Ottoman conquest brought repeated disruption to the Serbian church's institutional continuity. The Patriarchate of Pec, the church's seat, was abolished and restored more than once under Ottoman rule, most consequentially abolished again in 1766 and placed under the Greek-dominated Ecumenical Patriarchate for over a century, a period Serbian national memory treats as a loss of both religious and cultural autonomy layered onto Ottoman political subjection.
Serbian statehood, achieved in stages through the nineteenth century, was accompanied by renewed ecclesiastical independence, and the Serbian Patriarchate was fully restored in 1920 in the newly formed Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, unifying Serbian Orthodox communities that had been divided among Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian and independent Serbian jurisdictions. The church endured further suppression under communist Yugoslavia and was drawn deeply into the conflicts that accompanied Yugoslavia's violent breakup in the 1990s.
Two jurisdictional disputes remain unresolved in the twenty-first century: the Montenegrin Orthodox Church, a body some Montenegrins consider a legitimate restoration of pre-1920 autocephaly and the Serbian church considers uncanonical, and a similar contest in North Macedonia, both described here without asserting a winner, consistent with how the church itself treats them as open and contested.