Abstract: During the early nineties, a so-called nationalized and traditional Orthodox community has been revived in the republic of Montenegro. This community calls themselves the Montenegrin Orthodox Church and claims that they are the representative of a resurgent form of the traditional Orthodox Church in Montenegro, which according to themselves vanished in the formation of Yugoslavia in 1918. Since 1993 they have therefore tried to claim local clans, heritage, places and even Mountains as part of their revived “Montenegrin” version of Eastern Orthodoxy.
Up until now the research on this community has been delimited and has only focused on the – often violent – struggle between this community and the Serbian Orthodox Metropolitanate of Montenegro and the Littoral. It is difficult to grasp the reach and extent of the Montenegrin orthodox Church in these studies – are the community a paper tiger or an actual existing and thriving church? This study will focus on a selection of religio-sociological key findings on this community in order to provide a more nuanced description of them. The focus will be on this community’s existences and discuss to what degree the transformation of the Montenegrin society and independence of the Montenegrin state at large have contributed to the formation of this organization.