Taking as a starting point Nicolae Iorga's famous axiom Byzance après Byzance, coined to describe the influence of Byzantine culture and institutions in the Balkans for centuries after the empire's collapse, Diana Mishkova asserts Byzantium's central role in nation building in Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Romania in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and adds Turkey for the twentieth century. To demonstrate her thesis, Mishkova looks at a variety of ways the empire and its legacy were appropriated and instrumentalized by historians, many of whom doubled as nation builders. Highlighting the key master narratives, common tropes and their continuous appeal, Mishkova's greatest asset is her transnational framework, as she ventures from the west to Russia and across the Balkans, looking for origins, transfers, continuities and adaptations of ideas and knowledge about the empire, or more precisely their systematic expressions in evolving national historiographies. Its very name, variously described as Greek/Orthodox/Lower/Eastern Roman, but most commonly the Byzantine empire, is both a retronym and exonym, invented after its disappearance and different from how its inhabitants called themselves, illustrative of the tendency to attribute it various meanings. Surveying vast historical production, Mishkova singles out issues most adept to rival nationalist interpretations such as relations between Byzantium and the alleged predecessors of modern Balkan states; issues of authenticity, (dis)continuity, ethnogenesis, ethnic identity and territorial claims; and views on Byzantine rule, religion, and culture, all categories used to define notions of the collective self. While western notions related to Byzantium have dominated debates, Mishkova describes how the ideas travelled and took hold in the Balkans, sometimes from unexpected corners. Eventually, different political conjunctions were responsible for the fact that the study of Byzantium more often subverted than asserted the idea of the common Balkan past, as one would imagine.
Outlining the development of the specific field of Byzantine studies from the late nineteenth century, Mishkova points out how, despite the newly introduced scientific methods, historiographies continued to reflect political and ideological constraints and ambitions, though there were outlier historians and thinkers all along, like Stojan Novaković in Serbia, Demostene Russo, Petre P. Panaitescu, and Alexandru Elian in Romania, and the late Ottoman historian Ahmet Refik or Anthony Kaldellis among contemporary scholars, whose views are clearly the closest to the author of this systematic overview. Amidst general trends, Mishkova provides superb analysis of individual authors such as “Iorga's highly speculative bravura, visionary flair and opaque and ornate style . . . .” (119). The interest of both professional historians and state establishments made the Balkans since the interwar period into an international hub of Byzantine scholarship. It was a complex achievement, as Mishkova shows, with scholarly methodology largely deceptive, as old notions acquired new coatings throughout the Cold War and its aftermath with political and security anxieties projecting onto the past.
Historians in the region will criticize Mishkova's selections, interpretations and generalizations. But they always would. What puzzles the reader is the author's ambition, as stated in the introduction, to be a “neutral observer,” and the intention to leave reception and dissemination of historians’ production outside her remit. Yet, she duly notices the inherent epistemological dichotomy of such an effort. Ultimately, she settles on a narrative that sees historiographies in interplay with socio- and geopolitical contexts filled with examples of how competing political visions or diametrically opposed values meshed with historians’ conclusions or sheer inventions (Mishkova politely calls them construals). She also looks at scholars and figures beyond historians to strengthen her arguments, showing how trends emerging from the study of Byzantium formed schools of thought on national history and extended their conclusions to national character and essence. Mishkova's book is thus not just an overview of Balkan historiographies, but of the Balkan states’ political, intellectual, and cultural histories through the Byzantine prism. As her title aptly sums it up, Balkan states engaged in “rival Byzantiums,” or a multitude of ways in which Byzantium has been represented, appropriated, or disowned. Taking a longue durée perspective and placing them in global context, the Balkan historiographies on Byzantium, produced by a mélange of amateur and professional historians/politicians/national visionaries, whose output could hardly be isolated due to the porous boundaries of historical writing genres, are not an exception in their manipulability. What distinguishes the Balkans is, according to Mishkova's persuasive study, only its protracted course and the continuous insecurities that underpin it.
