Anastasia of Serbia
Our Venerable Mother Anastasia, Grand Princess of Serbia, mother of Saint Sava
Venerable · d. 21 June 1200 (the Studenica typikon gives 21 July 1200)
Commemorated 21 June — Repose at the monastery of the Theotokos, 1200, 21 July — Second commemoration in Serbian usage
Anastasia — Ana in the world — was the wife of the Serbian Grand Prince Stefan Nemanja and the mother of the three men who made mediaeval Serbia: Stefan the First-Crowned, Vukan, and Rastko, who became Sabbas of Serbia. In 1196, when Nemanja abdicated at the council of Ras, the two took the monastic habit on the same day and by the same act — he as Symeon, she as Anastasia — and she withdrew to the monastery of the Theotokos, where she reposed in 1200. She is venerated as venerable in the Serbian Church, the mother of a saint and herself a monastic, and her relics rest at Studenica. She is commemorated on June 21.
Ana, wife of Nemanja
Of her family nothing certain is known. The mediaeval Serbian sources — including the Lives written by her own sons — say almost nothing of her origins, and the theories advanced since (that she was Byzantine Greek, or French, or from a Bosnian house) rest on inference and not on evidence. The claim met with in the Russian and OCA notices, that she was a daughter of the Byzantine emperor Romanos, is late and unsupported: no emperor of that name reigned at a time that would allow it, and the Serbian scholarship treats the descent as legend. Her baptismal name was Ana.
She married Stefan Nemanja, Grand Prince (veliki župan) of Raška, who ruled from about 1166 to 1196 and who united the Serbian lands under one house. The marriage was long and, by the account of their sons, close. Six children are recorded: the sons Vukan, Stefan — who succeeded his father and was crowned king in 1217, the Prvovenčani, the First-Crowned — and Rastko, the youngest; and three daughters, of whom one, Jefimija, is named.
The mother of Sava
The event that fixes Ana in the tradition is the flight of her youngest son. Rastko, at about seventeen, and destined for a princedom, slipped away from the court with a party of Athonite monks and took the habit at the Russian monastery of Panteleimon on Mount Athos, taking the name Sava. Nemanja sent soldiers after him; the Serbian Lives describe the guards keeping watch through the night and Rastko being tonsured under their noses, sending back his princely clothes and his hair to his parents. Ana's grief at the loss, and her later reconciliation to it, are among the few personal notes the sources allow her. In the end she gave up not one son but a husband too, and her own state with them: what began as her son's desertion became the family's vocation.
Symeon and Anastasia
At the council of Ras, on 25 March 1196, Nemanja abdicated in favour of Stefan and, in the church of Saints Peter and Paul, took the monastic habit as Symeon. Ana was tonsured with him, in the same act, as Anastasia — the feminine of his new name, so that even in religion the two were paired. It is a striking arrangement and an unusual one: not a widow entering religion after her husband's death, but a couple ending a marriage of decades by entering it together on the same day.
Symeon went to Athos, where with Sava he founded Hilandar and where he died on 13 February 1199; he is venerated as Symeon the Myrrh-gusher. Anastasia remained in Serbia, in the monastery of the Most Holy Theotokos — the sources place it at Ras, and the Serbian tradition also associates her with the small house of Pridvorica below Studenica, where the nuns lived in sight of her husband's foundation. She lived out her few remaining years in the habit and reposed in 1200.
Relics and veneration
She was buried at Studenica, Nemanja's great foundation, where her husband's body was brought from Athos by Sava in 1207. Her relics remain there. A sixteenth-century fresco painted above her reliquary shows her at prayer, and it is from that image that the Serbian iconographic type of Saint Anastasia derives.
Her veneration is inseparable from her family's. The Serbian Church keeps Symeon (February 13 and the Athonite feasts), Sava (January 14 and the January 27 translation), and Anastasia together, and she is often sung with Symeon rather than alone. In the Serbian imagination she is the mother of the Nemanjić holiness — the point from which a dynasty that produced canonised kings for two hundred years is reckoned — and modern Serbian churches dedicate chapels and mosaics to her under the title Prepodobna Anastasija Srpska, the Venerable Anastasia of Serbia.
Feast and commemoration
June 21 (church date; New Calendar civil June 21, Old Calendar civil July 4) in Serbian, Russian and OCA usage; the Greek books do not keep her. In Serbian practice she is very often commemorated with her husband Symeon, and the two are painted and sung as a pair. June 21 falls inside the Apostles' Fast in most years, the fast having no fixed beginning but always ending on June 28.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable woman)
In thee, O Mother, was the image of God preserved unimpaired; for taking up the Cross thou didst follow Christ, and by thy deeds thou didst teach us to despise the flesh, which passeth away, but to care for the soul, a thing immortal. Wherefore, O venerable Anastasia, thy spirit rejoiceth with the angels.
Iconography
Anastasia is painted as a nun of royal rank: in the dark monastic mandyas and veil, the hands raised in prayer or one hand held to the breast and the other holding a scroll, the face grave and lined, with no attribute of rank except — in some compositions — a crown laid aside at her feet or the princely mantle worn beneath the habit, to show what she gave up. The type descends from the sixteenth-century fresco above her reliquary at Studenica, which shows her standing at prayer.
Her most usual setting is not solitary. She appears in the Nemanjić compositions — beside Symeon (Stefan Nemanja) in the habit, with Sava between or above them — and in the dynastic genealogies painted in the Serbian monasteries, where the whole house is set out as a vine springing from Nemanja and his wife. Modern Serbian churches, notably the cathedral of Saint Sava at Vračar in Belgrade, carry mosaics of her.
No pre-1900 image of her has been located for this collection. The Studenica fresco is not available in a licence-clean reproduction identified as hers, and the images of her that circulate — the Vračar mosaic and the recent Serbian panels — are modern works of living or recently deceased artists, whose copyright is untouched by any Creative Commons tag a photographer may have applied to a photograph of them. She wants an icon.
Disputed questions
- The date of her repose. The calendar keeps her on June 21, and the Russian and OCA notices give that as the day of her death. The Studenica typikon, however — a document of her own house, written within a generation — records 21 July 1200. The most economical explanation is a transposition of the month in one branch of the transmission, the day of the month being the same in both. The commemoration is not moved here; the divergence is recorded.
- Her parentage. The descent from an "Emperor Romanos" given in the Russian synaxarion and repeated in English notices has no support in the Serbian sources and is rejected by the Serbian scholarship. Nothing certain is known of her family.
- Which monastery. The sources name "the monastery of the Most Holy Theotokos" without further specification; Ras and Pridvorica (near Studenica) are both proposed, and the two need not exclude one another if she moved.
- Not to be confused with the other Anastasias of the calendar — Anastasia the Deliverer from Bonds (December 22), Anastasia the Roman (October 29), or Anastasia the Patrician (March 10) — none of whom is Serbian, and all of whom are earlier by many centuries.