The Serbians` ancestors, the Slavs, started settling on the current Romanian territory in the early Middle Ages. The archbishop Sava Nemanici had an important role in creating the spiritual unity of the Serbian people that lived north of Sava and Danube by founding the unitary Serbian orthodox church in 1219.
The Serbians migrated to the current territory of Romania after the Serbian people`s tragedy at Campia Mierlei in 1389 and after the fall of the Serbian medieval state (Despotia) in 1459.
After the fall of the Hungarian Kingdom, following the Mohacs battle of 1526, the Serbs from the Lipova region started a liberation movement under the leadership of Iovan Nenad, their Tzar, who founded the first Serbian state in the Pannonia region. The migrations of the Serbians continued in Banat and Crisana after the Ottoman conquest, and soon the majority of the population here was of Serbian origin. Many Serbian religious communities from territories that are now Romanian belonged to the Church in Belgrade.
After Banat`s liberation from the Ottoman rule in 1718, all Orthodox people (Serbian, Romanian, Arman/Vlach, etc.) became subordinated to the Church in Karlovat. The Serbian and the Romanians shared a common head of the church until 1864.
The Serbian culture, epecially that in the Romanian territories, developed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The borders between the Romanian Kingdom and that of the the Serbians, Croatians, and Slovenians was decided during the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, when a major part of Banat was taken by Romania. During that period, in Romania there were approximately 50 000 Serbians, in over sixty towns and villages. International agreements during the inter-war period regulated the status of national minorities in the two countries, and the relationships between the two has remained friendly ever since.
In March 29 1992, the Union of the Serbians from Romania was founded. USR organizes annually a Serbian dance and song marathon in April, a choir festival in May, publishes the weekly Nasa reci (Our Word) and magazine Knjizeveni Zivot (The Literary Life), assists the local administration in offering Serbian language classes in schools (especially in the Dositei Obradovici High School in Timisoara). USR has approximately 30 branches and 5500 active members. According to the 2002 census, in Romanian there are approximately 20500 Serbians, concentrated in the counties of Timis, Caras Severin, Arad, and Mehedinti.