Abstract
Village, Religion, Nation. About the Changes of Imagined Communities in the Balkan Area
In the former European territories of the Ottoman Empire, community-building was based on local and regional contexts (village or tribe) on one side, and religious affiliations within the millet-system on the other. As part of the process of nationbuilding, these communities were disbanded from the 19th century on. The affiliation to religious communities was nationalised and ethnicised – with the following result: Even the Orthodox church broke up into competing national Churches. At the same time, the newly emerging nation-states integrated the village communities in their administrative and judicial systems as local unities. Simultaneously, competing concepts of nation developed by combining or excluding «objective» characteristics like race, language or religion in different ways. Thus, starting in the 19th century the Balkans became an experimentation field for different types of national communitarisation models.
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