Conversions in Central and Eastern Europe

Gašper Mithans is a senior research fellow at the Science and Research Centre Koper. He led a project on religious conversions and atheization in Yugoslavia. A Fulbright Scholar at UC Berkeley in 2020, he also held research grants at Temple University and University College Cork. His research focuses on the history of religions, religion–state relations, and interwar Yugoslavia.Heléna Tóth is senior instructor in European history at Bamberg University. After being awarded her PhD at Harvard University, she taught European and German history at Boston University, and held visiting professorships in East European history at LMU Munich and Göttingen University. Her research focuses on political cultures in Central and Eastern Europe, transatlantic history, and the cultural and social history of socialism.Matteo Benussi is a sociocultural anthropologist based at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, specializing in religion, ethics, and politics in Eurasia. Benussi has conducted research on Islamic piety movements in Tatarstan, the legacies of the Chornobyl disaster in Ukraine, post-Soviet heritage politics, as well as halal infrastructures. He is currently exploring the topics of war, poetry, and political ontology in theaters of conflict.

• Introduction. Crossing Boundaries: Conversions in Central and Eastern Europe in the Long 20th Century Section 1: Conversion, Conviction, and Faith 1. Lev Gillet’s “Great Object of Intercession”: Ecumenism and Conversion Between France, Russia, and Ukraine 2. Conversions from, to, and Within the Evangelical Faith in the Late USSR (1950–1980s) 3. The Politics of Conversion: Institutional Strategies of the Serbian Orthodox Church Toward Religious Alternatives in the 20th Century 4. “Conversion Without Crisis?”: Inquiry into Religious Narratives of the Bahá’í Community in Bosnia and Herzegovina Section 2: Conversion, Coercion, and Protection 5. Muslim Conversions to Eastern Orthodox Christianity in the Modern Balkans 6. Religious Need or Survival Strategy?: Conversions Among Jews in Occupied Kraków and Other Localities in the Kraków District in 1939–1945 7. The Reaction of the Holy See to the Issue of the Forced Conversion of Orthodox Serbs to Catholicism in the Independent State of Croatia 8. Fashioning the Orthodox: Converting Greek Catholics to the Romanian Orthodox Church After the State-Enforced Union Section 3: Conversion, Power, and Unrest 9. Religion as Social Protest: The Orthodox Movement in Podkarpatská Rus (1919–1938) 10. Converts and the Rise of Nationalism Among German Evangelicals and Orthodox Slovenians in Interwar Slovenia 11. Sacralizing Ethnos: “Conversions” to Ethnoreligiosity in Eastern Europe Section 4: Conversion, Communism, and Atheization 12. “Converting” to Atheism and Tackling Religious Indifference in the Early Soviet Union 13. Yugoslav Partisans in Need of Catholic Clergy: The Vatican and the Issue of the Yugoslav Partisans on the Italian Peninsula in 1944 14. Speeding up Atheization in the GDR: Research Serving Worldview Change 15. Between Political Exigency and Humanitarian Service: Catholic (Non-)Converts in the Shaping of Socialist Funeral Culture in Hungary, 1970–1989

‘Taking conversion as its analytical lens, this volume offers a unique perspective on the dynamics of religious change in Central and Eastern Europe. With studies spanning the entire region and balancing the overtly political with the intimate and subjective, the editors and contributors have crafted an indispensable contribution to both area studies and religious studies.’Professor James A. Kapaló, University College Cork‘This volume brings much-needed attention to the religious-political history of regions often treated as imperial peripheries. Yet, modern European history’s most extreme dynamics unfolded in this “shatterzone of empires.” These chapters reveal conversion as a key process amid Ottoman collapse, Soviet atheism, and resurgent Christian nationalism.’Professor Todd H. Weir, University of Groningen