In 1922-1923, the adoption of the “reformed calendar” by a certain number of Orthodox churches led to a new round of divisions between the Eastern orthodox Churches. This may sound as just another episode in a long-lasting serial of “byzantine” theological quarrels.  It is far from being that. The “calendar” reform was just one of a series of highly geopolitical reforms that a group of Greek-Orthodox reformers had been advocating on the eve of WWI and which were projected in the limelight during the acceleration of time (in R. Koselleck’s terms) provoked by the War. It consisted in envisioning a new, imperial, but post-ottoman, configuration for the Eastern Orthodox churches that would preserve the primacy of the Greek-orthodox despite the emergence of national churches and adapted it to the new geopolitical developments of the Age of Empires.
The network of these reformers rotating around an Athens-Constantinople (Istanbul) axis and active from Alexandria to Tbilissi, and from Jerusalem to Bitola, but also in the USA, had a narrow window of opportunity on the aftermath of the Russian revolution and the end of WWI. The calendar question of 1922-1923 finally encapsulated in a nutshell the conflicts and resistances around this project. But though it was finally not fully realized, it has left its indelible mark, and one can even say its blueprint, in the way religion is politicized in Europe’s orthodox borderlands, whenever time accelerates, whether that be 1947, 1991 or even 2023…

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Programme 2023

Le Séminaire moderne et contemporain est un moment d’échange dans lequel les chercheurs des programmes de la section moderne et contemporaine et des intervenants invités peuvent présenter leurs travaux en lien avec les axes thématiques de l’EFA et avec la programmation scientifique de la section, mais aussi avec l’actualité de la recherche sur les Balkans et la Méditerranée orientale. Lieu de rencontre entre chercheurs venant d’horizons différents, le séminaire vise tout à la fois à valoriser les recherches menées à l’EFA en histoire moderne et contemporaine, anthropologie, géographie, sociologie et histoire de l’art (et autres), et à faire connaître auprès de la communauté de l’EFA les recherches menées dans d’autres institutions de la région.