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The last Byzantines: perceptions of identity, culture, and heritage in Serbia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Bratislav Pantelić
Bratislav Pantelić*
Affiliation:
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Sabancı University, Istanbul, Turkey
*
* Email: pantelic@sabanciuniv.edu
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Abstract

Focusing on material culture, this article considers a range of issues concerning the cultural policies, ideologies, and identities that have underlain Serbian development since the Middle Ages, and tests some widely held yet previously uncontested views. In particular it questions the Serbs' perceived affiliation with the Byzantine Empire and challenges the view that this affiliation was so pervasive that it influenced Serbian development and national formation in the modern age. It is argued that Byzantium had little if any role in the Serbs' cultural development - neither in historical memories nor in surviving traditions. Serbia's Byzantine culture is largely a myth developed in the 1930s by the Serbian clergy as a corollary of the Russian-inspired Svetosavlje ideology. This myth was meant to dislocate Serbia's cultural identity from its secular European sources and reposition it closer to Orthodox Russia.

Keywords

SerbiaByzantiumSvetosavljeidentityvisual artsheritage
Type
Articles
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 44 , Issue 3 , May 2016 , pp. 430 - 455
Copyright
Copyright © 2016 Association for the Study of Nationalities 

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