In Containing Balkan Nationalism, Denis Vovchenko makes an important contribution to the understanding and explication of the circumstances and consequences of the Bulgarian quest to create an autonomous Bulgarian Orthodox Church in the late nineteenth century. Relying upon published and unpublished sources from foreign ministry and ecclesiastical archives in Russia, Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey, as well as a robust secondary literature in multiple languages, the author eschews the common, nationally-determined narrative of the Bulgarian Church movement in favor of a multi-national/supranational interpretation. As stated in his introduction, Vovchenko advances the notion that “despite the appeal of nationalism as part of Western modernity,” Orthodox churchmen, diplomats, intellectuals, and military officers in the Russian and Ottoman Empires, Greece, Bulgaria, and Serbia deliberately constructed and promoted ideas and policies to contain nationalism in the Balkans (13). The book is structured chronologically and divided into seven chapters with an introduction and conclusion.
Vovchenko begins his monograph with a brief historical overview of the four centuries from the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453 to the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1853. The context is essential to understanding the underlying and intersecting dynamics that inspired the nascent Bulgarian church movement to reject the existing political and religious institutions of the Ottoman Empire and the Ecumenical Patriarchate in the hopes of realizing religious autonomy. Primary among them were incipient nationalist sentiments, dissatisfaction with local Ottoman governing structures, and significant resentment of the native Greek or Hellenized clergy and bishops of the Patriarchate. This, in turn, compelled the Russian Imperial government, the Russian Holy Synod, and conservative Russian and Ottoman Christian intellectuals to rally to the cause of Orthodox unity, although not necessarily for the same reasons.
As the nineteenth century progressed, so did the intensity of the forces (nationalism, secularization, westernization) tearing at the fabric of the Ottoman Empire and, most important, the Ecumenical Patriarchate. Vovchenko chronicles these accelerating forces and the reactions they elicited between 1856 and 1914 in the five chapters constituting the core of his monograph. Bulgarian nationalists, in lieu of having first attained territorial autonomy from the Ottoman Empire upon which to construct an independent nation state, chose to focus on creating an autonomous Bulgarian Orthodox Church. In fact, this had already begun in a more concrete manner in 1849 when the Ottoman authorities allowed the Bulgarian millet (Bulgarian nation) to construct a church in Constantinople: St. Stefan's. In relatively quick succession, the Bulgarian Church movement declared secession from the Patriarchate in 1860, expanded the use of Old Church Slavonic for services, and received a “firman” from the Sultan establishing the Bulgarian Exarchate in early 1870. The Ecumenical Patriarchate, constantly on the defensive, finally pronounced the Exarchate as schismatic in 1872 for conflating nationalism (phyletism) with Orthodoxy. The only element missing was an independent Bulgarian nation-state to complement the Bulgarian national church.
Vovchenko demonstrates that diplomats and intellectuals enlisted an array of ideologies to preserve and maintain the idea, if not the reality, of the Orthodox East. Some turned to Pan-Slavism because it had the advantage of being anti-western, but the disadvantage of also being anti-Greek. Other authors found modified versions of Nikolai Danilevskii's concept of “cultural-historical types” or Konstantin Leontiev's “Byzantism” more suitable to the cause. Russian journals as well as Greek newspapers in Constantinople found Pan-Orthodoxy and the idea of the Greco-Slavism particularly attractive and fruitful. Most telling, however, is that apart from conservative Russian intellectuals, a few committed diplomats, Ottoman Orthodox Christians fighting to preserve the status quo, and, perhaps, Ion Dragoumis and his small circle in Greece, there was not overwhelming support for containing Balkan nationalism.
The final chapter covers Russian views of Muslim Slavs. It is interesting in and of itself, but does not advance the argument that Russian intellectuals and others sought to preserve the Christian East. This, perhaps, reveals how the author could have made the study even stronger by encompassing the rich and valuable archival material within an intentional organizing principle and/or an explicit theoretical framework. In the introduction, there is passing reference to the concepts of federative structures and power-sharing institutions, but it is not sustained. In the middle of the book (217), the author mentions the work of Anthony Smith, Jürgen Habermas, and Eric Hobsbawm, but their conceptual edifices are not utilized. These minor critiques, however, do not diminish the importance of Vovchenko's elucidation of how diplomats, churchmen, and intellectuals employed powerful conservative, supranational, and Pan-Orthodox ideas in their attempt to contain Balkan nationalism.
