Belonging is a product of the imagination. The history of modern belonging is a gradual progression from the local and the literal to the national and the symbolic, i.e. the ever more expansive and the ever more abstract.  Writing the history of modern belonging is by necessity an exercise in multiscalarity.  

In the aftermath of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, the Russian tsar and the Ottoman sultan engaged directly the masses of their subjects by way of annual royal (birthday, accession-day, etc.) celebrations.  These proliferating and escalating ceremonial events ushered in a new era of ruler visibility, creating a modern public space/sphere, and forging credible direct vertical ties of subject loyalty, irrespective of language, location, creed or class.  Over time, the rounds of royal celebration also played a key role in the creation of new types of horizontal ties and ethnic group consciousness.

This paper shares insights from my research on the various intermediate scales of spatial and spiritual belonging, derived by applying microhistorical methods to a wide range of untapped or underutilized sources.  It offers a new model of the ethnonational worldview and briefly discusses its wider usability from the nineteenth century onwards.