Serbian Church Council of Karlovac Metropolitanate

The Serbian People's Church Council of Karlovac Metropolitanate represented the most important institutions of Serbs in the Habsburg monarchy.

[1] For more than two centuries (1708 - 1911), the Serbian Church Council in the Karlovac Metropolitanate not only elected archbishops, later patriarchs, but also made decisions on other questions — church-related, educational, and even on the purely political needs of the Serbs under Austro-Hungarian reign.

[3] The first Serbian People's Church Council, after Sabor in Baji (1694), was held in 1708 in Krušedol Monastery, with the aim of electing a new archbishop.

Later, the right to open this Parliament belonged to the Hungarian government, since the jurisdiction of the Karlovac Metropolitanate mainly extended to the lands of the crown of St. Stephen, for the most part in the Habsburg Kingdom of Hungary.

The Timisoara Parliament reached several important conclusions regarding to the needs of Serbian autonomy in the Habsburg monarchy, and also demanded that, in terms of granted privileges, a separate territory in Banat be designated for Serbs, in order to better protect themselves from foreign and mostly Hungarian influences.

It was a council that was 1861 in Sremski Karlovci, after the abolition Duchy of Serbia and Tamiš Banat in 1860, made demands for the renewal of Serbian Vojvodina, organized on a national basis.

In that long-running historical process, the most important was Great Migrations of Serbs under the Patriarch of Pec Arsenij Čarnojević, in the last years of the 17th century.

The parliaments were therefore a religious-political autonomous institution, which lasted over 200 years and was the center of the best part of all cultural and political work in the vast areas of the Karlovac metropolitanate.

It is understood that the Serbian People's-Church Councils served the metropolitans and archbishops as a strong support in the defense of people's rights and privileges, which were very often in danger from either the Viennese or the Budapest rulers.

From these assemblies, lawsuits and numerous deputations were often sent to the emperors, who managed to resolve many important national-political and religious issues favorably.

Only at the end 19th century and the People's House was built in Karlovac, with a special parliamentary hall, in which the last few parliaments were held.

The Parliament held 47 sessions in all, but its conclusions remained unfulfilled because the Hungarian government found it necessary to suspend the main provisions of the autonomous decree, motivating this step by "the fact that the Serbian National-Church Parliaments, after 9 legal articles from 1868, passed some decrees are detrimental to the highest royal supervision and violate majestic rights.

"[5] The Serbian People's Church Council also had their own bodies, the scope of which can be determined as follows: In addition to a purely religious and educational character within the framework of religious autonomy, the Serbian people's and church assemblies also had a political character that was of great importance for Serbs in the Karlovac metropolitanate, and especially for that part of them whose representatives did not go to far more tolerant Croatian but Hungarian cathedral.

Within that autonomy, the Serbs in Srem and the rest of Vojvodina strengthened themselves morally and materially; with this work, they prepared a whole cadre of intellectuals who played one of the most important cultural and political roles in the renewed Serbia, from Karadjordj's time until the founding of the Great School in Belgrade and later; in the same framework, they managed to develop a great cultural, literary, artistic and scientific activity, the whole significance of which can only be properly assessed today.