Translatio Imperii Revisited in the Balkans: Interpretation of Serbian Past and Imperial Imagination, 1878-1941

Abstract

Over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Serbian scholarship developed not only a highly ambiguous and complex model of perception of the Eastern Roman Empire, but it also evinced a sense of determinism referring to the political and cultural goals of modern Serbia as a successor to a medieval Serbian state. Yet the most conspicuous evidence of this Serbo-Byzantine discourse, which was based on both the renovatio and translatio doctrines, lay in the sphere of art and architecture. It was the architectural heritage of medieval Serbia, comprising of churches and monasteries dotting the territories of Serbia proper, Kosovo, Montenegro and Macedonia, that represented a basic link with a suitable imperial past of the nation, a vivid reminder of the nation’s former glory. Having been initially perceived as “Byzantine”, and later valued as truly authentic, Serbian architectural monuments of the Middle Ages were systematically nationalized over the course of the late nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century to became the epitomes of the Serbian variant of translatio.