Joannicius of Devič
Our Venerable Father Joannicius of Devič, Wonderworker
Venerable · Wonderworker · d. 1430
Commemorated 26 April — Commemoration kept on this day in the Serbian and Russian calendars, generally explained as the translation of his relics at Devič, 2 December — Repose at Devič in the Drenica
Joannicius (Serbian Joanikije, popularly Janićije) was a Serbian hermit of the first half of the fifteenth century who withdrew from the world as a young man into the gorge of the Ibar, lived in a cave above the Crna Reka — the Black River — and afterwards buried himself deeper still in the forests of the Drenica in Kosovo. There, tradition says, the despot Đurađ Branković brought him a daughter afflicted in her mind; the hermit healed her, and the grateful prince built on the spot the monastery which took its name from the healed maiden — Devič, "the maiden's place." Joannicius reposed there, by the received reckoning on 2 December 1430, and his relics remained in the monastery church, where for five centuries they were sought above all by the mentally ill and the possessed, Serbs and Albanians alike. He is one of the last of the medieval Serbian ascetics, and his shrine became in the twentieth century one of the most bitterly contested holy places in the Balkans. The wider Orthodox calendars keep his memory on April 26.
Origins and the cave above the Black River
The record of Joannicius is thin, and honesty requires saying so: he left no writings, no contemporary Life survives, and what is transmitted comes from the monastery's own tradition, from the Serbian Srbljak and later collections, and from the notice given him by Bishop Nikolaj Velimirović in the Prologue of Ohrid.
He was a Serb by birth, and the tradition brings him from Zeta — the old Serbian principality of the Adriatic hinterland, roughly modern Montenegro — though a variant account makes him a Srbljak out of Dalmatia. As a young man he left his home and went inland to the country of the Ibar, and settled in a narrow cave in the cliffs at the confluence of the Crna Reka, the Black River, in the gorge where the monastery of Crna Reka now stands. The place already had an ascetic memory: local tradition holds that Peter of Koriša had struggled in the same rocks before him. He lived there in silence, solitude and prayer, and the manner of it is all the tradition records — no visions, no debates, no journeys.
Devič in the Drenica
Solitude of that kind attracts company, and company drove him on. Seeking a deeper hiddenness, he moved west into the thick forest of the Drenica, in the middle of Kosovo, and spent years there alone.
He was found out nonetheless. The despot Đurađ Branković, who ruled the Serbian Despotate from 1427 until 1456 in the narrowing space left between Hungary and the Ottomans, had a daughter afflicted in her mind; and hearing of the hermit in the Drenica he brought her to him. Joannicius prayed over her and she was healed. Đurađ, in thanksgiving, built a monastery on the spot and endowed it; and because it was founded for a maiden's healing it was called Devič — from devica, "virgin, maiden." The monastery, dedicated to the Presentation of the Theotokos, has been inhabited from that day to this, latterly by nuns.
Joannicius did not become its abbot in any of the accounts; he remained what he had been, an ascetic living at the edge of a community that had grown up around him, and reposed there. The date transmitted is 2 December 1430.
Relics and the healing of the mind
His body was laid in the monastery church, and the whole subsequent history of Devič turns on it. The relics were not enshrined for display but kept in a tomb in the church, and the tomb became the particular resort of the mentally disturbed and of those believed to be possessed. This is the one specific thing the tradition insists upon, and it is striking for its social breadth: the accounts state plainly that those who came in faith to his grave and were healed included both Serbs and Albanians, Christians and Muslims — a fact of the Kosovo religious landscape which the monastery's own records preserved for centuries, and which continued to be true into modern times. For that reason Joannicius is invoked, in Serbian usage, precisely as a healer of the mind, and the foundation legend of Devič — a prince's mad daughter restored — is read as the pattern of everything that came after.
The shrine in the twentieth century
The later history belongs to the saint's cult and cannot be separated from it. The tomb was violated in both World Wars: in the second, in 1941, the monastery was sacked and the relics were desecrated and partly burned. Devič was restored and repopulated after the war as a convent. During the Kosovo conflict and its aftermath (1999–2001) the monastery was attacked, the tomb of St Joannicius was again desecrated, and the nuns lived under threat and under international military guard. On 17–18 March 2004, in the pogrom of those days, the nuns were driven out and the monastery was looted and blown up. It has since been rebuilt, and the relics of St Joannicius — what remains of them — are once more in the church.
Feast and commemoration
His repose is kept on December 2 (Old Calendar civil December 15), and this is his day in Serbian usage and in the Prologue of Ohrid. The commemoration on April 26 (New Calendar civil April 26, Old Calendar civil May 9) is the one carried by the Russian calendar and by the Orthodox Church in America, where it is understood as the translation of his relics; on that day he stands in the calendar beside Basil of Amasea, Glaphyra and Stephen of Perm, with whom he has nothing in common but the date.
His veneration is centred wholly on Devič monastery in the Drenica, where his relics lie, and he is honoured throughout the Serbian Orthodox Church — with a particular edge since 2004, as one of the saints whose shrine has had to be defended in living memory. He is numbered among the Serbian saints in the local synaxis.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable father)
The image of God was kept unblemished in thee, O father Joannicius, for thou didst take up the Cross and follow Christ into the wilderness, and by thy prayers thou didst give back to the troubled their right mind. Pray to Christ our God that our souls may be saved.
Iconography
Joannicius is painted as an elderly monastic ascetic: gaunt, long-bearded, in the dark mandyas and koukoulion or bare-headed, holding a scroll or a cross, the whole type of the prepodobni father. In the Serbian tradition he is very often shown against the cliff of his cave or in the forest, and in the compositions belonging to Devič itself he holds a model of the monastery church as its patron-founder; the narrative scene proper to him is the healing of Đurađ Branković's daughter, the prince and his afflicted child before the hermit at the mouth of his cell. He appears among the ranks of the Serbian saints in modern Sabor compositions.
No pre-1900 icon or fresco of St Joannicius of Devič has been located for this collection. The frescoes and the icon-stock of Devič itself suffered in 1941 and again in 2004, and what survives is not represented in the public-domain image collections consulted; the modern icons in circulation are living artists' work and are not reproducible here.
Disputed questions
- The date of his repose, and a chronological difficulty. The traditional date is 2 December 1430. But the foundation of Devič by Đurađ Branković is usually placed in the 1430s, commonly about 1434 — that is, after the year given for the saint's death. Either the repose is later than 1430, or the monastery's building followed the healing (and the saint's death) by some years and the two events have been compressed in the tradition. The sources do not resolve it, and the received date is retained here as received.
- Fifteenth century or thirteenth? Some Russian calendars — including the widely used azbyka calendar — describe him as a saint of the thirteenth century. This is almost certainly a transmission error: every Serbian source connects him with Đurađ Branković, who cannot be moved out of the fifteenth century, and with the foundation of Devič. The thirteenth-century dating may have arisen from the association of his cave with Peter of Koriša, who was a thirteenth-century ascetic.
- Why April 26? His repose is 2 December, and Serbian usage — including the Prologue of Ohrid — commemorates him on that day. Nevertheless April 26 is the date on which he appears in the Russian calendar and in the Orthodox Church in America's synaxarion, and it is generally explained as the translation (or uncovering) of his relics at Devič. The explanation is plausible and standard, but the event behind it is not documented in the sources available for this entry, and the rank assigned in this file's frontmatter should be treated as provisional.
- Not to be confused with the several other saints of the name: Joannicius the Great of Bithynia (November 4), the Byzantine ascetic and defender of the icons; St Joannicius II, Archbishop and first Patriarch of Serbia (†1354), a hierarch of the previous century; and the modern Serbian and Montenegrin hierarchs of the name. Joannicius of Devič is neither a bishop nor a writer, but a forest hermit of the Drenica.