Dimitris Stamatopoulos, „Byzantium after the Nation: The Problem of Continuity in Balkan Historiographies“
Stamatopoulos undertakes the first systematic comparison of the dominant ethnic historiographic models and divergences elaborated by Greek, Bulgarian, Serbian, Albanian, Romanian, Turkish, and Russian intellectuals with reference to the ambiguous inheritance of Byzantium. The title alludes to the seminal work of Nicolae Iorga in the 1930s, Byzantium after Byzantium, that argued for the continuity between the Byzantine and the Ottoman empires. If the idea of the continuity of the nation became the touchstone of the national historiographies, the continuity of empires—especially in the nineteenth century—was the common motif of divergent historiographical schemes promoting the reconciliation of the nation with the imperial model. Rival Balkan nationalisms engaged in a “war of interpretation” as to the nature of Byzantium, assuming different positions of adoption or rejection of its imperial model and leading to various schemes of continuity in each national historiographic canon.
Stamatopoulos discusses what Byzantium represented for nineteenth-, and twentieth-century scholars and how their perceptions related to their treatment of the imperial model: whether a different perception of the medieval Byzantine period prevailed in the Greek national center as opposed to Constantinople; how nineteenth-century Balkan nationalists and Russian scholars used Byzantium to invent their own medieval ages (and, by extension, their own antiquity); and finally, how the national historiographies of the twentieth century reused the scheme of the continuity of empires to revise some of the discontinuities or deadlocks of their dominant nationalist narratives.
Table of contents:
https://ceupress.com/book/byzantium-after-nation