Angelina of Serbia
Our Venerable Mother Angelina, Despotess of Serbia
Venerable · Princess · b. c. 1440, Berat in Albania — d. c. 1520, Krušedol in Syrmia
Commemorated 1 July — Commemoration of the venerable despotess, 30 July — Synaxis of the holy Brankovići — Angelina with her son Maximus (Serbian usage), 10 December — Commemoration with her husband Stephen and her son John
Angelina was an Albanian nobleman's daughter who married the blinded and dispossessed despot Stephen Branković of Serbia, followed him through exile in Venetian Albania and northern Italy, buried him there, and then — twice widowed of a country, since Serbia itself had fallen to the Turks in 1459 — brought her sons and her husband's body north into Hungarian Syrmia to begin again. Both sons, George and John, are numbered among the saints; George became the monk and metropolitan Maximus, and with him Angelina founded the monastery of Krušedol in the Fruška Gora, the house that became the spiritual centre of the Serbs of the Danube for two centuries. She ended her days there as a nun, about 1520, and is venerated as Prepodobna mati Angelina, "our venerable mother Angelina" — the matriarch of the last Serbian ruling house and of its exile.
Origins and marriage
She was born about 1440 at Berat, a daughter of the Albanian lord George Arianiti (Gjergj Arianiti) and of Maria Muzaka, in the generation of Albanian nobility whose whole political life was the resistance to the Ottoman advance. Her mother, the account says, raised her in Christian piety; nothing else of her childhood is transmitted.
About 1460 she was married to Stephen Branković, titular despot of Serbia. Stephen was a son of the despot George Branković, and had been blinded as a young hostage at the Ottoman court in 1441, together with his brother Gregory, on the order of the sultan — a mutilation intended to disqualify him from rule, and the fact by which Serbian tradition knows him: Stefan Slepi, Stephen the Blind. He had held the despotate briefly in 1458–59 and lost it with the country. He is himself venerated as a saint. The marriage was made in exile, at Shkodër under Venetian protection.
Exile in Italy
When the Ottoman armies moved into Albania the family fled again, this time across the Adriatic to northern Italy, where they held the castle of Belgrado in Friuli. There the children were born and raised — George, John, and daughters — and there Stephen died, in 1476 by the Italian record (the Slavic and OCA accounts give 1468). Angelina was left a widow of about thirty-six in a foreign country, with her husband's body, her children, and no principality.
Return to Syrmia and the founding of Krušedol
In 1486 the king of Hungary, whose southern frontier was now the front line against the Turks and who wanted a Serbian despot on it, granted the family the town of Kupinovo in Syrmia (Srem), on the Sava. Angelina left Italy with her sons, stopping in Serbia on the way to bury her husband's body — his relics had been found incorrupt, and their translation is itself a commemoration in the Serbian books.
In Syrmia she became what the Serbian tradition remembers her as: not a ruler's wife but the keeper of a nation's church in exile. Her son John held the despotate and died young and childless in 1502 (the OCA gives 1503), and miracles were reported at his relics. Her elder son George, who had a better claim, laid it down instead, was tonsured with the name Maximus, and became in time metropolitan of Belgrade and Srem. Mother and son together founded the monastery of Krušedol in the Fruška Gora — built in the years around 1509–1516 with help from the voivode of Wallachia and from the grand princes of Moscow, to whom Angelina wrote for aid — and it became the mausoleum of the Brankovići and the effective centre of Serbian church life north of the Danube.
Repose, relics and the fire of 1716
After her sons' deaths Angelina received the monastic tonsure and lived out her life in a women's community at Krušedol, reposing in peace about 1520. She was buried in the monastery church, in the same tomb as her sons, and the family was venerated together almost at once: Stephen, John, Maximus and Angelina, "the holy Brankovići," the last dynasty of the Serbs and the first of their saints to be created by exile rather than by rule.
Their relics rested at Krušedol until the Austro-Turkish war of 1716, when Ottoman troops burned the monastery and the relics with it; only fragments survived, and it is these that are venerated at Krušedol today. Angelina's memory survived the fire intact: she is among the most widely honoured women saints of the Serbian church, and the Russian calendar, which took up her feast early, keeps her as преподобная Ангелина, деспотиса Сербская.
Feast and commemoration
July 1 (Old Calendar civil July 14) is her own commemoration, kept by the Serbian, Russian and OCA calendars, and is the day authored here. The Serbian Church keeps her also on July 30, the synaxis of the holy Brankovići, when she is commemorated together with her son the metropolitan Maximus; and on December 10 she is commemorated with her husband Stephen the despot and her son John. The multiplicity is characteristic of the family: they are venerated singly, in pairs and as a house, and the Serbian books distribute the combinations across the year. Her cultus centres on Krušedol in the Fruška Gora, and she is honoured throughout the Serbian lands and in the diaspora as the type of the faithful woman who held a Church together when its state was gone.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable woman)
In thee, O mother, was preserved unimpaired that which is according to the image; for taking up the cross, thou didst follow Christ, and by thy deeds thou didst teach us to despise the flesh, for it passeth away, but to care for the soul, a thing immortal. Wherefore, O venerable Angelina, thy spirit rejoiceth with the angels.
Original translation from the Serbian
Iconography
Angelina is painted as a nun, in the black mantle and cowl of the monastic habit, her face aged and severe, holding a scroll or a cross; where her rank is shown, a princely mantle or a crown may be laid at her side or she may retain the despotess's diadem beneath the veil. Her characteristic images are group icons of the holy Brankovići — Stephen the Blind, often with his eyes closed or bandaged, Angelina between her two sons, and Maximus in episcopal vestments — and scenes in which she and Maximus hold the model of the Krušedol church between them, the founders' portrait type of the Serbian tradition. She appears in the Fruška Gora monastery frescoes and in the eighteenth-century Serbian engravings that spread the Krušedol cultus.
No image storable under this collection's policy has been located. What survives of the pre-1900 material is chiefly wall-painting and printed engraving in Serbian and Vojvodinian collections that are not digitised on Wikimedia Commons, and the icons of her that circulate today are modern Serbian work under the iconographers' own copyright, which a photographer's licence cannot release.
Disputed questions
- Her father. The OCA and several English lists call him "Prince George Skenderbek of Albania," conflating two men. Her father was George Arianiti, a great Albanian lord in his own right; Skanderbeg (George Kastrioti) was Arianiti's son-in-law, having married his daughter Donika — so Angelina was Skanderbeg's sister-in-law, not his daughter. The confusion is old and is repeated in most Orthodox English sources.
- The year of Stephen's death. 1476 in the Italian and modern Serbian record; 1468 in the OCA and the Slavic lives. The eight-year discrepancy also shifts the date of the family's move to Syrmia in some retellings; 1486 for the move is secure.
- The year of her own death. Nowhere firmly recorded: "the beginning of the sixteenth century" in the critical accounts, c. 1520 conventionally, and simply "the sixteenth century" in the Russian calendar. This entry indexes the sixteenth century.
- Her sons' names. George = Maximus in monastic life (metropolitan, feast January 18 in Serbian usage); John the despot (†1502) is a distinct saint. Both lack entries in this collection. Neither is to be confused with the many other Serbian saints of those names.
- Not to be confused with the other Serbian monastic women of the late medieval house — the nun Jefimija, or Anastasia of Serbia, mother of St Sava — with whom the Serbian calendars group her by type rather than by kinship.