A Religious International in Southeastern Europe?

Abstract

To talk of an Orthodox ‘religious international’ emanating from Southeastern Europe before the end of the Cold War would require excessive imagination. The overall historical trend shaping the religious scene in this part of Europe since the early nineteenth century has been the phenomenal growth of ‘national Orthodoxies’, which attached religion to the nation states of the Balkans and served faithfully their nationalist projects. This of course was a nineteenth-century development and it should not obscure an earlier history extending throughout the early modern period, from the fall of Constantinople in 1453 to the advent of the age of nationalism, during which the Orthodox Church did function as a transnational and transcultural religious institution. In that earlier period in its history the Orthodox Church united under its pastoral care the multilingual Orthodox population of the Balkans and Asia Minor within the Ottoman Empire and also the dense network of Orthodox diaspora communities in Italy, Central and Western Europe and Russia. All these populations came under the jurisdiction of the Patriarchate of Constantinople which exercised its pastoral care through a broad network of dioceses within and outside the Ottoman empire.1 The Arab-speaking Orthodox of the Near East in Syria, Palestine and Mesopotamia came under the jurisdiction of two other ancient Orthodox patriarchates, those of Antioch (based in Damascus) and Jerusalem.