National Identity in the 19th-Century Balkans: The Case of Hatzichristos

This article shows that the eventual predominance of national ideology in the Balkans and the subsequent consolidation of the national identity of its peoples was a long drawn-out process that continued even after the founding of nation-states. This is presented through the story of a man by the name of Hatzichristos, who during Ottoman rule in the Balkans, although of Serbian origins, fought on the side of the Greeks in the 1821 Greek war of independence and who then settled as a permanent resident in the newly-formed Greek state. Hatzichristos does not appear to have developed a sense of ethnic self-awareness. His perception of nationalism, if it existed at all, was embryonic. But the fact that the Greeks wrongly referred to him as Voulgaris [Bulgarian] indicates that they did not have any precise definition of what constituted the Others in terms of nationalist criteria.