Joannicius I of Serbia
Saint Joannicius, Archbishop of Peć and First Patriarch of Serbia
Patriarch · Bishop · d. 3 September 1349, buried at Peć
Commemorated 3 September — Repose; the first Patriarch of the Serbs, buried at the Patriarchate of Peć
Joannicius (†1349) carried the Serbian Church across its great threshold: a chancery man — logothete (secretary) at the court of the Serbian king — he was made Archbishop of Peć in 1339, and in 1346, when Stefan Dušan required an emperor's crown and an emperor requires a patriarch, a council of the Serbian hierarchs with the Bulgarian Patriarch's concurrence raised the archbishopric to a patriarchate and Joannicius to be first Patriarch of the Serbs; a week later he crowned Dušan Tsar at Skopje. He guided the Church through the codifying years of Dušan's law-book, and reposed on 3 September 1349, buried in the church of the Holy Apostles at Peć, where the patriarchs he began are buried around him.
Logothete and archbishop
Joannicius rose not through the monasteries but through the royal chancery: he served as logothete — chief secretary — at the Serbian court, a man of letters and government, and in 1339 was elected Archbishop of Peć, head of the autocephalous church Saint Sava had founded a century before.
The first patriarch
Stefan Dušan, master by conquest of most of the Byzantine Balkans, determined on the imperial title, and the order of Christian polity required that an emperor be crowned by a patriarch. At Skopje in 1346, in the week of Pascha, a great council — the Serbian hierarchs, the Bulgarian Patriarch of Trnovo, and the Athonite representatives — proclaimed the Serbian Church a patriarchate and Joannicius its first patriarch; on Pascha itself he set the imperial crown on Dušan. Constantinople answered in time with an anathema (lifted a generation later), and the corpus records the canonical storm as the history it is; the Serbian Church has never ceased to honour the man himself, who bore the new dignity with the old sobriety of the chancery. He assisted in the great legislative labour of the reign — the Zakonik, Dušan's law-code, whose first articles are the Church's — and ordered the enlarged hierarchy of the new patriarchate.
Repose
Joannicius reposed on 3 September 1349 and was buried in the church of the Holy Apostles at the Patriarchate of Peć. The Serbian Church numbers him among her holy hierarchs, first of the line of patriarchs whose portraits and tombs fill Peć.
Feast and commemoration
September 3 (church date; Old Calendar civil September 16) — his repose — and among the holy hierarchs of Serbia in their synaxis (August 30, with the Serbian enlighteners). He falls under the common of a hierarch (see references/common-readings.md).
Iconography
Joannicius is painted as a Serbian patriarch: white-bearded, in sakkos and omophorion with the patriarchal cap or bareheaded, blessing and holding the Gospel — his historical portrait belongs to the fresco lines of the patriarchs at Peć, where the church that holds his tomb also holds the painted succession he began. No licence-clean reproduction identified to him has been located; the entry is listed among the wanted icons, the Peć fresco line being the natural source.