Serbian Orthodox Church

The Church St Sava made self-governing in 1219, when he was consecrated its first archbishop at Nicaea with the blessing of the Patriarch of Constantinople in exile there. It became a patriarchate at Peć in 1346, lost it to the Ottomans in 1766 and regained it at Belgrade in 1920. The medieval monasteries of Kosovo, Peć, Dečani and Gračanica, keep some of the finest frescoes of the Orthodox world. In the Second World War hundreds of thousands of Orthodox Serbs, priests and bishops among them, were killed in the Independent State of Croatia, and under communism the Church was watched and constrained. Its twentieth century also gave the whole Church St Justin Popovic and St Nikolaj Velimirovic. In 2022 it granted autocephaly to the Church of North Macedonia, which it had long refused to recognise. Patriarch Porfirije has led it since 2021.