ABSTRACT
Defying the still prevailing ethnocentric treatment of collective identity, a growing number of historians uphold that prior to the nineteenth century people in the Balkans identified themselves primarily with a religious and not with an ethnic community. The multi-ethnic Orthodox Christian community in the Balkans, variously named an “Orthodox Commonwealth,” “Orthodox cultural union,” or “Romaic community,” emerged from the combined policies of the Ottoman sultans, who divided their subjects into religious categories with no regard for ethnic distinctions, and of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, which strove to cultivate ecumenism, religious coherence and solidarity above and beyond linguistic or ethnic differences. A sense of ethnic affiliation had certainly existed, but it was subsumed under far more important moral obligations defined by religious, familial, professional, or class allegiance.
