Serbians in the 18th century in relation to Catholicism and Protestantism : mechanisms and strategies for assimilating new cultural elements

The new image of 18th century Serbian culture was mostly the consequence of a reaction to the reinforced unifying tendencies and proselytism which were put into place by the Catholic Church at the time. This defense mechanism and the various strategies (depending on the geopolitical reality of a divided Serbia, as well as on political and cultural changes) allowed the Orthodox Slavs to keep a connection with their basic code of (auto)-identification, i.e. Orthodoxy, and with the cultural tradition which was related to it. The paper is an attempt to show the similarities and differences in the strategies applied in various areas of the "Slavia Orthodoxa", particularly by the Serbs of the Habsburg empire, who embraced the Polish-Ukrainian-Russian cultural paradigm, and the Protestant minorities who lived within the Hungarian borders.