The Academy listens to a pastor from Leskovac: SANU launches Todorovic's book on the Roma

When on 18 May at the Nis branch of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts a pastor from a Leskovac Pentecostal church took the floor at the launch of sociologist Dragan Todorovic’s book, the branch’s academic halls, for decades a space of discourse on the classics of Serbian literature, heard a register that had not until then had an official audience there. The pastor spoke of the experience of pastoral work in Leskovac, where over the past twenty years the Roma community has been moving en masse from an Orthodox or Islamic background into new Protestant churches, most often of Pentecostal and Baptist denominations. That an academic framework accepted such a testimony as part of an official scholarly book launch is a signal of a shift in how the Serbian academy now sees the topic of religious mobility within marginalised communities.

The book Roma on the Waves of Neo-Protestantism: the Protestantisation of Roma in South-Eastern Serbia by Dragan Todorovic, professor of the sociology of religion at the University of Nis, has been issued as part of SANU’s publishing programme for the first half of 2026. The four-hundred-and-sixty-page study is the result of decades of fieldwork conducted by Todorovic in Leskovac, Vranje, Nis, Pirot, Bujanovac and Surdulica, with a corpus of over four hundred interviews with Roma believers and pastors, as well as with clergy who from Orthodox, Islamic and evangelical perspectives have rejected, accepted or commented on this mass conversion. It is the first systematic sociological study on this theme in the Serbian academic context.

What the study shows

Todorovic’s finding, shaped by quantitative and qualitative methodology, gives a clear picture of a community that has over the past two decades been changing its religious profile. The estimate in the book is that between 18 and 24 per cent of the Roma population in south-eastern Serbia now belongs to one of the neo-Protestant denominations, the highest rate of conversion among Roma in the Balkans, with the exception of Bulgaria. The book does not work normatively, it does not ask whether the conversion is good or bad, but analyses the mechanisms that enabled it. Among them, Todorovic identifies four key axes: economic (the pastoral community functions as a social support network that helps more concretely than the state), therapeutic (Pentecostal ritual practice meets spiritual needs the Orthodox pastorate in Serbian villages traditionally did not address), identitarian (the new religious framework enables Roma communities to articulate their own voice outside ethnic labels imposed on them by the surrounding society), and linguistic (Pentecostal and Baptist communities use Romani as a liturgical language, something Orthodoxy was never able to do).

The launch was led by academician Voji Stanovcic, chairman of the SANU Committee for the Study of the Life and Customs of the Roma, who in his opening remarks stressed that the topic is deeply relevant not only to scholarship but to contemporary social policy, because it shows how religious identification in Serbia is changing in a way that is not a reflex of state policy but an autonomous process within a marginalised community. In addition to Stanovcic and the author, the launch was addressed by academician Tibor Varadi, professor Aleksandra Sanja Lazarevic from Belgrade and, as a novelty, two pastors of Pentecostal churches from Leskovac, Sasa Stojanovic and Boban Krstic.

How this kind of book reads outside the academy

What was unusual at the launch was not only the presence of pastors but the way scholarly work on a religious community is now conducted in dialogue with that community, rather than about it. The traditional sociological practice, which for decades approached the Roma as a subject of research rather than as an interlocutor, has been methodologically abandoned by Todorovic. His study is full of long quotations from semi-structured interviews, with testimonies from believers and pastors who authorised their speech in the final text. That is a research standard set in Serbian sociology only over the past ten years, as a consequence of debates on fieldwork ethics led by authors such as Nikolina Bobic and Eleonora Vukovic.

Several theses in the book are likely to spark dialogue in the Serbian academic field. Todorovic advances the thesis that precisely the Pentecostal and Baptist approach to the Roma community over the past twenty years has played a significant role in reducing intra-group aggression and increasing school enrolment among children, a claim that can be statistically contested but is argued in the book through a series of concrete local studies. SANU with this edition has opened space for a topic that has not had a settled public in Serbian cultural policy, and how that opening is poured into new research projects remains to be seen. The book deserves attention beyond the narrower academic public, because it shows how the culture of one marginal community is changing in quiet waves that surface in public discourse only when they are recorded in academic publications.