Gabriel I of Serbia
The Holy Hieromartyr Gabriel Rajić, Archbishop of Peć and Patriarch of the Serbian Land
Hieromartyr · New Martyr · Patriarch · Bishop · d. October 1659, hanged by the Turks
Commemorated 30 August — Commemorated with the Synaxis of the Serbian Hierarchs
Gabriel Rajić, Patriarch of Peć in the middle of the seventeenth century, is the one member of the Serbian synaxis of August 30 who died a martyr. Sent out from a church that could no longer feed itself to beg alms in Wallachia and then in Moscow — where in 1655 he sat with the Patriarch of Antioch in the council that revised the Russian service books — he came home with the alms to find his throne given to another and himself denounced to the vizier, on a charge got up by Austrian Jesuits, as a traitor. The vizier knew the charge was false; he offered the patriarch his life and an office if he would deny Christ. Gabriel refused in words the tradition has kept, and after torture was hanged in October 1659.
A patriarch on the road
Gabriel, of the family Rajić, took the throne of Peć in the mid-seventeenth century, in the decades when the Ottoman pressure on the Serbian Church, relaxed for a generation after the restoration of 1557 under Macarius, had become intense again. The patriarchate was in debt: the berat had to be paid for, the churches were falling down, and the Christian population was being squeezed for taxes it could not raise. In that extremity the patriarch did what the Eastern hierarchs of the Turkish centuries habitually did — he went abroad to beg.
He went first to Wallachia, the nearest Orthodox principality with money, and from there north to Moscow. He was in the Russian capital in 1655, and there took part in the church council convened by Patriarch Nikon, sitting with Macarius III of Antioch — the patriarch whose Arabic-speaking archdeacon, Paul of Aleppo, has left the great travel account of these years — in the work of correcting the Russian service books against the Greek and the older Slavonic texts. Gabriel brought with him as gifts to the Russian Church several manuscripts and three printed liturgies from the south Slavonic presses; and he was sent home with generous alms for his church and his country.
The Serbian patriarch's presence at that council is worth pausing on. The revision of 1655 would split the Russian Church and produce the Old Believer schism; the men in the room were Nikon, the Antiochian Macarius, and this Serb, come from a church so poor it had to be subsidised, sitting in judgement over the books of the richest Orthodox realm on earth.
Martyrdom
He came back to find that his see had been given to another in his absence, and worse: Austrian Jesuits, the account says, had denounced him to the vizier as a traitor — that is, as an agent of the Habsburg powers, the standard and lethal accusation against Balkan Christian leaders who had travelled abroad. He was arrested.
The vizier was not deceived. The tradition is explicit that his innocence of any political crime was plain, and that the vizier said so; which is exactly why the interrogation turned where it did. He offered to spare Gabriel's life, and to give him a position of honour, on one condition: that he deny his faith in the Saviour. The patriarch's answer is preserved:
I am entirely innocent of crimes against the state — this you admit yourself. I will never agree to save my life by betraying the Christian faith while I remain in my right mind. Keep your riches and your honours; I have no need of them.
He was tortured, and then hanged, in October 1659. The Serbian Church numbers him with its new-martyrs under the Turks, and his witness is the reason the August 30 synaxis, which is otherwise a roll of peaceful hierarchs, ends in blood.
Feast and commemoration
August 30 (church date; Old Calendar civil September 12), within the Synaxis of the Serbian Hierarchs. The OCA gives him a notice of his own on this date; the Russian calendar names him inside the collective entry as "Gabriel I (Rajić) (1659)." It is in his notice, in the OCA's text, that the fuller Srbljak roll of the day is preserved — Jacob, Archbishop of Serbia (†1292), the bishop Gregory of the Nemanjić kindred, Archbishop Sava III (1305–1316), and the patriarchs Cyril, Nikon, John and Maximus.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of a hieromartyr)
As a sharer in the ways and a successor to the thrones of the Apostles, O divinely-inspired one, thou didst find in contemplation the means to ascend to divine heights; rightly dividing the word of truth, thou didst struggle for the faith even unto blood, O hieromartyr Gabriel: intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.
Iconography
Gabriel is shown as a Serbian patriarch of the Ottoman centuries — the sakkos and crossed omophorion, bare head, a long dark or greying beard — and, as a martyr, holding the cross of martyrdom in his right hand instead of blessing with it, or with the martyr's cross in one hand and the Gospel in the other. Where his passion is depicted it is the gallows: the patriarch hanged in his vesture, which is the form his martyrdom took and by which Serbian iconography distinguishes him from the other patriarchs of Peć in the synaxis composition. No pre-1900 image inscribed with his name has been located for this collection; the Ottoman century left the Serbian Church little means for portraiture, and the icons of him now in circulation are modern works under copyright.
Disputed questions
- Where was he hanged? The Serbian tradition places his execution at Brusa (Bursa) in Asia Minor, where he had been taken for judgement; the OCA's notice does not name the place.
- The date. October 1659 is the transmitted date of the martyrdom. His commemoration is nevertheless kept on August 30 with the other hierarchs, not on the day of his death — a normal enough arrangement where a saint's memory is absorbed into a national synaxis.
- "Austrian Jesuits." The phrase comes from the Slavonic hagiographical tradition and should be read as its authors meant it — the Habsburg Catholic interest working against an Orthodox hierarch who had gone to Moscow — rather than as a documented identification of particular accusers.
- Not to be confused with the later Serbian patriarchs of the name (Gabriel II and III of the eighteenth century, and Gavrilo V Dožić, who was imprisoned at Dachau), nor with Gabriel the Iberian, the Athonite fool-for-Christ who took the Iveron icon from the sea.