Synaxis of the Serbian Hierarchs

The Synaxis of the Holy Hierarchs and Teachers of the Serbian Land

Bishop · Patriarch · d. 13th–17th centuries

Commemorated 30 August — Joint commemoration of the archbishops and patriarchs of the Serbian Church

On August 30 the Serbian Church, and with it the Russian Church and the OCA, keeps a single office for the whole line of archbishops and patriarchs of the Serbian land — from Sava, who obtained the autocephaly in 1219 and became the first archbishop, to Gabriel I Rajić, hanged by the Turks in 1659. Most of them have their own day besides; what the synaxis says is that they are one thing. The service for it stands in the Srbljak, the Serbian book of proper offices, under the heading of the "general service to the Serbian saints"; and its roll — an unbroken succession of hierarchs across four centuries, several of them of the ruling house, several of them the historians and biographers of their own predecessors — is the Serbian Church's account of how a nation was held together by its bishops when it had lost everything else.

The occasion of the feast

The Serbian Church's independence dates from 1219, when Sava, son of the Grand Župan Stefan Nemanja, obtained from the Ecumenical Patriarch (then in exile at Nicaea) the consecration of an autocephalous archbishopric of the Serbian and Maritime lands, with its seat first at Žiča and afterwards at Peć. In 1346 the archbishopric was raised to a patriarchate under Joannicius II. The Turkish conquest broke it; it was restored in 1557 under Macarius Sokolović and finally abolished in 1766. The synaxis of August 30 gathers the hierarchs of that whole arc, and its logic is unmistakably that of a people whose episcopate was its polity.

The feast's core, as the OCA states it, is the archbishops "of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries" — the classical line of Peć. The Slavonic calendars and the Srbljak's general service extend it forward through the patriarchs of the Ottoman centuries, so that the roll as kept today runs from 1219 to 1659.

The roll

The names as the Russian and Serbian calendars give them, with the years of repose:

Archbishops of Serbia

Sava I (†1237), the founder — feast January 14 (Jan 12 in the OCA's reckoning), with the translation of his relics on May 6.
Arsenius I (†1266), Sava's own choice as his successor, who moved the seat to Peć — feast October 28.
Sava II (†1271), son of King Stefan the First-Crowned — feast February 8.
Eustathius I (†c. 1285) — feast January 4.
Jacob (†1292) — feast February 3.
Sava III (1305–1316) — feast July 26.
Nicodemus (†1325), who brought the Jerusalem typikon into Serbian use — feast May 11.
Daniel II (†1337/38), the biographer of the Serbian kings and archbishops — feast December 20.

Patriarchs of Serbia

Joannicius II (†1354), the first patriarch — feast September 3.
Ephraim II (†1395/1400), twice patriarch, the hesychast who crowned Prince Lazar — feast June 15.
Spyridon (†1388), who called church singing "a spiritual flute" — kept on this day.
Macarius (†1574), restorer of the patriarchate of Peć in 1557 — kept on this day.
Gabriel I (Rajić) (†1659), hanged at Brusa for refusing to deny Christ — kept on this day.
Gregory, bishop — of whom the calendars record only the name and that he was of the Nemanjić kindred.

The Srbljak's general service on August 30 also names the patriarchs Cyril, Nikon, John and Maximus, of whom little more than the names is transmitted.

The wider "Sabor"

In Serbian usage the term Sabor srpskih svetitelja is often heard more broadly, of the whole company of Serbian saints and not the hierarchs only — the Nemanjić rulers beginning with Simeon the Myrrh-gusher, the martyred princes, the holy women. Several saints already in this reference carry a secondary commemoration on August 30 on exactly that footing: Milica of Serbia, for instance, is entered here under the "Synaxis of the Serbian Enlighteners and Hierarchs," and Sava III and Nicodemus likewise. The Serbian Church keeps other and larger national synaxes on other days, and the strict content of August 30 in the service books is the hierarchs; the broader usage is recorded here without being made the definition of the feast.

Among the saints of the Serbian land already in this reference and honoured in that wider company are John Vladimir, Simeon the Myrrh-gusher, Stefan Lazarević, Milica, Angelina, Anastasia, Joannicius of Devič, Basil of Ostrog and Nikolaj of Žiča.

Feast and commemoration

August 30 (church date; Old Calendar civil September 12). The feast is kept by the Serbian Orthodox Church, by the Moscow Patriarchate (which received it into its calendar with the Serbian saints generally), and by the OCA. Almost every hierarch named in it has his own principal feast elsewhere in the year; the August 30 commemoration is entered as a synaxis in their individual entries in this reference, and as the primary feast only for the three whose sole day it is — Spyridon, Macarius and Gabriel I.

Hymns

Troparion — Tone 3

O shepherds of the Serbian land, from Sava the first-enthroned to the last of you that suffered, ye kept your people in the faith when their kingdom was taken from them, and made of the throne of Peć a lamp that the darkness could not put out. Wherefore, O holy hierarchs and teachers, entreat Christ God that our souls may be saved.

Original translation from the Slavonic

Iconography

The synaxis is painted as a standing assembly of hierarchs, in two or three ranks, vested in polystavrion and crossed omophorion, each holding a Gospel or a scroll and each named by an inscription; Sava, taller or centrally placed, heads the company, and the church of Peć or of Žiča is often shown behind them. In Serbian usage the composition frequently opens out into the wider Sabor, with the Nemanjić rulers in their crowns and sakkos ranged beside the bishops, and Symeon the Myrrh-gusher and Sava together at the centre — a type descended from the great medieval genealogical fresco, the Loza Nemanjića ("the vine of the Nemanjići") of Dečani and Peć, in which the dynasty is painted as a Tree of Jesse with the saints of the house on its branches.

No image has been stored for this entry. The medieval fresco portraits of the individual archbishops at Peć are firmly pre-1900 and would be storable in a faithful flat reproduction; the high-resolution photographs available on Commons, however, are either photographs of a 1984 painted copy by Milutin Dragojević in the Gallery of Frescoes at Belgrade — a modern work whose painter's rights the photographer's licence does not touch — or angled architectural shots of the church interiors, and none of them is a group image of the synaxis as such.

Disputed questions

How many, and which? No two calendars give exactly the same roll. The OCA's notice lists nine (Sava I, Arsenius I, Sava II, Eustathius I, Nicodemus, Daniel, Joannicius II, Ephraim II, and "James the Serbian hierarch, commemoration date unknown") and treats Spyridon, Macarius and Gabriel I as three separate notices of the same day; the Russian calendar runs all thirteen together into one entry and adds "Gregory, bishop"; the Srbljak adds Sava III and the patriarchs Cyril, Nikon, John and Maximus. The variation is not a disagreement about who is a saint, but about where the general service's roll is thought to end.
Is it a synaxis of hierarchs or of all Serbian saints? See above. The service books say hierarchs; popular usage in Serbia says Sabor srpskih svetitelja, all the saints.
"Gregory the bishop." The OCA's own article for him reads, in full, "No information available at this time." The Russian calendar identifies him only as of the Nemanjić kindred. He is not to be confused with any of the several better-known Gregories of the Balkan churches, and no life should be constructed for him.