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The Serbian Orthodox Church has functioned as the carrier of national identity since Sava secured autocephaly for it in 1219, and the memory of the battle of Kosovo in 1389, transmitted through liturgy and epic poetry as much as through history, remains central to how Serbs narrate their past. The oldest and most important Serbian monasteries stand in Kosovo: the Patriarchate of Pec, Visoki Decani, Gracanica and Our Lady of Ljevis are inscribed by UNESCO as World Heritage in Danger, and Decani has needed international protection since 1999. Catholic Croats and Hungarians form a minority in Vojvodina, and a Muslim Bosniak population lives in the Sandzak region. The church regained influence rapidly after 1990 and religious instruction returned to state schools in 2001.
Facts
Law and State
Establishment StatusPrivileged Never Established 3 No church is established, but the 2006 Law on Churches and Religious Communities grants seven traditional communities a privileged status including tax exemption and state funded chaplaincy. State Funding MechanismThe seven traditional communities recognised under Serbia's 2006 Law on Churches and Religious Communities receive tax exemption and state funded chaplaincy, a privileged status no other religious body holds. 3 Apostasy or Blasphemy LawSerbia's Criminal Code carries no offense titled blasphemy. Article 317 punishes provoking or inciting ethnic, racial or religious hatred or intolerance among the peoples and ethnic communities living in Serbia with six months to five years' imprisonment, rising to one to eight years when committed by abuse of power or authority, or when the offense results in riots, violence or other grave harm to the coexistence of the country's peoples and minorities. 3 Registration or Recognition RegimeThe 2006 Law on Churches and Religious Communities grants seven traditional religious communities a privileged registered status in Serbia. 3 Ban or Official WatchlistSerbia's 2006 law on churches and religious communities recognizes seven denominations, the Serbian Orthodox Church, the Roman Catholic Church, the Slovak Evangelical Church, the Reformed Christian Church, the Evangelical Christian Church, the Islamic community and the Jewish community, as traditional, and bars any other group from registering under a name that includes a word already used in one of those names, such as Orthodox or Evangelical. All other communities must re-register at the Ministry of Religion's discretion through a review of their theology, governance and finances. 3 Concordat BasisSerbia has no concordat with the Holy See. The one formal agreement the Serbian foreign ministry itself names is the narrower Agreement on Cooperation between the Republic of Serbia and the Holy See in the Field of Higher Education, signed 27 June 2014; diplomatic relations otherwise trace back to the Holy See's 1919 recognition of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, of which Serbia is the recognized legal successor. 4 Disputed
Legal StatusThe 2006 Law on Churches and Religious Communities grants seven traditional communities a privileged status including tax exemption and state funded chaplaincy; the Serbian Orthodox monasteries in Kosovo are protected under a separate international framework. 3 Serbia's 2006 Law on Churches and Religious Communities grants seven named traditional religious communities, the Serbian Orthodox Church chief among them alongside the Catholic Church, several Protestant bodies, Judaism and Islam, a privileged legal status including tax exemption and state-funded chaplaincy, a tier not available outside this named list. Separately, Serbian Orthodox monasteries located in Kosovo, whose independence from Serbia Serbia does not recognise, are protected under a distinct international framework, reflecting their significance both as active religious sites and as contested cultural heritage in a still-disputed territorial relationship. The State Department's report records both arrangements as current without resolving the political question underlying the Kosovo monasteries' status, bound up with the broader unresolved Serbia-Kosovo relationship. Whether communities outside the seven named groups will be added to the privileged tier, and whether the monasteries' protected status changes with any future resolution, both depend on developments outside religious law specifically. Demographics
Religious CompositionAround 85 per cent Serbian Orthodox, with Roman Catholics near 5 per cent chiefly in Vojvodina and Muslims near 3 per cent in the Sandzak (Pew Research Center, Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020; Serbian census). 1 Government
Government Type Sovereignty StatusSovereign UN member state 2 Established Year5 June 2006 (from the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro); notable earlier dates: 1217 (Serbian Kingdom established); 16 April 1346 (Serbian Empire established); 13 July 1878 (Congress of Berlin recognizes Serbian independence); 1 December 1918 (Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes established, later known as Yugoslavia) Geography
LatitudeApproximate reference point, rounded to one decimal place; a country's extent has no single center, so this coordinate is conventional, not a survey measurement. LongitudeApproximate reference point, rounded to one decimal place; a country's extent has no single center, so this coordinate is conventional, not a survey measurement. Location
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Religion and History in Serbia
Sava Nemanjic secured autocephaly for the Serbian church in 1219 and became its first archbishop, and in doing so he built something that outlasted every Serbian state that followed. The church he organised carried the language, the law codes, the royal genealogy and the memory of the medieval kingdom through nearly five centuries of Ottoman rule, when there was no Serbian state at all. That is the reason its role in Serbian national identity is structurally different from the role of, say, the Church of England in English identity: it was for a long period the only Serbian institution there was.
The memory that matters most is a defeat. The battle of Kosovo in 1389 killed both commanders and did not immediately end Serbian independence, but it was transmitted through liturgy, through the cult of Prince Lazar as a martyr and through epic poetry sung to the gusle, until it became the central story of the nation. Its liturgical form matters: this is a defeat commemorated as a deliberate choice of the heavenly kingdom over the earthly one.
Serbia is overwhelmingly Orthodox, with a Catholic minority of Croats and Hungarians in Vojvodina and a Muslim Bosniak population in the Sandzak. The slava, the family celebration of an inherited patron saint, is a distinctively Serbian institution and is inscribed on the UNESCO list of intangible cultural heritage.
Church influence recovered rapidly after 1990. Religious instruction returned to state schools in 2001 as an elective alongside civic education, a change argued over at the time and now routine.
The Monasteries in Kosovo, and Heritage Under Guard
The oldest and most important buildings of the Serbian Orthodox Church stand outside the territory Serbia administers. The Patriarchate of Pec, the historic seat; Visoki Decani, whose fourteenth century fresco programme is among the largest surviving in the Byzantine world; Gracanica; and Our Lady of Ljevis at Prizren are all in Kosovo. UNESCO inscribed them as a single World Heritage property and placed it on the List of World Heritage in Danger.
The danger is not neglect. Several of these buildings were attacked in the violence of March 2004, and Decani has been under international military protection since 1999, first by Italian troops of the NATO force and continuously since. A monastery that receives visitors under armed guard is an unusual object: it is simultaneously a functioning religious community, a world heritage site, a Serbian national symbol and a security problem.
Two further complications belong in any honest account. First, the legal status of the monastery land has itself been litigated: Kosovo's Constitutional Court ruled in favour of Decani in a long running property dispute, and implementation of that ruling has been slow, which the monastery and international observers have both raised repeatedly. Second, the reciprocal loss is real. Ottoman era mosques, tekkes and Orthodox churches alike were damaged across the region during the wars of the 1990s, and framing the Kosovo monasteries as the only heritage at risk misdescribes what happened.
The monasteries are living communities, not ruins, and the monks at Decani in particular have a documented record of sheltering people of the other community during the conflict.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
This source names Serbia directly: "under Ratko Mladic and backed by Serbia-dominated rump Yugoslavia, and Bosnian Croat forces backed by Croatia."
The Serbian Orthodox Church, autocephalous since Sava obtained recognition in 1219, holds about 85 per cent affiliation and carries national identity.
This source names Serbia directly: "article on Eastern Orthodoxy in Serbia, read directly for this pass, which states that the Ecumenical Patriarch persuaded the Ottoman Sultan to abolish the Patriarchate of Pec on 11 September 1766..."
This source names Serbia directly: "The Serbian Ministry of Foreign Affairs' own bilateral-relations page for the Holy See, naming the Agreement on Cooperation between the Republic of Serbia and the Holy See in the Field of Higher..."
This source names Serbia directly: "The Wikipedia article on religion in Serbia, presenting a table sourced to the Statistical Office of the Republic of Serbia showing Orthodox Christian identification of 85 percent (6,371,584 people)..."
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