Scholarly interest in the cultural and ecclesiastical connections between Byzantium and the Slavic world long predates the work of Dimitri Obolensky, yet his formulation of the Byzantine Commonwealth (1974, and its recent sequel Revisiting the Byzantine Commonwealth (Shepard and Frankopan 2025) opened new space for understanding these relationships as a dynamic field of interaction rather than one-directional influence. In the Balkan setting, major projects such as Byzantine Sources for the History of the Peoples of Yugoslavia (1955-1986) and, more recently, The Byzantine World in the Balkans (2012), which explored Byzantine cultural, ecclesiastical, and political stance on and presence in the region, have further shaped the field and provided important inspiration for this project. Following a doctoral dissertation on intellectual history and the politics of knowledge in the eleventh-century Constantinopolitan church, this research expands that perspective to examine how Byzantine culture and ecclesiastical life were received and (re)interpreted within the liturgical life in the Serbian Orthodox context between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. The project is situated within the “Byzantium and Other Christianities” research strand of the cluster as it examines how Byzantine liturgical and intellectual models were received and rearticulated in a non-Greek Orthodox context.

Rather than treating liturgy as a fixed body of texts, this research approaches it as ritual practice, a mechanism of meaning-making, and a performative framework for articulating collective religious and political identity. Drawing on ritual theory (e.g. Bell 1992) and recent studies that foreground liturgy as a lens for social and cultural history (e.g. Mellas 2020, Radle 2024, Roosien 2024, among others), it investigates how liturgical practices circulated, were adapted, and embedded in new contexts. The study takes as its starting point the translation activity and pilgrimage networks associated with Saint Sava of Serbia in the early thirteenth century. In addition, particular attention is given to monastic and transregional networks, especially those centered on Mount Athos and the Hilandar monastery in particular, as a key site of liturgical practice, textual transmission, and cultural mediation. The influence of hesychasm on Serbian ecclesiastical and monastic life particularly shaped not only spiritual ideals but also liturgical and literary preferences, further contributing to the reception and reinterpretation of Byzantine models. Within this framework, the project also engages with homiletic material, exploring the circulation of homilies and homiliaries across linguistic boundaries. Finally, this research also examines how medieval liturgical traditions are interpreted and instrumentalized in contemporary ecclesiastical and scholarly discourse.