Blagoje Popović of Vranje

The future St. Justin was born Blagoje Popović on 25 March / 6 April 1894 in Vranje, a town in southern Serbia only recently freed from Ottoman rule, into a family whose surname — Popović, “priest’s son” — recorded generations of clergy. This file sets out what is documented of his birth, family, and earliest formation, and distinguishes the firm data from the pious tradition of a seven-generation priestly line.

Tradition: Serbian Orthodox (glorified 2010)

The Town and the Date

Blagoje Popović was born in Vranje, in the far south of the Kingdom of Serbia, on 25 March 1894 by the Julian calendar then in civil use in Serbia — 6 April 1894 by the Gregorian reckoning — which is to say on the Feast of the Annunciation of the Most Holy Theotokos (the biographical accounts in Popović’s Sabrana dela, ed. Atanasije Jevtić; and the standard life summarized in Andrew Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present, London: SPCK, 2015, ch. on Serbian theology). The coincidence of his birth with the Annunciation is regularly noted by his biographers because his repose, eighty-five years later, would fall on the same feast (see Glorification 2010); the datum is the sort of detail that hagiography prizes, and it happens here to be a matter of record rather than of legend.

Vranje itself matters to the story. The town lies in the region of southern Serbia that remained under Ottoman administration until the Serbo-Ottoman wars of 1876–1878, and was incorporated into the Principality of Serbia only in 1878, sixteen years before Blagoje’s birth (a standard point of Serbian regional history; cf. Klaus Buchenau, Auf russischen Spuren: Orthodoxe Antiwestler in Serbien, 1850–1945, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2011, on the religious culture of the southern Serbian lands). Justin was therefore a child of a frontier Orthodoxy — a Serbian Church that had lived for centuries under Islamic rule and had preserved its identity, in the reading he would later give it, through the liturgical and ascetic inheritance of St. Sava rather than through any state or “European” civilization. The formation of a boy in newly liberated Vranje, near Kosovo and the medieval Serbian heartland, is not incidental to a theologian who would make Svetosavlje — the way of St. Sava — a category of thought (see Against European Humanism).

The Family and the Name

He was baptized Blagoje — a Serbian name built on the root blag-, “good, gentle, blessed,” and associated with the Annunciation (Blagovesti) on which he was born. He was one of the children of Spiridon Popović and his wife Anastasija; the sources name him as among the youngest, in the common report the seventh child (the biographical apparatus in the Sabrana dela; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015). The details of the household — the number and names of the siblings, the family’s precise means — are reported thinly and inconsistently in the popular Lives, and this collection does not press them beyond what the sober accounts carry: a devout family of modest station in a provincial town.

The surname itself is the family’s clearest inheritance. Popović is patronymic in form — “son of the priest” (pop) — and the biographical tradition holds that the Popović family had produced Orthodox priests for several generations, a line commonly given as seven generations of clergy (the pious tradition reported in the devotional Lives and repeated in popular accounts).

[Disputed: the “seven generations of priests” is a figure that circulates in the devotional literature and popular biographies of St. Justin; it is plausible for a family named Popović in that region and is consistent with his own deep churchly formation, but it is a traditional round number, not a genealogically documented count, and this collection reports it as family tradition rather than as an archival fact. What is firm is that his father Spiridon and the family were closely bound to the Church, and that Blagoje was raised in an intensely ecclesial home (biographical apparatus, Sabrana dela, ed. Jevtić; the caution about round numbers follows METHODOLOGY §3.5).]

Piety, Pilgrimage, and the First Vocation

The one anecdote of his childhood that the biographers agree on, and that Justin’s own devotional temper makes credible, is the family’s habit of pilgrimage to the nearby monastery of Prohor Pčinjski, one of the great shrines of the southern Serbian lands, where an aunt or the mother is said to have taken the boy and where he absorbed the liturgical and miraculous world of Serbian monastic Orthodoxy from within (the devotional Lives; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, on the formative Serbian piety). The scene is offered by the tradition as the seed of his vocation; per the repository method it is reported as the tradition’s account of his early piety, pinned to the devotional Lives, not certified as a datable event.

What can be said without qualification is that Blagoje was formed, from earliest childhood, inside the worshipping life of the Serbian Church at its most traditional — a Church of monasteries, saints’ lives, and the daily services — and that this liturgical formation, rather than any book, was the ground from which his whole later theology grew. He would insist for the rest of his life that Orthodox dogma is not an abstraction but the content of the Church’s prayer, and that theology is inseparable from asceticism and the liturgy (a thesis of the Dogmatics; see The Dogmatics of the Orthodox Church). That conviction has its root in Vranje and Prohor Pčinjski, in a childhood spent within the services rather than merely learning about them.

From Vranje to Belgrade

At the age of about eleven, in 1905, Blagoje left Vranje for Belgrade to enter the St. Sava Seminary (Bogoslovija Svetog Save), the principal theological school of the Serbian Church, where the ecclesiastical education proper began (the biographical accounts in the Sabrana dela; the seminary years are treated in Formation and the Great War). The move from the southern frontier town to the capital’s seminary is the hinge between the childhood and the formation: it takes a devout provincial boy and sets him on the path of the professional theologian, at exactly the moment when the young Serbian kingdom was moving toward the wars — the Balkan Wars and then the World War — that would decide whether he lived to become one.

The Vranje years, then, give the essential things: a birth on the Annunciation into a priestly family in a recently liberated Orthodox borderland; a name, Blagoje, that he would exchange for Justin only in the trauma of the Great War; and a liturgical and ascetic formation, absorbed before any theology was studied, that would remain the deepest layer of everything he wrote. The rest — Petrograd, Oxford, Athens, the professor’s chair, the ecumenism controversy, the decades at Ćelije — is built on this foundation.

References

Popović, Justin (St. Justin of Ćelije). Sabrana dela [Collected Works]. Ed. Bishop Atanasije (Jevtić) et al. Belgrade: Manastir Ćelije / Naslednici Oca Justina, various dates. (The biographical apparatus for the birth date, family, and Vranje origins.)
Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015. (Justin Popović within twentieth-century Orthodox theology; the Serbian formation.)
Buchenau, Klaus. Auf russischen Spuren: Orthodoxe Antiwestler in Serbien, 1850–1945. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2011. (The religious culture of the southern Serbian lands and the “anti-Western” current of Serbian Orthodoxy.)
Devotional Lives of St. Justin of Ćelije (popular Serbian hagiographic accounts), used for the childhood pilgrimage and family tradition and reported as tradition, not documented fact, per METHODOLOGY §3.5.