Serbia

Serbia, in the heart of the southern European Balkan countries that once constituted Yugoslavia, has been at the crossroads of global religion since antiquity. Groups of Serbs and other Slavic people migrated from the northeast of the Carpathian Mountains to the Balkan Peninsula from the fifth to the seventh centuries and settled in Roman territories. The Roman Empire, centered in Constantinople, with Christianity as its state religion, attempted to domesticate intruders into imperial subjects. Although the Slavs adopted the political, cultural, and religious institutions of the Byzantines, they rejected and fought against imperial rule and established their own kingdoms and principalities.

Christianization of the Serbs occurred in the second half of the ninth century when two brothers from Thessalonica, Cyril and Methodius, began to preach in ...