One of the most important scholars of Orthodox Christianity in Southeastern Europe, the author, although a political scientist by training, is noted for his willingness to engage with primary sources. This book contains a series of essays that examine the historical trajectory of the Ecumenical Patriarchate since the 18th century. Some of the material is also available in the two survey volumes (2010, 2014) edited by Lucian Leustean (whose last name is misspelled in the book). The book collects these essays into a coherent whole. In the volume’s introduction, the author offers a highly critical account of past scholarship marked by a sometimes unduly harsh tone.

The author’s numerous works have analyzed the impact of the Enlightenment upon the ecclesiastical institutions of the Ottoman Empire, and in this book attention focuses on the historical trajectory of the Ecumenical Patriarchate over the 19th and 20th centuries. His interpretation is confined to standard institutional history, whereby history is the deeds of “great men” (as the high clergy are all males), with very little emphasis placed on class, status, and/or gender. The author’s point of view is largely identical to that of the “great men” he studies, and no effort is made to place the institution within the context of the broader Orthodox religious landscape (which extends far beyond southeastern Europe). That leads the author to an almost hagiographic assessment of the institution’s leadership, which is praised time and again for its efforts to preserve and maintain the Patriarchate against all odds.

In the author’s narrative, the Patriarchate is an actor undermined by the rise of nationalism in the Ottoman Empire. Kitromilides’s greatest scholarly accomplishment might be his successful rebuttal of the mistaken impression of the previous generation of regional scholars that the Patriarchate represented an agent of Greek nationalism. In contrast, he has shown that the high clergy’s attitudes were shaped by the sincere effort to maintain Orthodoxy’s traditions (which included the use of the Greek language). But the broader issue also necessitates a deeper analysis of the complex interplay among language, status, class, and ethnicity in the Ottoman Balkans. The author’s interpretation has helped historians revamp traditional historiographies and articulate a better understanding of the broader sociocultural context that shaped the rise of nationalism in the region.

For the author, nationalism is part of a secular modernity (45) that undermines the Church—a position practically derived from the attitude of the high clergy, who are his privileged interlocutors. In his interpretation, the redeployment of Orthodoxy (Roudometof Reference Roudometof2001) for the purposes of nation-building is a betrayal of the Orthodox Tradition, instead of a creative re-making of tradition within the modern world of nation-states. It is instructive that Kitromilides (39) sees the emergence of national churches as “the consequence of the subjection of the churches by individual states” in the region, with the church’s leadership “passed into the hands [of]a hierarchy effectively socialized into the new national cultures … [who] collaborated with this project.” But the intertwining of Christianity and state goes as far back as the Roman Empire; Kitromilides’s criticism is reserved for local nation-states but not for Holy Russia or the Ottoman Empire, two divinely ordained monarchies that also entailed specific configurations of church–state relations. To be fair, the author acknowledges the broader issue of the “cultural change” (26) caused by nationalism in southeastern Europe but frames the issue in terms of the Church’s “subjection to the secular state” (25), which he explicitly reads through the lenses of the conventional modernization narrative (45), whereby modernization equals secularization.

His is a dated interpretation no longer universally accepted within the social sciences (see Beyer Reference Beyer, Beckford and Demerath2007; Grew Reference Grew and Rossi2008). His stance curtails our ability to interpret the cultural adaptations of Orthodox Christianity throughout the longue durée. As I have argued elsewhere (Roudometof Reference Roudometof2014), Orthodoxy has experienced a series of distinct cultural models throughout its 2,000 years of history. The cultural model of the national church might seem despicable to scholars due to its entanglement with nationalism. But this model is the globally legitimate and overwhelmingly popular version of Orthodoxy in the world today (and of course populists are quite willing to appropriate it for themselves). Still, nothing is gained from a gaze that views it as a historical aberration. On the contrary, the scholar’s obligation is to understand this model and account for the sociocultural conditions that led to its emergence and maintenance. For the Patriarchate, it goes without saying that the triumph of this model has been disastrous. In Chapters 4 and 5, the author offers detailed overviews of the suffering the Greek Orthodox community endured during the 20th century. Next, the author offers an overview of the Great Church’s involvement in the international politics of the Cold War era. The author takes the high clergy’s stance at face value, instead of placing the institution’s actions in relation to other ecclesiastical institutions elsewhere in the Orthodox world. The significance and the novelty of the postnational approach advocated by the Patriarchate Bartholomew I in recent decades go underappreciated, while the contradictions implicit and explicit in such an approach are not critically interrogated.

In the concluding chapter, the author offers three highlighted pronouncements (in bold) that sum up his overall perspective. These should be seen as normative statements instead of social-scientific conclusions. All of them echo the Patriarchate’s self-image in an effort to generate scholarly consensus over issues where currently fierce disagreements exist. I feel the second of these pronouncements, which states that “the identification of Orthodoxy with nationalism is a product of anachronistic judgment and misunderstanding of the historical record” (108), warrants a further comment here. While the nationalist discourses that see Orthodoxy as part of national self-assertion are very much the “product of anachronistic judgment” (and the author is quite correct in pointing this out), the cultural model of national Orthodoxy these discourses have generated in the course of the last few centuries is currently the dominant blueprint for Orthodox Christians globally. Its rejection should not be uncritically adopted as the legitimate scholarly viewpoint. That is tantamount to “going native” (i.e., adopting the Patriarchate’s self-image as the sole legitimate scholarly viewpoint). In this instance, the sociological notion of the “definition of the situation” is quite relevant: If people define a situation as real, it will be real in its consequences.

Overall, the book offers a historical interpretation that largely corresponds to the Patriarchate’s current self-image as a global or transnational institution. Insofar as readers are aware of the multiple and distinct readings of the historical trajectories currently in circulation within the Orthodox religious landscape, it is fair to say that this volume makes a noteworthy scholarly contribution, albeit one predicated upon a very particular institutional viewpoint. But less knowledgeable students of religion and politics might mistake its various normative pronouncements for statements of fact. Given the nature of the topic, though, and the typically strong sentiments involved in these matters, the chances of that happening are quite low.