Abstract
Bojan Aleksov''s study deals with the Nazarenes - the first Protestant Serbs - in South Hungary and Serbia, in the second half of the nineteenth century, the so-called age of modernization and nationbuilding. It portrays the origins and the spreading of a new religious movement as an indicator of social change among the Serbian people, whose demands and needs the Orthodox Church had failed to meet.
Looking at the social, economic, cultural and historical motives of conversions to Nazarenes, I examine the Nazarenes'' challenge to the Orthodox Church and the latter''s belated response in the form of the so-called re-Orthodoxization (in line with newly invented tradition of Serbian version of Orthodox Christianity - Svetosavlje) and the development of the mass Bogomoljci movement with its implications for the formation of Serbian national identity observed in the changes of the notions of Church, religion and piety.