Bishop of Žiča and Ohrid

Consecrated a bishop in 1919, Nikolai served two of the most storied sees of the Serbian Church — Žiča, the coronation church of the medieval Nemanjić kings, and Ohrid, the ancient archiepiscopal city on the lake in Macedonia. The Ohrid years, in particular, were the setting of his greatest writing and of the popular revival he came to lead.

Tradition: Serbian Orthodox (glorified 2003)

Consecration and the See of Žiča

Returning from his wartime missions to the newly unified Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, Velimirović was consecrated bishop in 1919 and appointed to the historic see of Žiča in central Serbia (OrthodoxWiki, “Nicholas (Velimirović) of Žiča,” orthodoxwiki.org; “Nikolaj Velimirović,” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org). Žiča — a great early-thirteenth-century foundation of the Nemanjić dynasty, the church in which, by tradition, the medieval Serbian kings were crowned — was among the most symbolically charged sees in the Serbian Church, and the appointment placed the celebrated young envoy at the heart of the national Church’s life.

[Disputed: the sequence and exact years of Nikolai's two episcopal appointments are given with minor variation in the sources. The common outline is: consecration and appointment to Žiča in 1919; transfer to the see of Ohrid c. 1920, where he served through the 1920s and into the 1930s; and a return to Žiča in the mid-1930s (1934/1936), which he held until his emigration. Some references (e.g., OrthodoxWiki) render the dates as Žiča 1919–1920, Ohrid 1920–1936, Žiča again from 1936. The dates of the transfers are not always consistent; the secure facts are that he was consecrated in 1919 and held both the Žiča and Ohrid sees during the interwar period.]

Ohrid

The move to Ohrid carried Nikolai to one of the most resonant places in the whole Orthodox world. Ohrid, on the shore of its lake in what is now North Macedonia, had been the seat of a great archbishopric in the medieval Byzantine and Slavic worlds, a center of Slavic letters associated with the disciples of Sts. Cyril and Methodius, and a city dense with ancient churches. For a bishop of Nikolai’s temperament — a poet, a lover of the Slavic Christian past, a man drawn to the meeting of nature and prayer — Ohrid was providential. It was here, on the lake, that he wrote his poetic masterwork Prayers by the Lake (Molitve na jezeru, 1922), and here that he compiled the Prologue from Ohrid, the great synaxarion-and-homily corpus that bears the city’s name (see Prayers by the Lake and The Prologue from Ohrid). The Ohrid years, roughly the 1920s, are the creative summit of his life.

They were also the years in which his pastoral vision took its most characteristic form. As a diocesan bishop Nikolai was tireless: preaching, writing, building and restoring churches, founding institutions of charity, and — most consequentially — throwing the weight of his office behind the popular lay prayer-movement of the Bogomoljci, the “God-Worshippers,” whom he sheltered, organized, and led (see The God-Worshippers). Where many bishops regarded the enthusiasm of the lay brotherhoods with suspicion, Nikolai embraced and guided it, becoming the recognized patron of a revival that reached thousands of ordinary Serbs. His episcopate, in this respect, was pastoral in an unusually populist key: he aimed not merely to administer a diocese but to rekindle the faith of a people.

The Interwar Bishop and the National Church

Nikolai’s interwar episcopate coincided with the consolidation of the reunified Serbian Patriarchate (restored in 1920) and with the fraught politics of the first Yugoslav kingdom. He was a national figure, closely engaged with the public life of the Serbian Church and nation, and his preaching and writing increasingly took up not only the care of souls but the diagnosis of the age — the crisis of a Europe he saw as drifting from God, and the vocation of the Orthodox Serbs within it. It is in this interwar public role that some of the most contested elements of his legacy appear: his celebration of a Serbian Orthodox “nationalism” rooted in St. Sava, delivered most famously in a 1935 address, and the strand of thought about Jews, Judaism, and modernity that his critics trace across his interwar and wartime writing (see The Charge of Antisemitism). These belong to the record of the same bishop who wrote Prayers by the Lake and led the God-Worshippers, and the collection keeps them together rather than sorting the life into an admirable and an embarrassing half.

By the later 1930s Nikolai had returned to Žiča as its bishop, and it was there, at the outbreak of the Second World War and the German invasion of April 1941, that the next and darkest chapter of his life began — the arrest, the monastic confinement, and the deportation to Dachau (see Arrest and Vojlovica). The scholar-bishop of the interwar decades, at the height of his influence and productivity, was about to become a prisoner.

See Also

References

  • “Nicholas (Velimirović) of Žiča.” OrthodoxWiki, orthodoxwiki.org. (The 1919 consecration; the sees of Žiča and Ohrid and their approximate dates; used to locate the outline, not as a terminal citation.)
  • “Nikolaj Velimirović.” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org. (The episcopal appointments and their dating; the interwar public role.)
  • Byford, Jovan. Denial and Repression of Antisemitism: Post-Communist Remembrance of the Serbian Bishop Nikolaj Velimirović. Budapest–New York: Central European University Press, 2008. (The interwar national-church role and the 1935 “Nationalism of St. Sava” context; treated fully in Section 06.)