Second paragraph of third chapter:
This case is illustrative of the conditions in Kosovo during the late Ottoman period, when religious divisions were still more important than ethnic ones. Religion was the dominant marker of identity, in this case dividing Albanians into Muslims and Christians, or into those conservative circles who were determined to defend Muslim hegemony against those who were or intended to become Catholics. Yet this case also marks the beginning of a new period of Ottoman reforms, which led to attempts by the Roman Catholic church, notably the Franciscan order, to gain back some of the souls which had been lost to Islam during the long period of Ottoman rule. The development of the Marian devotion in Letnica, as well as the policy of conferring the sacrament on non-Catholics, were the main devices used to accomplish this, i.e. to re-Catholicize part of the population in the Karadag mountains. The concept of crypto-Christianity was instrumental in church policy. Instead of taking crypto-Catholicism simply for granted, I would like to suggest that initially (i.e. in the first decades of the nineteenth century) it was primarily a church category which did not correspond with the ‘lived realities’ of those who received this label.¹ It was designed to redefine the identity of people who had a vague or ambivalent sense of religious belonging, and to explicate and justify a church policy of Catholic recovery and expansion into Ottoman territory. Through the workings of the devotional and missionary regime in the parish of Letnica, however, the category became increasingly real for those involved.
¹ I do not dispute that at an earlier stage, at the time when Albanian Catholics were converting to Islam (during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), crypto-Catholicism was a ‘lived reality’ indeed. There is ample documentary evidence for that (see for instance Malcolm 1998: 173-175). I want to question, however, the common assumption that there was a clear continuity of crypto-Catholicism up to the nineteenth century. I believe that the awareness of belonging to two different and radically opposed religious traditions was gradually lost among ordinary converts (after two or three generations).
Published in 1999, before the dynamics around Kosova changed completely, this is a study of several interesting cases of religious and ethnic identity in the region, making the case that both are much more fluid than you might think from public discourse. I’m always on for some good anthropological field work, and this is good anthropological field work.
In fact for anyone who knows the region, Duijzings’ core theme is not new. Back in 2024, I was talking with two fairly well-known political figures from Serbia and North Macedonia, and we discovered that each of them had a parent who had been expelled from the same part of northern Greece in the 1940s, and also had cousins who had remained and are now ‘Greek’. Identity is what you make it.
Duijzings approaches the topic with empathy and care, and brings to life the cases he looks at. These are:
- Christian shrines which are also the subject of Muslim pilgrimages and other religious practices
- The ‘crypto-Catholics’ of the Albanian lands
- Dervishes and Bektashi, and their clashes with the state-sanctions Muslim authorities
- The Egyptian minority in Kosova and Albania
He then looks at the structure and impact of two nationalist cultural projects, contrasting the unsuccessful attempt by Naim Frashëri to promote Bektashism as a core part of Albanian identity with the successful use of Serbian epic poetry, notably “The Battle of Kosovo”, to do the same for Orthodox Christianity and Serbian nationalism.
Written at a time when Kosova’s future was deeply uncertain, it’s useful counter-evidence to the ‘ancient hatreds’ narrative. I have the version that was submitted to the University of Amsterdam as the author’s anthropology PhD thesis, but you can get the book version here. Duijzings is now professor of social anthropology at the University of Regensburg.
This was the shortest book on my unread shelves acquired in 2022. Next on that pile is War Over Kosovo, edited by Andrew Bacevich and Eliot Cohen.
