The year 2019 was marked by the celebration of the 800th anniversary of the acquisition of autocephaly by the Serbian Orthodox Church. On this occasion, on December 17, 2019, the Serbian Institute in Budapest held a scientific roundtable entitled "Serbs in Hungary and Orthodoxy through the Ages". The co-organizer was the Department of History of the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Novi Sad.
The conference featured 12 oral lectures, which touched upon increasingly important scientific and cultural segments of Serbian Orthodoxy and the church, through which new scientific knowledge is gained. The topics touched upon the life and work of St. Sava, certain eras in the history of the Serbian Orthodox Church between the 16th and 20th centuries, the Serbian Church Museum in Szentendre, Serbian church and spiritual music, autobiographies and memories of Serbian priests in Hungary from the 20th century, as historical sources, a case of a paraliturgical rite in Szentendre, as well as the religious affiliation and identity of Serbs in Hungary. The conference also featured a discussion among the lecturers, which provided impetus for future research ideas.
The scientific value of this collection is also given by the generational structure and professional heterogeneity of the participants: among the lecturers at the scientific conference were four university professors (Boris Stojkovski, Đura Hardy, Goran Vasin, Svetozar Boškov), two doctoral students (Dušan Ljuboja, Mikloš Temeri), one archivist (Endre Mađar), one museum director (Tijana Palkovljević Bugarski), one musicologist and choirmaster (Tamara Adamov Petijević), one institute director (Pera Lastić) and two ethnologists (Sofija Kaplan and Mladena Prelić). The lecturers represented scientific, educational and cultural institutions of Budapest, Szentendre, Novi Sad and Belgrade. All presentations had their accompanying summaries in Hungarian as well.
The collection of papers was published in 2022 and provides readers with an overview of all the presentations that were presented in the year of the great jubilee. In addition to these papers, the collection includes two reviews of books with church themes, written by Milan Dujmov (a list of Serbian priests of the Diocese of Buda) and Zoran Vukosavljev (the architecture of Serbian churches in Hungary), then a shorter text as a result of Attila Šeres' research in the Moscow KGB archives, and finally two expert texts by the historian of church art Ksenija Golub (on the wall paintings of the monastery church in Grabovac, i.e. on the monastery and temple in Srpski Kovin).
The editors of the collection were Dušan J. Ljuboja and Pera Lastić, with the assistance of Zoltan Bada, an associate of the Serbian Institute.
The richly illustrated collection of works can be purchased at the premises of the Serbian Institute in Budapest (at Veres Palne Street, 19).
