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 the Slavic vernacular, created the Cyrillic alphabet, and translated the Christian scriptures and liturgies into the Old Church Slavonic language. The early Serbian protostates of the 9th and 10th centuries coemerged with the hierarchical structure of organized Christianity.

The struggle for supremacy between the pope in Rome and the patriarch in Constantinople originated the schism between the Orthodox and Catholic churches in 1054 and was reflected in shifting ecclesiastical allegiances among the Serbs. However, in 1219, Saint Sava, the youngest son of the first ruler of the Serbian Nemanjić Dynasty, became the archbishop of the autocephalous Serbian Orthodox Church under the Constantinople patriarchy, sealing an enduring identity of Serbs as Orthodox Christians. Together with the rise of Serbian military power, conquest of Byzantine territories, and coronation of Tsar Dušan in 1346 as the Emperor of Serbs and Greeks, the Serbian archbishop was raised to the rank of patriarch. Between the 12th and 14th centuries, the Nemanjić Dynasty built numerous monasteries, giving birth to the Raška School of art, whose frescoes of secular authorities alongside Christian images adorned the walls of the churches. In turn, most of the Nemanjić kings were canonized by the Serbian church. All these events testify to the presence of state institutions pervaded by Christian religiosity and church institutions imbued with state power.

With the fall of the Serbian state to the Turks in the 1389 Kosovo battle and its incorporation into the Ottoman Empire after 1459, the monasteries, churches, and clergy became a sanctuary of Serbian cultural and social identity. Serbian priests led rebellions against the Turks and guided flows of refugees from Kosovo and Raška north into the Austrian territories. In the 1700s, the center of Serbian cultural life gradually moved to the town of Sremski Karlovci and monasteries in Srem, an area between the Sava and Danube rivers. For nearly 500 years under the Ottomans, to be a Serb meant to belong to the Serbian Orthodox Church, and this vested identity was carried over into the present.

Having regained its independence in the 19th century, Serbia managed to unify dispersed ethnic Serbs into the country of Yugoslavia following World War I and bring together fragmented eparchies under patriarchy in Belgrade. While marginalized after World War II by the Yugoslavian communist government, the Serbian Orthodox Church was once again called upon by the Serbian state in the 1990s to rouse national feelings and solidify national identity during the recent Balkan wars.

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