Byzantine Blog

St. Sava of Serbia
Enlightener and First Archbishop of the Serbs (+1235)

You were a guide to the way of life, a first hierarch and a teacher, you came and enlightened your homeland, O Sava, and gave it rebirth by the Holy Spirit. You planted your children like olive trees in the spiritual paradise. O, Equal to the Apostles and Saints, pray to Christ our God to grant us His great mercy.

Troparion, tone 3

The son of Stefan Nemanja, the great Serbian national leader, he was born in 1169. As a young man he yearned for the spiritual life, which led him to flee to the Holy Mountain, where he became a monk and with rare zeal followed all the ascetic practices. Nemanja followed his son's example and himself went to the Holy Mountain, where he lived and ended his days as the monk Simeon.

Sava obtained the independence of the Serbian Church from the Emperor and the Patriarch, and became its first archbishop. He, together with his father, built the monastery of Hilandar and after that many other monasteries, churches and schools throughout the land of Serbia. He traveled to the Holy Land on two occasions, on pilgrimage to the holy places there. He made peace among his brothers, who were in conflict over their rights, and also between the Serbs and their neighbors.

In creating the Serbian Church, he created the Serbian state and Serbian culture along with it. He brought peace to all the Balkan peoples, working for the good of all, for which he was venerated and loved by all on the Balkan peninsula. He gave a Christian soul to the people of Serbia, which survived the fall of the Serbian state.

He died in Trnovo in the reign of King Asen, being taken ill after the Divine Liturgy on the Feast of the Theophany in 1236. King Vladislav took his body to Mileseva, whence Sinan Pasha removed it, burning it at Vracar in Belgrade on April 27th, 1594.

Prologue from Ohrid, St. Bishop Nikolaj (of Zhicha)

Artist, Healer, Lawmaker, Writer and Builder

SAINT SAVA was involved "in many things and his foot walked everywhere and his steps were good; he touched many details, and every touch of his was like medicine; he thought about many things, and every of his views turned into Icon of Saint Sava magnificent work."

His artistic spirit can be found from Typics of Hilandar to his "Service to Saint Simeon till the Life of Nemanja". Service to Saint Simeon is by its nature poetry of the soul of Saint Sava. In that way, Saint Sava made an influence on artistic spirit of Serbian people. All writers of Sava's biography mentioned his closeness to art, and when they were describing his voluntary work in Serbia, on Holy Mountain, in Constantinople, in Thessaloníki and in Palestine.

Wherever he walked, he was not in contact with builders and painters only, but with scribes and their inspirations, as he was, while traveling, collecting the church artifacts and giving them as gifts to his hosts or monasteries in his country.

In Hilandar and Studenica, Saint Sava established hospitals and wrote rules for them; in that way, he was the first medical writer, health worker and health-rules maker. Serbian schools not just in Serbia, but abroad as well, accepted Saint Sava as their patron saint, and they celebrate him.

The legacy of St Sava lives on in the Orthodox Church traditions of the Slavic nations. He is associated with the introduction of the Jerusalem Typikon as the basis for Slavic Monastic Rules. The Serbian Hilandar monastery on Mt. Athos lives by the Typikon of St Sava to this day. Editions of The Rudder (a collection of church canons) of St Sava, with commentary by Alexis Aristines, are the most widely disseminated in the Russian Church. In 1270 the first copy of The Rudder of St Sava was sent from Bulgaria to Metropolitan Cyril of Kiev. From this was copied one of the most ancient of the Russian Rudders, the Ryazan Rudder of 1284. It in turn was the source for a printed Rudder published in 1653, and since that time often reprinted by the Russian Church. Such was the legacy of St Sava to the canonical treasury of Orthodoxy.