Serbian Orthodox Church, autocephalous, or ecclesiastically independent, member of the Eastern Orthodox communion, located primarily in Serbia, Montenegro, and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The southern Serbs wavered for long periods in their ecclesiastical allegiance between Rome and Constantinople (now Istanbul); the consecration of St. Sava as autocephalous archbishop of Serbia in 1219, however, aligned the various Serbian principalities into one ecclesiastical whole behind Constantinople. As the kingdom of Serbia grew in size and prestige and Stefan Dušan, king of Serbia from 1331, assumed the imperial title of tsar in 1346 to 1355, the archbishopric of Peć was correspondingly raised to the rank of patriarchate. By 1459, however, Serbia was made a Turkish paşalik (province). The patriarchate was abolished, then restored in 1557, only to be abolished once again in 1766. The church remained under the jurisdiction of the ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople until it became autocephalous in 1879, the year after the recognition of Serbia as an independent state. After World War I all the Serbs were united under one ecclesiastical authority, and the patriarchate was reestablished in 1920, the patriarch’s full title being “archbishop of Peć, metropolitan of Belgrade and Karlovci, and patriarch of the Serbs.”
The supreme authority of the Serbian church, the Holy Synod, is composed of all its bishops, who meet once a year. There is also a standing synod of four members who administer the day-to-day affairs of the church, which is estimated to have about 8,000,000 adherents. Nearly 70,000 reside in the United States and Canada. There are 32 dioceses, including 4 in North America; four seminaries and a theological faculty train candidates for the clergy; and a patriarchal journal, Glasnik (“Messenger”), is published monthly.