Feast day: January 14

St. Sava

Archbishop · 1174–1236

Patron of Serbia

A Serbian prince who became a monk on Mount Athos, then returned to organize the Serbian Church and is remembered as the father of his nation's faith and schools.

Born about 1174, the prince Rastko was the youngest son of Stefan Nemanja, the grand prince who founded the medieval Serbian state. As a teenager he slipped away from his father's court to Mount Athos, the monastic republic of the Greek Church, where he took the monastic name Sava and gave himself wholly to the ascetic life.

His father soon abdicated his throne, joined his son on Athos, and together they founded the monastery of Hilandar, which became the great centre of Serbian religious culture. Sava drew up its rule and made it a school of monks, scholars, and future leaders for his nation.

Returning to a Serbia torn by political and ecclesiastical division, Sava reconciled his quarrelling brothers and, in 1219, obtained from the Patriarch at Constantinople the recognition of an independent Serbian Church, of which he became the first archbishop. He organized its dioceses, translated liturgical and legal texts, and gave the young kingdom both a native hierarchy and a body of written law.

He died in 1236 at Tarnovo, returning from a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Honoured as the founder of the Serbian Church, its patron, and a father of Serbian literature and education, St. Sava remains among the most revered figures in his nation's history.

He gave up a throne for a monastery, then founded his country's church, law, and literature — Serbia's greatest medieval figure.