Around 81 per cent of Serbia's population are Serbian Orthodox Christians, with Muslims at about four per cent, Roman Catholics at under four per cent, Protestants under one per cent, and small numbers declaring atheism or no answer, according to the 2022 census. The Serbian Orthodox Church is not formally established, but it holds a recognised position in law, an effective monopoly on public religious symbolism, and a claim to have preserved Serbian identity through five centuries without a state.
Sava, and the Autocephaly of 1219
Rastko Nemanjić, youngest son of the Serbian grand prince Stefan Nemanja, ran away to Mount Athos as a teenager and became the monk Sava. With his father, who abdicated to join him, he founded the monastery of Hilandar on Athos, which remains Serbian to this day.
In 1219 Sava obtained autocephaly for the Serbian church from the Byzantine emperor and patriarch, then in exile at Nicaea, and became its first archbishop. He organised dioceses, wrote the first Serbian legal and liturgical texts, composed the biography of his father, and effectively created the Serbian church, the Serbian literary language and the Serbian state's ideological foundation in one career.
The status was raised to a patriarchate at Peć in 1346 under Emperor Dušan, at the height of medieval Serbian power.
The Relics Burned on Vračar
In 1595, during a Serb uprising in the Banat, the Ottoman grand vizier Sinan Pasha had Sava's relics removed from Mileševa monastery, carried to Belgrade and publicly burned on the Vračar plateau.
The act was intended to destroy a focus of rebellion and instead created the most potent site in Serbian religious memory. The Church of Saint Sava stands on the spot where the burning is believed to have taken place. Begun in 1935, halted by war and then by communist rule, and only completed internally in recent years with a vast gold-ground mosaic in the dome executed with Russian assistance, it is among the largest Orthodox church buildings in the world.
The Slava: A Feast No Other Nation Keeps
The distinguishing practice of Serbian Orthodoxy is the slava, the celebration of the family's patron saint. Each family has one — Saint Nicholas, Saint George, Saint John, the Archangel Michael and Saint Sava are among the most common — and it is inherited through the male line, unchanged for as many generations as anyone can trace.
The household hosts on the saint's day. A priest blesses the slavski kolač, a round decorated loaf, which is turned and cut crosswise and sprinkled with wine; žito, boiled sweetened wheat, is eaten in memory of the dead; a candle burns all day. Guests are not invited — they come, because they know the date.
UNESCO inscribed the slava on its list of intangible cultural heritage in 2014. It is almost certainly a Christianised survival of a pre-Christian household cult, and it is the reason Serbian religious identity is transmitted through families rather than through congregations: a man who has not entered a church in years will still host his slava.
Peć, and a Patriarchate Abolished
After the Ottoman conquest the Serbian church was the only Serbian institution that survived. The Patriarchate of Peć was restored in 1557, reportedly through the influence of a grand vizier of Serbian origin, and functioned for two centuries as the effective government of the Serbs — collecting taxes, adjudicating disputes, maintaining the medieval legal tradition and keeping the memory of the Nemanjić state.
In 1766 the Ottomans abolished it and subordinated the Serbian church to the Greek Patriarchate of Constantinople, installing Greek bishops. The patriarchate was not restored until 1920, after the creation of Yugoslavia unified the several Serbian Orthodox jurisdictions that had developed under different empires.
This history explains the church's self-understanding: it governed the nation when no Serbian state existed, and it regards that as a permanent mandate rather than a historical episode.
The Monasteries in Kosovo
The oldest and most important Serbian religious buildings are in Kosovo, which declared independence in 2008 and which Serbia does not recognise. Visoki Dečani, founded in the 1320s, holds the largest surviving body of medieval Byzantine-tradition fresco painting anywhere, with well over a thousand identifiable figures. The Patriarchate of Peć, Gračanica and the Church of Our Lady of Ljeviš in Prizren complete the UNESCO inscription.
All four are listed as World Heritage in Danger. Orthodox churches in Kosovo were attacked during and after the 1999 war and again in the March 2004 riots, when dozens of churches and monasteries were damaged or destroyed, including Our Lady of Ljeviš. Dečani was guarded by NATO peacekeepers for two decades and has faced repeated legal difficulty over its land.
The Serbian Orthodox Church maintains its Diocese of Raška and Prizren there and rejects any settlement that would place the monasteries under Kosovo's jurisdiction. For a great many Serbs who rarely attend liturgy, these buildings are the core of the national claim, which is why the religious and political questions in Kosovo cannot be separated.
The Monasteries Inside Serbia
The Kosovo sites are the most contested, but the monastic heartland extends across Serbia proper. Studenica, founded by Stefan Nemanja in the 1190s and built in white marble, is UNESCO-inscribed and holds frescoes of the early thirteenth century in a style that predates the Byzantine revival further east. Žiča, painted red in the Athonite manner, was where Serbian kings were crowned. Sopoćani's Dormition fresco is regarded as among the finest surviving works of medieval European painting.
Fruška Gora, the wooded ridge in Vojvodina north of Belgrade, holds a cluster of monasteries founded from the fifteenth century onward by Serbs who had moved north ahead of Ottoman advance, and it functioned as a substitute centre of Serbian religious life under Habsburg rule.
Monasticism in Serbia declined severely under communism and has revived since the 1990s, with a marked increase in young monastics and a strong current of traditionalist piety that has at times pulled against the hierarchy. Hilandar on Mount Athos, Sava's own foundation, remains the spiritual reference point, and a serious fire there in 2004 prompted a national restoration effort.
Seven Traditional Communities, and Everyone Else
The 2006 Law on Churches and Religious Communities recognises seven traditional bodies: 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. These enjoy legal personality automatically, tax advantages and access to state institutions.
All other groups must register, and registration has been refused or delayed for several — including, pointedly, Protestant denominations with long histories in the country whose applications were complicated by naming conflicts with recognised bodies. The European Commission and religious freedom monitors have criticised the two-tier structure.
Confessional religious education returned to state schools in 2001 as an optional subject taken alongside civic education, having been removed under communism. Military chaplaincy was restored in 2011.
The Muslims of the Sandžak, and a Split
Serbia's Muslim population is concentrated in the Sandžak region in the south-west, centred on Novi Pazar, where Bosniaks form a local majority, and among Albanians in the Preševo valley and Roma communities elsewhere.
The Islamic community in Serbia has been divided since 2007 into two rival organisations with almost identical names — the Islamic Community in Serbia, aligned with the Islamic Community of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo, and the Islamic Community of Serbia, seated in Belgrade and on better terms with the Serbian state. The dispute has involved contested control of mosques and property and occasional violence, and it maps onto political rivalries within Bosniak politics as much as onto theology.
Novi Pazar's Altun-Alem Mosque dates from the sixteenth century. Belgrade's Bajrakli Mosque, the only one remaining in a city that once had many, was set on fire in 2004 in retaliation for the riots in Kosovo, and was subsequently restored.
Vojvodina's Patchwork
The northern province of Vojvodina, ruled by the Habsburgs rather than the Ottomans, is the most religiously varied part of the country. Hungarian and Croatian communities are Roman Catholic; Slovaks are largely Lutheran; Romanians are Orthodox but under their own jurisdiction; Rusyns are Greek Catholic, worshipping in the Byzantine rite while in communion with Rome.
Towns such as Subotica and Novi Sad carry the architectural evidence — Catholic cathedrals, Lutheran and Reformed churches, Orthodox cathedrals and, in Subotica, a celebrated art nouveau synagogue restored in recent years.
Serbia's Jewish community, which numbered tens of thousands before 1941, lost the great majority of its members in the Holocaust and now numbers only a few thousand, mostly in Belgrade and Novi Sad.
Identification Without Attendance
The final thing to understand is the gap between the census and the pew. Over four-fifths of Serbs record themselves as Orthodox, and surveys consistently find that a much smaller minority attend liturgy regularly, keep the fasts or take communion often.
What the great majority do keep is the slava, the marking of Orthodox Christmas on 7 January by the Julian calendar the church still uses, the lighting of a candle at a funeral and a church wedding. Religion here functions as inherited belonging rather than weekly practice — which is why the church's authority on questions of national identity, and particularly on Kosovo, has held up even as its authority over private conduct has not. Serbia more broadly is our Serbia country guide; the terrain these jurisdictions grew across is covered in the geography of the Balkan peninsula, and where Serbia is sets the scene.
