Against the seemingly incontestable logic of nationalist essentialism and the opinions of ill-informed pundits, Nicholas Doumanis has given us a carefully researched and beautifully written historical account that suggests that the nation-state – despite its present authority – is neither a necessary realisation of collective destiny nor the ideal means of collective salvation. It often runs roughshod over the attitudes, values and religious experiences of local communities, generating the ferocious destruction of the very people that it recasts, in the overheated crucibles of its historical alchemy, as ‘its own’.

If nationalism easily assumes the mantle of religion in modern society (Bruce Kapferer, Legends of people, myths of state: violence, intolerance, and political culture in Sri Lanka and Australia, Washington 1988), Doumanis's account shows us how this convertibility can in turn result in the destruction of deeply rooted local traditions of religiosity. If Muslims and Christians could variously feast, celebrate and even worship together, their conviviality evaporated in the ferocious heat of nation-building by Turks and Greeks. The forcible submersion of inter-communal co-existence in a maelstrom of genocide and ethnic cleansing during the final years of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of the Turkish Republic chillingly exemplifies a conversion story more reminiscent of the Crusader era, and unfortunately far more convincing, than the usual just-so stories about the supposedly inevitable emergence of modernity. Although his analysis is focused on Anatolia in the decades leading to the emergence of the Turkish Republic, much of what Doumanis recounts – as he clearly intends us to understand – is applicable to recent, catastrophic nationalist confrontations in Bosnia, Kosovo, and elsewhere.

Doumanis departs from the conventions of top-down historical reporting by relying heavily on oral sources conserved in the Centre for Asia Minor Studies in Athens. This treasure-house preserves crucial documentation of life in Asia Minor and beyond during the decades preceding the disastrous 1920–2 war between Greece and Turkey. As historical source material, to be sure, this material has limitations; Doumanis is especially careful to note that most of the data are not verbatim transcripts but summaries written down retrospectively by well-educated interviewers in the demotic language of Athens rather than in the dialects that many of the respondents presumably employed. But it is this attention to the potential weaknesses of his sources that renders what he is able to extract from them so compelling. The endless reiterations of Muslim-Christian neighbourliness are almost tedious, but their capacity to break through the formality of their representation in the archive forces us to recognise them as much more than conventional platitudes, especially as they contradict what official authorities would have wanted to hear. Indeed, Doumanis skillfully points out the signs of a reticence clearly induced by fear of the bureaucrats. Following the anthropological – rather than a conventional historian's – credo that ‘it is always a mistake to ignore the meaning of people's words’ (p. 56) and arguing for the rationality and necessary significance of the oral evidence, he shows that the silences are more indicative of the bureaucrats’ repressive attitudes than of any comprehensive adherence to an official doctrine that was instead, we learn, experienced as a major cause of collective suffering.

Contemporary western observers regarded the cultural, linguistic and religious diversity of the Ottoman regions as a ‘great curse of Babel’, a phrase that provides the title of the first substantive chapter of the book. The empire's riotous cultural variety offended their statist sensibilities as much as the rich smells of the bazaar irritated their noses. For the refugees who came to Greece when all this collapsed, however, nostalgia for a now-erased communal existence did not mean ignoring differences and boundaries, and Doumanis is also careful to show that not all the refugees’ memories of the ‘Ottoman belle époque’ (from around 1890 to the beginning of the First Balkan War in 1912) were equally sunny. He also recognises that their nostalgia exhibits ‘hyperbole, caricatures, and prejudices’ (p 87). Equally important is his acknowledgment that both Islam and Christianity were less calibrated to religious boundaries on the ground, in the actual performance of acts of worship as well as social engagement, than the doctrinal establishments of both religions might have desired. Ironically, it was the shift from confessional to national identity that hardened the lines between the two religious communities and ushered in both religious fundamentalism and its political equivalent in the form of state-sponsored nationalism.

Doumanis plumbs the rich folkloric and philological materials gathered by such intrepid collectors as Lucy M. J. Garnett, Richard M. Dawkins and Frederick W. Hasluck, as well as the literary reconstructions of writers who had lived through the collapse of the old order and were far from content with the new. He also finds support in the writings of anthropologists (notably Charles Stewart) who, like him, acknowledge the hegemonic character of the disdain so often shown toward those proto-ethnologists and their data – materials that make nonsense of the received wisdom of categorical separations between folk and ecclesiastical religion, between ‘Islamic’ and ‘Christian’ belief systems and ritual practices, and between the legitimate concerns of the historians’ craft and those of ethnologists of various periods and persuasions. The mutual recognition of piety and decency by Muslims and Christians largely perished in the flames of what the Greeks call the ‘Catastrophe’ of 1922, but the oral sources, as Doumanis demonstrates, conserve not only a clear memory of these attitudes but also of the logic whereby members of the two confessional communities were able to recognise common ground in each other's ways of exploring the supernatural, healing sickness, and simply enjoying the edible signs of their twinned existence. Theirs were distinctive but complementary orientations to the world – a world wrecked by the taxonomic depredations of modernity, but reconstructed here in a work of scholarly precision, disciplined imagination and uncompromising honesty.