Dr Nebojša Šuletić delivered a lecture entitled “The Serbian Church in the States of Early Modern Europe”

As part of the programme accompanying the exhibition Art in the Service of Faith: The Splendour and Glory of the Metropolitanate of Karlovci, Dr Nebojša Šuletić, Research Associate at the Institute for Balkan Studies, delivered a lecture entitled “The Serbian Church in the States of Early Modern Europe” at the Gallery of Matica Srpska in Novi Sad on 7 August 2026.

The lecture emphasized that the early modern period was an age of confessional states, in which only one religion—the established state religion—could be professed freely and publicly. The religious rites of minority communities could be performed only with the written permission of the authorities, under conditions prescribed by law and subject to supervision by state institutions. In the territories of the Ottoman Empire, the Habsburg Monarchy, and the Republic of Venice, where most of the Serbian Orthodox faithful and clergy lived, seven distinct models of toleration of Serbian Orthodoxy have been identified.

Particular attention was paid to the model represented by the Metropolitanate of Karlovci, which, in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, was granted an unusually broad range of religious rights and freedoms by the Habsburg state authorities.