Serb-Catholic movement in Dubrovnik

The Serb-Catholic movement in Dubrovnik (Serbo-Croatian: Dubrovački srbokatolički pokret) was a pan-Serb cultural and political campaign in Dubrovnik active at various periods between the 1830s and the interwar period. The group of local Catholic intellectuals, known as Serb-Catholics, espoused a Serb sentiment. The most prominent incarnations of the movement were the early pan-Slavic phase under Matija Ban and Medo Pucić, and a more Serbian nationalist one, most active between the 1880s and 1908, led by a large number of Dubrovnik intellectuals at the time.

Before the 19th century, the presence of Orthodox Serbs in the city of Ragusa/Dubrovnik was minute because the Republic of Ragusa enforced a single state religion of Roman Catholicism. Orthodoxy was given equal status with Catholicism in 1848, by which time there were hundreds of Orthodox immigrants from Herzegovina in the city who maintained their religious affiliation with the Serbian Orthodox Church. The Eparch of Dalmatia Josif Rajačić dispatched the first Orthodox priest to Dubrovnik, Georgije (Đorđe) Nikolajević, in 1833.

The cultural and political movement of Serbs in Dubrovnik was started around this time, notably by Nikolajević's 1838 article in the newspaper Srbsko-Dalmatinski Magazin (published in Zadar by Božidar Petranović), where he claimed the entire Ragusan Slavonic literary corpus for Serbian literature. In 1841, Medo Pucić, a writer from an old Catholic noble family, became acquainted with pan-Slavists Ján Kollár and Pavel Jozef Šafárik, and started to espouse a Serb national sentiment.Matija Ban, another Catholic from Dubrovnik, was influenced by pan-Slavists and romantic nationalists Michał Czajkowski and František Zach in Istanbul, so much that he moved to Belgrade in 1844 in an attempt to promote his idea that Serbian patriotism must extend beyond Serbian Orthodoxy and the borders of the Principality of Serbia. In Serbia, Ban's group of enthusiasts worked with Serbia's minister of the interior Ilija Garašanin, the author of Načertanije, to enter the upper reaches of Serbian political life. They were not, however, met with uniform acceptance - Jovan Sterija Popović and others, with support of the Church in Serbia, protested against their ideas and by extension against Vuk Karadžić's notion that Serbian language and nationality extended beyond Orthodoxy.

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