The Life
He came back as the first archbishop of Serbia and gave his people a Church, a law code, and a literature. Sava was born around 1174 with the secular name Rastko, the youngest of three sons of Stefan Nemanja, the Grand Prince who unified the Serbian lands and founded the Nemanjic dynasty. As a teenager, Rastko was given the appanage of Hum to govern. He held it for about two years and then left. A delegation of Russian monks from Mount Athos had visited the Nemanjic court and Rastko had listened with growing intensity to their description of the monastic life. One night he slipped away from a hunting party, made his way through the Balkans to the Holy Mountain, and entered the Russian monastery of Saint Panteleimon there. When his father sent soldiers after him, the young prince climbed to the top of a tower in the monastery, took monastic tonsure during the night, and lowered his princely garments down to the soldiers as proof that the prince they had been sent to retrieve no longer existed. He took the monastic name Sava, after the great Palestinian abbot Saint Sabbas the Sanctified. He moved from the Russian monastery to the Greek monastery of Vatopedi. His father Stefan Nemanja eventually abdicated the Serbian throne in favor of his middle son Stefan, took monastic vows under the name Simeon, and joined Sava on Athos. Together father and son obtained permission from the Byzantine emperor to restore the abandoned monastery of Hilandar, which became the principal Serbian monastic foundation and remains an Athonite monastery to this day. Simeon reposed at Hilandar in 1199 and was glorified almost immediately as a saint. Sava brought his father\'s relics back to Serbia in 1207 to reconcile his quarreling brothers Stefan and Vukan, who were tearing the country apart in civil war. The reconciliation worked. Sava remained in Serbia as archimandrite of Studenica monastery and wrote his father\'s Life, the first work of Serbian hagiography. He returned to Athos in 1217 and from there traveled to the patriarch of Constantinople, who was then in exile at Nicaea because the Latin crusaders had seized Constantinople in 1204. Sava persuaded Patriarch Manuel I to grant the Serbian Church autocephaly. On August 15, 1219, the feast of the Dormition, Sava was consecrated as the first Archbishop of the autocephalous Serbian Orthodox Church. He returned to Serbia and rebuilt the entire Serbian church structure: he organized eight new bishoprics and staffed them with disciples he had trained, established Zica as the seat of the new archbishopric, recrowned his brother Stefan as king under the Byzantine rite (Stefan had previously received a crown from the pope), translated and adapted the Byzantine nomocanon to give Serbia its first written legal code, and traveled the Serbian lands constantly to teach the people the basics of the Orthodox Christian faith. He made two pilgrimages to the Holy Land. He died at Tirnovo in Bulgaria on January 14, 1235, on his way back from the second pilgrimage. His relics were translated to the monastery of Mileseva in Serbia. In 1594, the Ottoman general Sinan Pasha had the relics brought to Belgrade and burned publicly on the hill of Vracar, in retaliation for a Serbian uprising in which Serbian fighters had carried banners bearing the saint\'s icon. The Serbian people received this desecration as confirmation rather than refutation of the saint\'s power: the Cathedral of Saint Sava in Belgrade, one of the largest Orthodox churches in the world, was built on the site of the burning.
Rastko was about seventeen years old. His father had given him the principality of Hum to govern. His parents were already arranging his marriage. The future of the youngest Nemanjic son had been planned for him since birth: he would be a Serbian prince, marry into one of the great Balkan houses, and govern his lands. None of it interested him. The Russian monks who had visited the court had described a different kind of life. They had told him about the Holy Mountain, where men gave up everything for prayer, where the prayers were sung day and night without ceasing, where the only purpose of life was the love of God. Rastko had listened. After they left, he could think of nothing else. He arranged his flight carefully. He told his father he wanted to go on a long hunt with one of the Russian monks who was passing through. The father, suspecting nothing, agreed. The hunting party set out. Once they were far enough from the capital, Rastko separated from the others and disappeared with the Russian monk into the mountains. They traveled south through the Balkans, probably crossing into Byzantine territory, and arrived eventually at the Athonite peninsula. Rastko entered the Russian monastery of Saint Panteleimon as a guest, then asked the abbot to receive him as a novice. He was already in the monastery when his father\'s soldiers caught up with him. Stefan Nemanja had figured out within days that his son had not been on a hunt and had sent soldiers in pursuit. The soldiers reached Saint Panteleimon and demanded that the prince be returned to them. The abbot tried to delay them. Rastko climbed to the top of the monastery tower while the soldiers waited below. During the night the abbot tonsured him, gave him the monastic name Sava, and clothed him in the black monastic habit. At dawn the new monk Sava appeared at the top of the tower, lowered down his princely clothing on a rope, and called down to the soldiers: tell my father the prince he sent you for is gone. Tell him this monk Sava is his son now. The soldiers returned to Serbia with the clothes. Stefan Nemanja was furious. But over the following months his anger turned to grief, his grief to acceptance, and his acceptance to admiration. Within a few years he was writing to his son in monastic terms, asking for spiritual counsel. Within five years he had abdicated the throne, taken monastic vows himself, and gone to Athos to join his son.
After Stefan Nemanja gave up the throne in 1196 and took the monastic name Simeon, he came to Mount Athos to be with his son. By then Sava had moved from the Russian monastery to the Greek monastery of Vatopedi, and Simeon joined him there. Both monks wanted something more permanent for the Serbian people: a Serbian monastery on the Holy Mountain that would belong to Serbia in perpetuity, that would train Serbian monks, that would translate Greek patristic texts into Slavonic, that would give the Serbian Church a permanent presence in the heart of the Orthodox monastic world. The abandoned monastery of Hilandar, on the Athonite peninsula, had been suggested as a possibility. They petitioned the Byzantine Emperor Alexios III Angelos for permission to restore it as a Serbian foundation. The emperor granted the petition and issued a chrysobull (a golden seal of imperial authority) confirming Hilandar\'s status as a Serbian monastery in 1198. Father and son rebuilt it. The funding came from the Serbian state. The monks came from various Athonite communities and from Serbia. Simeon spent his last years there as a simple monk, no longer a grand prince, sweeping cells and reading the psalter. He reposed at Hilandar on February 13, 1199. Within months his relics began to exude a fragrant myrrh. He was venerated almost immediately as Saint Simeon the Myrrh-Streaming. Sava remained at Hilandar, governed it, wrote its rule (the Hilandar Typikon), and trained the first generation of Serbian Athonite monks. He also wrote a separate rule for a small hesychast hermitage he had founded above Karyes (the administrative center of the Athonite peninsula) where he himself withdrew periodically for solitary prayer. Hilandar would become and would remain the principal Serbian monastic foundation outside Serbia itself. Eight centuries later, after the medieval Serbian state had perished, after the Ottoman conquest, after the great Serbian migrations of the seventeenth century, after the rise and fall of multiple Serbian polities, Hilandar would still be there, still Serbian, still functioning as a working Athonite monastery. It is still there today.
He brought their dead father\'s body home and made them stand together at the graveside. The war ended. After Stefan Nemanja gave up the throne, the succession went to his middle son Stefan, with the eldest surviving son Vukan receiving a smaller territory in the western Serbian lands. The arrangement did not hold. Vukan, who believed he should have received the main Serbian throne by right of seniority, allied himself with the Hungarian king and attacked his brother Stefan. The country fell into civil war. Both sides recruited foreign allies. Both sides devastated each other\'s territories. The Serbian state that Stefan Nemanja had spent his life unifying was being torn apart by his own sons. From Mount Athos, Sava watched the unfolding catastrophe with growing anguish. He determined to intervene. He decided that the only force capable of reconciling his brothers was the body of their dead father. In 1207 (or 1208) Sava arranged the translation of the relics of Saint Simeon from Hilandar back to Serbia. He brought the relics to Studenica monastery (the foundation his father had built in his own princely days as the eventual burial site of the Nemanjic dynasty). He convened both brothers for a memorial service. According to the hagiographical tradition, when the casket was opened during the service, the body of Stefan Nemanja was found to be incorrupt, fragrant with myrrh, warm to the touch, looking as if he were only sleeping. The brothers wept. They confessed their fratricidal war to their father\'s undecayed body. They embraced each other over the relics. The civil war ended within months. A peace agreement was signed. The Serbian kingdom was restored under Stefan as Grand Prince, with Vukan accepting his subordinate position. Sava remained in Serbia as archimandrite of Studenica for nearly the next decade. He used the years to write his father\'s Life (the first work of Serbian hagiography), to compose the Studenica Typikon (which structured monastic life at the new Serbian foundations on the Hilandar model), and to begin the systematic preparation of the indigenous Serbian Christian formation that he would carry to its conclusion when he eventually obtained Serbian autocephaly in 1219.
In 1217, Sava\'s brother Stefan accepted a royal crown from Pope Honorius III in Rome. This was a serious move. By accepting the crown from Rome, Stefan was placing Serbia under Latin ecclesiastical authority. Sava could not accept this. He left Serbia and returned to Mount Athos. From Athos he traveled to the patriarch of Constantinople. The patriarch was not at Constantinople at this time: the Latin crusaders had captured the city in 1204 and established their own Latin Empire there. The Byzantine emperor and patriarch had fled to Nicaea, in Asia Minor, where they maintained the Byzantine government and the Constantinopolitan patriarchate in exile. Sava traveled to Nicaea and met with both the Emperor Theodore I Laskaris and the Patriarch Manuel I Sarantenos. He made the case for an autocephalous Serbian Church: Serbia was an established Orthodox kingdom with a stable hierarchy and monastic foundations; it had every condition for ecclesiastical independence; without independence, it would inevitably fall under Latin influence as Stefan\'s recent papal crowning showed. Both the patriarch and the emperor were persuaded. On August 15, 1219, the feast of the Dormition of the Theotokos, Patriarch Manuel I consecrated Sava in Nicaea as the first Archbishop of the autocephalous Serbian Orthodox Church. Sava was forty-five years old. He returned to Serbia and immediately began the work of organizing the new Church. He recrowned his brother Stefan as king under the Byzantine Orthodox rite, annulling the previous Latin coronation. He established the seat of the new archbishopric at Zica monastery. He organized eight new dioceses across the Serbian lands and consecrated bishops for each one, drawing on the disciples he had trained at Hilandar and Studenica. He translated the Byzantine nomocanon into Serbian and produced the Zakonopravilo, the first written Serbian legal code, integrating ecclesiastical canon law with civil law. He traveled the country teaching the people. He made two pilgrimages to the Holy Land. He died in 1235 at Tirnovo in Bulgaria, on his way back from the second pilgrimage.
After his consecration at Nicaea in 1219, Sava returned to Serbia and spent the next sixteen years building the Serbian Church from the ground up. He recrowned his brother Stefan as king under the Byzantine Orthodox rite, annulling the Latin papal crowning of 1217 and integrating Serbia firmly into the Byzantine Orthodox sphere. He established the seat of the new archbishopric at Zica monastery in central Serbia, where he had a major cathedral built, and from which he could oversee the entire Serbian Church. He organized eight new diocesan bishoprics throughout the Serbian lands, drawing on the disciples he had trained at Hilandar and Studenica to staff them. He translated the Byzantine nomocanon (a compilation of ecclesiastical canon law combined with relevant Byzantine civil law) into Slavonic and adapted it for Serbian conditions; the resulting Zakonopravilo (also called the Krmcija) gave Serbia its first written legal code and would subsequently be translated into Russian and influence Russian law for centuries. He traveled constantly throughout the Serbian lands, teaching the people the basics of the Orthodox Christian faith: the Creed, the meaning of the sacraments, the structure of the liturgical year, the lives of the saints, the moral demands of the Gospel. He made two pilgrimages to the Christian holy places, visiting Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Nazareth, the Jordan, Sinai, Antioch, Constantinople (after its restoration to the Byzantines in 1261, no, actually before the restoration; he visited Constantinople under Latin occupation), Bulgaria, and Egypt. On these pilgrimages he negotiated with the various Eastern patriarchs, Constantinople, Alexandria, Jerusalem, securing recognition of the Serbian autocephaly and arranging various practical matters of Serbian ecclesiastical life. He died at Tirnovo in Bulgaria on January 14, 1235, on his return from his second Holy Land pilgrimage. He had become ill after celebrating the Divine Liturgy on the feast of Theophany. He was about sixty years old. The Serbian Church he had built would survive everything that came after: the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century, the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, the Ottoman conquest of the Serbian lands, the great Serbian migrations of the seventeenth century, the Habsburg jurisdictions, the Yugoslav state, the communist persecutions, the wars of the 1990s. The framework Sava had established between 1219 and 1235 has continued in unbroken succession to the present day.
Their own language, their own laws, their own saints could carry the same faith. Sava\'s deepest theological conviction was that the Serbian people did not need to become Greek to be Orthodox. The Greek and Latin languages, the Greek and Latin liturgical traditions, the Greek and Latin theological vocabularies, were not superior in themselves to the languages, liturgical possibilities, and theological vocabularies of other peoples. They were simply the historical vehicles through which the same Orthodox faith had reached the Greek and Latin worlds. The same faith could reach the Serbian people through Serbian vehicles: Slavonic translations of the Greek liturgical and patristic texts, Serbian-language teaching for the people, indigenous Serbian saints, indigenous Serbian theological literature, indigenous Serbian law. This was a profound conviction. Many Christians of his time held the opposite view, that the only authentic Christian liturgical languages were Latin (in the West) and Greek (in the East), and that vernacular liturgical languages were somehow less authentic. Sava rejected this. He believed that the catholicity of the Christian faith required, not the suppression of indigenous national identities under a single Greek or Latin imperial-ecclesiastical framework, but the deliberate development of indigenous national patristic traditions, each one integrated with the broader patristic patrimony, each one preserving the same faith in the linguistic and cultural vehicles natural to its own people. He spent his life translating Greek patristic texts into Slavonic, training Serbian disciples to be Serbian bishops, writing Serbian hagiographical and liturgical compositions, codifying Serbian law on the Byzantine model but in indigenous Serbian form. He inaugurated what later Serbian theology would call svetosavlje, the integration of authentic Orthodox formation with authentic Serbian national-cultural identity. This principle would shape the entire subsequent Serbian Orthodox tradition. It would shape the foundational Bulgarian, Russian, and Romanian Orthodox traditions as well, all of which would draw on Saint Sava\'s precedent in developing their own indigenous Orthodox identities while maintaining integration with the broader patristic patrimony.
They thought destroying the relics would destroy his power over the Serbian people. It did the opposite. Saint Sava had been dead for three and a half centuries when the Ottomans came for his relics. The relics had rested at Mileseva monastery in southern Serbia since 1237. Throughout the Ottoman occupation of Serbia (which began in earnest after the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 and the fall of the Serbian despotate in 1459), the relics had remained at Mileseva and had been the focus of intense Serbian veneration. Pilgrims, including Catholic and Muslim pilgrims, came to the monastery to seek the saint\'s intercession. Foreign visitors who saw the relics reported that they remained incorrupt and exuded fragrance. The Serbian people drew strength from the relics: the saint who had given them their Church was still with them, even under foreign occupation. In 1594, a Serbian uprising broke out in the Banat region in southern Hungary. The Serbian fighters carried banners bearing the icon of Saint Sava. The uprising was suppressed by the Ottoman forces. The Ottoman general Sinan Pasha decided to make an example. He ordered the relics of Saint Sava transported from Mileseva to Belgrade. On April 27, 1595 (some sources say May 10), the relics were burned publicly on the hill of Vracar in Belgrade. The Ottomans intended this as a demonstration of their absolute power over the Serbian people: even your saint, even his bones, even your most sacred treasure, we can destroy. The Serbian people received the desecration in a way the Ottomans had not anticipated. They did not lose faith in the saint. They concluded the opposite: the Ottomans had attacked the relics because they feared the saint, and they feared the saint because his power was real. The Serbian veneration intensified. The site of the burning became a place of pilgrimage. Three centuries later, after Serbia had achieved independence, after the Ottoman Empire had collapsed, after the catastrophic Serbian losses of the World Wars, after the communist period, the Serbian Orthodox Church built the Cathedral of Saint Sava on the hill of Vracar where the relics had been burned. It is one of the largest Orthodox churches in the world. It stands today as the Serbian theological response to the Ottoman desecration of 1594: you tried to end his power; here is his power, larger than ever, on the very ground where you tried to end it.
His bones were brought back to Serbia. The Ottomans burned them in 1595. The Serbian people built one of the largest Orthodox cathedrals in the world on the spot of the burning. Saint Sava died at Tirnovo in Bulgaria on January 14, 1235, on his way back from his second pilgrimage to the Holy Land. He had become ill after celebrating the Divine Liturgy on the feast of Theophany. The Bulgarian Tsar Ivan Asen II buried him with great honor at the Cathedral of the Holy Forty Martyrs in Tirnovo. Two years later, in 1237, his nephew King Vladislav of Serbia obtained the relics from the Bulgarians and translated them to the monastery of Mileseva in southern Serbia, which Vladislav had built as the Serbian dynastic burial place. The relics remained at Mileseva for nearly three and a half centuries, becoming the focus of intense Serbian Orthodox veneration that continued through the catastrophic late medieval Serbian losses (the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, the fall of the Serbian despotate in 1459) and throughout the early Ottoman occupation. In 1595 the Ottoman general Sinan Pasha had the relics transported to Belgrade and publicly burned on the hill of Vracar in retaliation for a Serbian uprising. The Serbian people received the desecration as confirmation of the saint\'s power, not as its refutation. Across the subsequent four centuries, Serbian Orthodox veneration of Saint Sava intensified rather than diminished. After Serbia achieved independence in the nineteenth century, after the restoration of the Serbian Patriarchate in 1920, after the World Wars and the communist period, the Serbian Orthodox Church built the Cathedral of Saint Sava on the hill of Vracar where the relics had been burned. It is one of the largest Orthodox churches in the world. It stands today as the Serbian theological answer to every attempt to end Saint Sava\'s power: the saint who gave the Serbian people their Church remains with them, and the Cathedral of Saint Sava on the hill of Vracar is the largest standing testimony to that fact. He is celebrated by the Serbian Orthodox Church on January 27 (which corresponds to January 14 on the Julian calendar). He is the patron saint of Serbia, of Serbian education, and of Serbian medicine. Hundreds of churches around the world bear his name. The first Serbian Orthodox parish in North America (in Jackson, California, founded in 1894) was named for him. The Serbian Orthodox tradition has woven him into the foundation of Serbian national identity to a degree paralleled by few other patristic figures in any indigenous national Orthodox tradition.