of what Alexei Miller and Alfred Rieber have called
‘imperializing’.154 Thus, one can suggest a hypothesis about historical
narratives — either implicitly or explicitly — translating the idea of Serbia
as a kernel of a new, South Slavic state and of Serbs as empire-builders into
a structure of the nation’s past. How far these hypothetical inferences prove
to be appropriate is an important question open to further scholarship on
Serbian interwar political culture.
The ideological discourse of Yugoslavism and the political framework
of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, with all its ideological complexities,
conveniently opened up yet another layer of interpretation of the Byzantine
heritage. In contrast with mainstream historical explanations of the
exclusively Serbian inheritance of Byzantine culture, this alternative view
interpreted the Byzantine heritage as a common legacy of all the nations of
154
Alexei Miller and Alfred J. Rieber, ‘Introduction’, in Imperial Rule, pp. 1–6.
the Balkans, particularly the South Slav. Part of these integrative narratives
— which either sought to construct a common cultural framework
for the South Slavs and a historical model of ‘peaceful coexistence’, or
simply to mask predominant nationalistic attitudes — was a process of
‘Yugoslavization’ of the Byzantine heritage. This was an older nineteenth-
century idea, which was given a fillip by the geographer Jovan Cvijić’s
influential theory of the cultural zones of the Balkan Peninsula.155
Cvijić made concerted efforts to demonstrate that a ‘zone of modified
Byzantine civilization’ represented a core feature of the whole region,
of what he named ‘Balkanic culture par excellence’ 156 and ‘Balkanism’
in particular.157 His accounts stood in stark opposition to mainstream
Serbian historiography, which considered Byzantium in relation solely to
the Serbian national heritage. In the interwar period, Cvijić’s followers,
first and foremost Vladimir Dvorniković, employed this scheme in
establishing a much-needed Yugoslavian common cultural framework. He
propounded a theory of continuity of Byzantine culture and longevity of
its unifying civilizational zeal — even though it was simultaneously seen
as effete and inferior to the indigenous patriarchal culture of the South
Slavs — which was similar to the ideas of Nicolae Iorga and his disciples.158
He saw the Byzantine heritage as a cohesive bond which was, and should
be, established between all South Slavs.159 According to this schema,
Byzantium ought to be understood not as an imperial heritage adopted
and perfected solely by medieval Serbs, but a historical paragon of different
peoples engulfed by the newly established Yugoslav Kingdom.
Seeing Byzantium as a common cultural legacy of South Slavs —
which sharply differed from later ideas of Dimitri Obolensky’s about the
‘Byzantine Commonwealth’ based on the integrative role of Orthodox
Christianity 160 — represented an echo of a much broader and older
155
Jovan Cvijić, ‘Kulturni pojasi Balkanskog poluostrva’, Srpski književni glasnik, 6,
1902, 4, pp. 909–21. For an English summary of Jovan Cvijić’s theses, see ‘Studies in
Jugoslav Psychology’, trans. Fanny Foster, Slavonic and East European Review, 9, 1930, 26,
pp. 375–90.
156
Cvijić, ‘Kulturni pojasi’; Jovan Cvijić, ‘The Zones of Civilization of the Balkan
Peninsula’, Geographical Review, 5, 1918, 6, pp. 470–82.
157
Jovan Cvijić, Govori i članci, 4 vols, Belgrade, 1921, 1, p. 91.
158
See Virgil Candea, ‘Introduction,’ in Iorga, Byzantium after Byzantium, pp. 7–23.
159
Vladimir Dvorniković, ‘Psiha jugoslovenske melanholije [1925]’, Delo, 27, 1991, 9–12,
p. 236.
160
Dimitri Obolensky, The Byzantine Commonwealth: Eastern Europe, 500–1453,
London, 1971; Dimitri Obolensky, ‘Byzantium and the Slavic World’, in Angeliki E. Liaiou
and Henry Maguire (eds), Byzantium: A World Civilization, Washington, D.C., pp. 37–48;
See also, Paschalis Kitromilides’s collection of articles in An Orthodox Commonwealth:
system of interpretation, which was already fully-fledged in pre-First
World War historiography, most notably in Stojan Novaković’s accounts
written simultaneously with the popularization of the Yugoslav idea in the
1910s. Denouncing the ‘mistakes of the past’ and the atavistic project of a
Serbian empire which would justify illegitimate expansionism, Novaković
emphasized the irrelevance of nation-states in the Middle Ages and also
the prospects of revamping the ‘Serbo-Byzantine Empire’,161 opting for a
more democratic and inclusive solution to future political cooperation of
the Balkan nations. Nonetheless, despite anti-nationalistic rhetoric, his
and similar accounts could have further helped challenge a nation-state
political framework and encourage imperial enthusiasm simply through
the fact that they formed a niche of counter claims that would remain
elitist and opposed to mainstream historical imagination.
It was in this new versatile intellectual setting that a new science
of ‘Balkanology’ was founded as a comparativist and inherently anti-
nationalistic endeavour of ‘studying the Balkan organism’.162 This ‘new
science’ was initiated by Yugoslav scholars Petar Skok (1881–1956) and Milan
Budimir (1891–1975) who established the Institut des Études balkaniques/
Balkanski institut in Belgrade in 1934.163 They saw Byzantium as a
common cultural framework and a cohesive historical force which had
unified the region culturally in the past. They tried, among other things, to
rectify the predominantly nationalistic reading of the Balkan’s Byzantine
past which they considered an era of a unifying (but not unitary) culture
that had nevertheless yielded a sense of unity in diversities.164 Balkanology
undoubtedly reflected intellectuals of the period’s attempts to establish a
historical basis for a much-needed cultural and political unity against the
antagonistic political and national context of Yugoslavia of the late 1930s,
as well as the rest of the Balkans. These integrative registers penetrated
into interwar Serbian humanities, with the archaeologist Nikola Vulić
(1872–1945) being one of its notable representatives. Of course, these
Symbolic Legacies and Cultural Encounters in Southeastern Europe, Aldershot, 2007.

161
162
Milan Budimir and Petar Skok, ‘But et signification des études balkaniques’, Revue
internationale des études balkaniques, 1, 1934, 1, pp. 2–3; Milan Budimir, ‘O Balkanu i
balkanologiji’, in Ratko Parežanin and Borivoje Gavrilović (eds), Balkanski svet, Belgrade,
1940, pp. 17–18; Petar Skok, ‘Praktična i teorijska važnost balkanologije’, in Balkanski svet,
pp. 15–16.
163
See Ratko Parežanin, Za balkansko jedinstvo: osnivanje, program i rad Balkanskog
instituta u Beogradu (1934–1941), Munich, 1976.
164
Petar Skok and Milan Budimir, ‘Destinées balkaniques’, Revue internationale des
études balkaniques, 2, 1936, 4. pp. 601–13.
narratives were not confined to Serbia. Similar types of ‘medievalized’ and
confronted national histories began to take a prominent place in national
historiographies in Romania, Bulgaria and Greece, when historians ‘created
a basis for looking upon the region as a unit with a common heritage’.165
Explanations for the apparent idiosyncrasy of these two coexistent
registers of interpretation of the Byzantine heritage lie not as much in
the simultaneity of different scholarly traditions as in the ideological
underpinnings of history-writing and power relations. Different focuses
on Byzantium and its relationship with Serbia pertained to the tension
and ambivalence of the constantly re-negotiated national question that
preoccupied Serbian political and intellectual elites throughout the 1920s
and 1930s and their dilemmas of either upholding a nation-state concept
or supporting a supra-national integration (with Serbs representing
either a ‘core-nation’ or nationality equal to any other). Having been
adopted either as a national or supra-national heritage, Byzantium was
included in Serbian national narratives via simultaneously developed
national, imperial or counter-imperial registers of interpretation. Whether
representing a superior civilization brought down by internal vices, a
culture succeeded and ‘refined’ by medieval Serbs, or a unifying cultural
framework that predated and anticipated a South Slavic cultural unity
and/or a trans-national cooperation in the Balkans, Byzantium remained
a similarly vexed question for Serbian historians in the 1930s as it had been
five decades before.
Yet throughout the entire period, Byzantium was always seen from
the standpoint of its decline and inheritance, and always in relation to an
‘imperial project’ that presupposed and foresaw some kind of unity, either
national, territorial or both. The sheer instrumentality of these multivalent
historical readings was possible only due to the simultaneity of apparently
contradictory, but in fact coherent, justifications for political ambitions
and different types of political solutions, be they national, multinational
or trans-national. On the other hand, the multifacetedness of Byzantium’s
historical identity, whose perception included both condemnation and
blessing and oscillated between various viewpoints, relied heavily on
several interpretive traditions and models of interpretation of the Eastern
165
Diana Mishkova, ‘What is in Balkan History? Spaces and Scales in the Tradition
of Southeast-European Studies’, Southeastern Europe, 34, 2010, pp. 55–86 (p. 71). See also,
Maria Todorova, ‘My Yugoslavia’, in Radmila Gorup (ed.), After Yugoslavia: The Cultural
Spaces of a Vanished Land, Stanford, CA, 2013, pp. 23–37; Vladimir D. Mihajlović, ‘Genius
loci Balkani: recepcija prošlosti i konstruisanje akademskog narativa o balkanskom
nasledju’, Etnoantropološki problemi, 8, 2013, 3, pp. 779–803.
Roman Empire that were adopted and utilized by Serbian historians. As
a matter of fact, matters Byzantine in Serbian historiography were not
only matters historical, but also a continuation of ideological arguments
targeted at the political sphere. The problem discussed in this article
shows that a need for a more subtle and context-sensitive understanding
of the writings of historians is conducive to understanding interactions
between disciplinary traditions, historical contexts and extra-scholarly
ramifications.
Although the question of Serbia’s ‘Byzantine inheritance’ remains
part of a sustained scholarly interest in the national past it has continued
to be vigorously debated. Constantly present in public discourse, it still
preoccupies many Serbian historians. More than a century after Stanoje
Stanojević’s Byzantium and the Serbs, similarly conceived explanations of
medieval Serbia’s cultural association with Byzantium and differentiation
from it saturate national historiography. The problems of Byzantine-
Serbian cultural links and political encounters lie not only at the heart
of the Serbian historical imagination but are also central to the burning
questions of national identity and sovereignty, just as they were a century
ago.

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Byzantium's Apt Inheritors: Serbian Historiography, Nation-Building and Imperial Imagination,

Aleksandar Ignjatović is an associate professor in the Faculty of Architecture at the

Slavonic and East European Review, 94, 1, 2016

Byzantium and Serbia: interpretive patterns

Serbia and Byzantium: cultural affinities and differences

In his later writings Stanojević reiterated the same question of

Between transfer and renewal

Nationalized church, national empire

Beyond imperial imagination?

Symbolic Legacies and Cultural Encounters in Southeastern Europe, Aldershot, 2007.

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