Век сумње: религиозност у чачанском крају 1886–2008

English title: A Century of Doubt: Religious Life in the Čačak District, 1886–2008

The monograph A Century of Doubt: Religious Life in the Čačak District, 1886–2008 analyzes the transformation of public religiosity in a local community over more than a century. Its focus is not limited to church institutions, but includes the relationship between faith, society, the state, modernization, political ideologies, and everyday life.

The Čačak district is treated as a microhistorical space in which broader processes in Serbian society can be observed: the weakening of traditional piety in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the secularization of education and public life, the activity of the Serbian Orthodox Church, attempts at religious renewal in the interwar period, communist atheization after 1945, and the public return of religion after 1990.

The book does not examine religiosity as private mystical experience, but as publicly visible practice: church attendance, worship, holidays, customs, religious periodicals, anti-religious campaigns, sociological research, local rituals, and symbolic forms of piety. This choice makes it possible to treat religion as a historical and social fact, not only as an inner belief.

The interwar period is especially important, because it brings together the crisis of traditional piety, accelerated modernization, the activity of the Diocese of Žiča, and the role of Bishop Nikolaj Velimirović. The socialist period shows how religion was marginalized and ideologically suppressed, while the post-socialist period reveals the rapid but contradictory return of Orthodoxy to public life.

The book does not argue that religiosity simply declined and then revived. Rather, it changed through crises, ruptures, adaptations, ideological pressures, popular customs, short-lived waves of religious enthusiasm, and persistent forms of local piety. For this reason, the monograph contributes to the history of religion, social history, everyday life, historical anthropology, and the study of modernization in Serbia.