The Life
Who They Were Born John Dabović in San Francisco in 1863 to Serbian immigrants from the Bay of Kotor, the future St. Sebastian was the first person born in the United States to be ordained an Orthodox priest and the first American-born Orthodox monk. He grew up in the small Serbian community of San Francisco, served as a reader at the Russian Mission cathedral there, and was sent to St. Petersburg and Kyiv for theological studies.Tonsured Sebastian and ordained a priest in 1892, he spent the next forty-eight years as a missionary across the western United States and beyond. He founded the first Serbian Orthodox parish in America at Jackson, California in 1894, organized churches across California, Oregon, Washington, Alaska, and Arizona, and worked alongside Archbishop Tikhon in the Russian Orthodox Mission. He died in Serbia in 1940 and was buried at Žiča Monastery by St. Nikolai Velimirović. Glorified by the Serbian Orthodox Church in 2015.