Pan-Slavism had a very short lifespan in the nineteenth century and has very little chance to return, but the worship of the Slavorum Apostoli, the Saints Cyril and Methodius, is probably the one point over which there is no controversy. Venerated in different degrees by all Slavic nations, canonized by the Orthodox church at least as early as the eleventh century, they were recognized as saints by the Catholic Church in the nineteenth century, and declared co-patrons of Europe by the Polish Pope John Paul II in 1980. They had been revered in a universal, anational and supra-ethnic manner since the ninth century by all Slavic societies, but also by the other Orthodox peoples in the Balkans, as well as by Rome and Byzantium. Like practically all religious figures from the medieval period they were absorbed and re-purposed for modern nationalist use, but this nationalization of the medieval cult has been exceptionally strong in Bulgaria, where it was “Bulgarianized” in the nineteenth century. This was already achieved in the Second Bulgarian Empire (12^th–14^th centuries) and used for state-building purposes, but the celebration faded significantly already before the Ottoman conquest and had to be virtually re-discovered or re-established. Seen as a guarantor for Bulgarian national identity, it was Bulgaria's accession to the European Union that made the Cyrillic alphabet its third official alphabet (after Latin and Greek).

The book under review, in Bulgarian Iubileino i moderno: Kirilo-metodievskiat razkaz prez sotsializma v Bîlgaria, is a sophisticated exploration of the peregrinations of the myth and tradition of Cyril and Methodius in Bulgarian modern culture, specifically during the socialist period. It is a superb continuation of Stefan Rohdewald's excellent 2014 book Götter der Nationen: Religiöse Erinnerungsfiguren in Serbien, Bulgarien und Makedonien bis 1944 (reviewed by me in Southeastern Europe 41, 2017). It is written in Bulgarian by a young Polish scholar at the Institute of Slavistics of the Polish Academy of Sciences, an institution with an illustrious tradition that most recently published in Polish the ten-volume lexicon Migrating Ideas in the Slavic Balkans (https://ispan.waw.pl/ireteslaw/handle/20.500.12528/1076), where Drzewiecka was one of the authors. The work follows how a medieval religious myth is transformed into a secular and modern one, and its metamorphosis under socialism, including its anti-religious hypostasis, but also stressing the strong and uninterrupted national(ist) and sacral continuities. The argument, with a sensitive self-positioning, is developed in four chapters, the first of which carefully sets up the epistemological and methodological premises. It is based on a dense reading of the scores of academic, church, and popular anniversary collections treated as formational cultural, ceremonial texts, and approached theoretically from different angles: narrativity (Paul Ricoeur, Hayden White, Ann Rigney), memory (Jan and Aleida Assman, Pierre Nora), invention of tradition (Eric Hobsbawm, Terence Ranger), secularism (Charles Taylor, Jose Casanova), modernity (Samuel Eisenstadt, Anthony Giddens), sociology (Pierre Bourdieu, Mary Douglas), conceptual history (Reinhardt Koselleck), and more. The next chapters are devoted to the dominant story of St. Cyril as Creator, the secondary one of St Methodius as Executor, and the purely “Bulgarian trail” of the disciples. The most interesting conclusion is the fundamental continuity with previous periods and regimes, even as there are differences in emphasis and rhetorical articulation. Specifically, the nucleus of the dominant story of St Cyril as a metonym for the whole tradition remains unchanged. Already from the nineteenth century, the stress is on enlightenment and education, the creation of the alphabet over the evangelization mission. The communist period accentuates the elements of creativity, Slavic unity, and especially the Bulgarian cultural messianism in a universal context, but the unifying element is the centrality of the concept of the “people.” In this it reaches an unexpected institutionalized “symphony” between secular and religious, Orthodox nationalism and communist nationalism, and “left” and “right.” Drzewiecka introduces the concept of “ontological penumbra” to describe this synthesis between seemingly incompatible ideologies and positions.

As with any rich work, one would want to read more about the role and motivations of the communist intellectual elites, the individual “makers” of the myth, as well as about the comparative aspects, especially in those cultures where the veneration of Cyril and Methodius is also strong, like the Czech, Slovak, Croatian, Macedonian, and Russian. But these are goals consciously not pursued, only suggested, in this book. As it is, this works not only serves as a role model and template to follow in the scholarly milieus in which and for which it was conceived, but provides an invitation to pay more attention to high-quality work coming from first-rate Slavic centers in Slavic countries, writing in some arcane Slavic language.