the disintegrating influence of Orthodox jealousies, till each diocese became an autocephalous Church.[1]
14. The Church of Servia (1879).
We have already seen that there was once a great independent Servian Church, of which the centre was Ipek, and that it was destroyed by the unholy alliance of the Porte and the Phanar (p. 307). In 1810 a part of the lands occupied by Serbs became independent under the famous Black George (Kara Georg). The free Serbs at once broke away from Constantinople (which had carried out its unchanging policy of trying to Hellenize them by sending them Greek bishops and allowing only Greek as the liturgical language), and put themselves under the jurisdiction of Carlovitz. In 1830 Prince Milos Obrenovitch set up an independent metropolitan at Belgrade with three suffragans. At first the Phanar was allowed the right of confirming their election, but in 1879, as a result of the greater territory given to Servia by the Berlin Congress, the Church of the land was declared entirely autocephalous. This time the Phanar, taught by the Bulgarian trouble, then at its height, made no difficulty at all. The hierarchy of the Servian Church consists of the Metropolitan of Belgrade, who is Primate, and four other bishops.[2] They unite to form a Holy Synod on the Russian model. There are forty-four monasteries in Servia, and one Servian monastery at Moscow is allowed by the Russian Government to send money to Belgrade and to acknowledge some sort of dependence from that metropolitan.[3] On the whole the relations between the established Church of Servia and the Phanar have been friendly. But there are Serbs in Macedonia who have had just the same complaint against the
- ↑ For Czernovitz see Silbernagl, pp. 207–214; Kyriakos, iii. p. 126; E. d'Or. v. pp. 225–236, vii. pp. 227–231. Kyriakos counts about four million Orthodox in Austria and Hungary altogether.
- ↑ Of Ušice, Niš, Timok, and Šabac.
- ↑ For the Servian Church see Silbernagl, pp. 162–175; Kyriakos, iii. pp. 37–39.
