Religion and Ethnicity

Ethnic, national, and religious identifications have been intricately intertwined in East Central Europe. ¹ To be Polish, proverbially, has also meant being Catholic, while Orthodox Christianity has “embodied,” seemingly necessarily, Greek, Serb, Romanian, and other ethnicities. Ethnic and religious entanglement can be found throughout East Central Europe. Scholars have invoked the close association between markers of confessional and national difference in Bosnia and Macedonia as an example of the conspicuous fusion of “ethno-religious” identities, based upon the “commonplace [understanding] that religious identification and ethnic affiliation have been very closely linked in the Balkan setting.” ² Language, culture and confession in this region have enjoyed relationships of mutual influence and support, as well as of reciprocal, mutually constitutive antagonism(s): being Greek (Orthodox), for example, relies heavily upon a sense of not being Turkish (Muslim). Complex ethno-religious matrices have afforded multiple competing or coexisting options for identifying self and other, while regional, imperial, and temporal parameters have influenced the development of such matrices. For instance, Greek Catholics (Catholics of the Byzantine Rite) within a broadly defined Slavic linguistic classification were able, over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to adopt Rusyn, Russian, Ukrainian, Hungarian, Polish, Boiko, Hutsul, Lemko, Romanian, and other ethnic identifications, even as the narrow definition of Greek Catholicism as the only legitimate “Ukrainian” option in the Austro-Hungarian context gave way to broader acceptance of a national Ukrainian Orthodox Christianity after World War I, something virtually unthinkable only a few years earlier. ³