Who was Mojsej Putnik, and why was he given a ‘festival greeting’ by Zaharija Orfelin in 1757? Few reference works on religious or political history offer any answers to these questions, which would probably stump most tenured historians of eighteenth-century Europe if stopped in the street. They have to do with the establishment of the Serbian metropolitanate of Karlovci in the southern reaches of the kingdom of Hungary when, in the 1690s, this territory passed from Ottoman to Habsburg rule and numerous Orthodox came from Ottoman lands to settle there. Perhaps better known as the place where the momentous Treaty of Karlowitz was signed in 1699, Karlovci became the administrative centre for new and old Orthodox inhabitants of the Monarchy. The metropolitanate interacted with the Viennese and Hungarian authorities, and also launched some interesting cultural impulses, of some importance not just for Serbian identity but for the programmes and claims of other nations in the Balkans. Few have written on this in English, but one should mention Charles Jelavich (Church History, 1954), Phillip Adler (Austrian History Yearbook, 1976–7) and Noel Malcolm (Kosovo: a short history, London 1998).

The book begins with a contextualisation of the establishment of the patriarchate (pp. 1–22). The Anglophone historiography, slender as it is, is overlooked, and an opportunity to tackle existing hypotheses or consolidate historiographical debate thereby missed. At times Todorović resorts to the standard rhetoric of national historiography: Serbs seek ‘glory’, Turks ‘revenge’. However, she makes good use of mainly Serbian primary and secondary sources to reconstruct the life and intentions of the artist and writer Zaharija Orfelin (1726–85) who produced the work mentioned in the title to celebrate the investiture of Mojsej Putnik as bishop of Novi Sad in 1757 (pp. 23–33). The bulk of the book is given over to an analysis of the ‘Festival greeting’ itself, a thirty-three-page manuscript preserved in Wroclaw University Library and containing a panegyric poem in Russian Slavonic with twenty-two intricate illustrations. Attention is given to the panegyric form (pp. 35–57), to the patriarchal investiture ceremony for which it was intended (pp. 85–112) and to the imagery and the conception of space and time manifested in Orfelin's work (pp. 113–59). The influence of Russian panegyric, notably those composed by the Ukrainian Kozachinskii for the Empress Elisabeth in 1733, and for the Karlovci Metropolitan Vikentije Novaković two years later, is traced, as are other European influences on Orfelin's work such as the Triumphal Arch erected by Gottlieb Volckamer von Kirchensittenbach for the Emperor Joseph i at Nuremburg in 1705. Of particular value are twenty-five black-and-white illustrations, many reproduced from the original manuscript of the Greeting (pp. 59–83), and the reproduction of the text both in the original and in translation (in collaboration with Bogdan Terzić, pp. 161–202). There is no conclusion, which is a shame. Despite this, and despite some limitations of perspective as already indicated, Todorović's monograph is a useful and rare contribution to the study of artistic and literary production in the mid eighteenth-century Balkans, where eastern-rite churchmen came into contact with, and began to make use of, the new ‘European’ forms of public representation.