Metropolitanate of Montenegro and the Littoral

Metropolitanate of Montenegro and the Littoral
Cetinje Monastery seat of the Metropolitanate
Location
Territory	Montenegro
Headquarters	Cetinje, Montenegro
Statistics
Population - Total	400,000 est.
Information
Denomination	Eastern Orthodox
Sui iuris church	Serbian Orthodox Church
Established	1219 (as Eparchy of Zeta)
Language	Church Slavonic Serbian
Current leadership
Bishop	Metropolitan Amfilohije
Map
Website
mitropolija.me

The Metropolitanate of Montenegro is the largest diocese of the Serbian Orthodox Church in Montenegro. Founded in 1219 by Saint Sava, it is now one of the most prominent dioceses in the Serbian Orthodox Church. The current Metropolitan bishop is Amfilohije Radović. His current title is "Archbishop of Cetinje and Metropolitan of Montenegro and the Littoral".

The Metropolitanate of Zeta was founded in 1219 by Sava of the Nemanjić dynasty, the first Archbishop of the autocephalous Serbian Orthodox Church. After having received the status of an Orthodox church by the Ecumenical Patriarch and confirmed by the Emperor of Nicaea, Archbishop Sava organized the area under his ecclesiastical jurisdiction into nine bishoprics. One of these was the bishopric of Zeta (the southern half of modern Montenegro). The seat of the Zetan bishops at that time was the Monastery of Holy Archangel Michael in Prevlaka (near Tivat). The first bishop of Zeta was St. Sava's disciple Ilarion (fl. 1219). The bishopric (eparchy) of Zeta was elevated to a metropolitanate by the decisions of the state-church council of Skopje in 1346, presided over by the Serbian Emperor Stefan Dušan.

The fall of the Serbian medieval state in 1389 to the Turks after the Battle of Kosovo and the gradual disintegration of its parts in the 15th century, together with the Venetian conquest of the coastal cities of Kotor, Budva and the Paštrovići region in 1420–1423, endangered the Zetan Orthodox Metropolitanate. In 1452 the Venetians destroyed the Orthodox Monastery of St Michael the Archangel in Prevlaka to facilitate their plans for the forceful conversion of the Orthodox Christians from these parts of the coast into the Roman Catholic faith. From 1452 the seat of the Metropolitanate several times (variously to St Mark's Monastery in Budva, to the Monastery of the Virgin Mary in the mountains close to the city of Bar, and St Nicholas's Monastery on Vranjina (Skadar Lake), and then to St Nicholas's Monastery in Obod (Rijeka Crnojevića) ) moved to Cetinje Monastery, built in 1484. When the Zeta plains finally fell to the advancing Turks, the Grand Duke of Zeta Ivan Crnojević, along with part of his people, moved to the Montenegrin mountains, which had once been just a part of the medieval state of Zeta.