Orthodox Imagined Communities in the Ottoman Balkans

As a young scholar being trained in Early Modern European history, I imbibed unstated assumptions along with the canons of western historiography. My teaching and research career, though, soon moved eastward, to focus on Byzantium, the Balkans, and the Eastern Christianity which permeated both. With this transition, I became uneasily aware of how little attention western scholarship has given to these fields, or to the momentous developments which took place in the eastern half of the European continent. Some of these developments challenge and undermine some hallowed scholarly perspectives; among them is the assessment commonly held among western scholars about the emergence of a sense of nation and nationalism