Spyridon of Serbia
Our Father among the Saints Spyridon, Patriarch of the Serbian Land
Patriarch · Bishop · d. 11 August 1389, at Peć
Commemorated 30 August — Commemorated with the Synaxis of the Serbian Hierarchs
Spyridon was Patriarch of Serbia from 1382 to 1389, in the years between the death of Tsar Dušan's empire and the ruin of Kosovo. Consecrated by his predecessor Ephraim II, who had withdrawn from the throne into solitude, he governed a church whose state was disintegrating around it, and gave particular care to the monastic communities on which Serbian life increasingly depended. He is remembered as a hymnographer — he called church singing "a spiritual flute" and is credited with composing offices for the Serbian Church — and he died within weeks of the Battle of Kosovo (15 June 1389), so that Serbian memory sets his repose beside that of the Holy Prince Lazar. He is commemorated on August 30 with the Synaxis of the Serbian Hierarchs.
Patriarch in the last years of the Serbian state
Spyridon came to the throne of Peć in 1382, consecrated by Ephraim II, who had been made patriarch in 1375 to heal the schism with Constantinople and who, being a hesychast by temperament and a Bulgarian by origin, laid the office down as soon as he decently could and retired to the Archangel monastery of Dušan's foundation. The Serbian polity that Spyridon inherited was no longer an empire but a scatter of principalities: Prince Lazar Hrebeljanović in the Morava valley, Vuk Branković in Kosovo, Tvrtko in Bosnia, the Balšići on the coast. The Ottomans were already across the Maritsa.
In that setting the patriarch's work was, of necessity, the work of the monasteries. The tradition remembers Spyridon as having concerned himself especially with the monastic communities through the years of civil and ecclesiastical disorder — the endowments, the discipline, the succession of abbots — because the monasteries were what would outlast the principalities, and did.
The spiritual flute
The one saying transmitted of him is about church singing, which he called a spiritual flute (Slavonic: duhovna svirala). It is not an idle phrase in a Serbian mouth of the fourteenth century: this was the age in which the Serbian chant tradition was being formed, and in which the Serbian Church was acquiring the proper offices of its own saints — the material that would be gathered into the Srbljak. Spyridon is credited with composing church hymns for the Serbian Church, and he stands in the succession of hierarch-poets that runs through Danilo II and Ephraim to the monk Isaiah and to the anonymous authors of the offices of Lazar.
Kosovo, and his repose
On 15 June 1389 the Serbian and Ottoman armies met at Kosovo Polje. Lazar was taken and beheaded; Sultan Murad was killed; the field passed into Serbian memory as the end of a world. Spyridon died a few weeks later — 11 August 1389 by the Serbian reckoning — and was buried at Peć. The Church, unable to leave the throne empty in such a year, brought Ephraim II back out of his retirement to take it up again.
Feast and commemoration
August 30 (church date; Old Calendar civil September 12), within the Synaxis of the Serbian Hierarchs. He has no separate day and no proper office; the OCA gives him his own notice on this date, and the Russian calendar names him inside the collective entry. He is kept by the Serbian Church, the Moscow Patriarchate and the OCA.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of a hierarch)
The truth of things revealed thee to thy flock as a rule of faith, a model of meekness and a teacher of temperance; therefore thou hast achieved the heights by humility, riches by poverty. O Father and Hierarch Spyridon, intercede with Christ our God that our souls may be saved.
Iconography
Spyridon is painted in the manner of the Serbian patriarchs of Peć: standing, vested in the polystavrion — the white phelonion sown with dark crosses that is the mark of the Serbian and Byzantine hierarch of the period — with the crossed omophorion, the Gospel in the left hand and the right raised in blessing; his head bare, in the Byzantine manner, with a short rounded grey beard. He belongs to the ranks of hierarchs in the synaxis composition rather than to any independent type, and where he is named it is usually in the row of patriarchs at Peć. No pre-1900 image inscribed with his name has been located for this collection; the fresco portraits of the patriarchs at Peć that survive in reproduction are either of other hierarchs or are known only through modern painted copies, whose copyist's rights stand between them and this collection.
Disputed questions
- The dates. The OCA gives his patriarchate as 1382–1388 and says he died "at almost the same time" as Prince Lazar; the Serbian tradition gives 11 August 1389, some eight weeks after Kosovo. The 1388 figure appears to be a rounding of the last full year of his government, and this reference follows the Serbian date. The Russian calendar simply prints "Spyridon (1388)" in the roll of the synaxis.
- His hymnography. That he wrote offices for the Serbian Church is the constant tradition and is consistent with the "spiritual flute" saying, but no particular surviving service can be assigned to him with certainty; the attributions in the Srbljak's older strata are not secure.
- Not to be confused with Spyridon of Trimythous (December 12), the wonderworker of Cyprus, whose name he bears, nor with Spyridon the prosphora-baker of the Kiev Caves.