Founding Hilandar

In 1196 Sava’s father, Grand Prince Stefan Nemanja, abdicated his throne, took monastic vows as the monk Symeon, and the following year joined his son on Mount Athos. Together, father and son refounded the ruined monastery of Hilandar as a house for the Serbian nation, secured by a golden-sealed chrysobull of the Byzantine Emperor Alexios III Angelos (1198) and the founding charter of Grand Prince Stefan. Hilandar became the spiritual and cultural fountainhead of Serbian Orthodoxy — in the tradition’s phrase, “the first Serbian university.”

Tradition: Serbian Orthodox

Nemanja Becomes the Monk Symeon (1196)

The decisive event behind Hilandar was the abdication of Stefan Nemanja. In 1196, at a state assembly (sabor), the aged Grand Prince renounced his throne, dividing his realm and naming his second son Stefan as his successor as Grand Prince while his eldest, Vukan, received Zeta and other lands (Fine, The Late Medieval Balkans, pp. 41–42, 116–117). Nemanja and his wife Ana then took monastic vows: he became the monk Symeon and she the nun Anastasia. He first withdrew to his own foundation of Studenica, the great marble monastery he had built; but in 1197/98, drawn by his son, he made the extraordinary journey of an abdicated sovereign to Mount Athos, to live out his life as a simple monk beside Sava (Obolensky, Six Byzantine Portraits, ch. 4; Stefan Nemanja, English Wikipedia).

That a reigning founder of a state should lay down his crown to die a monk on the Holy Mountain was itself a remarkable act, and it gave the Nemanjić dynasty, from its very root, a sacral character: the founder of the line was also the founder of its holiness. The collaboration of the two — the old prince-monk Symeon and his learned son Sava — produced Hilandar.

The Refounding of Hilandar (1198)

Hilandar (Greek Chilandariou) was not a new foundation but a ruined and abandoned monastery on the southwestern side of the Athonite peninsula, which Symeon and Sava undertook to rebuild and to receive as a Serbian house (Hilandar, English Wikipedia; Chilandari Monastery (Athos), OrthodoxWiki). The decisive grant came from the Byzantine Emperor: in June/July 1198, Alexios III Angelos (r. 1195–1203) issued a golden-sealed chrysobull donating the derelict monastery of Hilandar to Symeon and Sava and “to the Serbs as an eternal gift,” to be held as an independent monastery for the Serbian nation (Hilandar, English Wikipedia: “Emperor Alexios III issued a charter” in July 1198; Charter of Hilandar). Alexios III was connected to the Nemanjići by marriage — Stefan, the new Grand Prince, was married to the emperor’s niece Eudokia — which helps explain the imperial favor.

The grant was reinforced from Serbia. Grand Prince Stefan sent money and provisions and issued his own founding charter for Hilandar (the Charter of Hilandar, conventionally dated 1198/99), which endowed the monastery with villages and revenues in Serbia and is among the oldest surviving documents of the Serbian state and language (Charter of Hilandar, English Wikipedia; Saint Sava, English Wikipedia: “Grand Prince Stefan sent money and other necessities, and issued the founding charter for Hilandar in 1199”). Hilandar was thus doubly secured — canonically and territorially within the Byzantine Athonite order by the emperor’s chrysobull, and materially by the Serbian crown’s endowment.

[Disputed: The exact dating of the founding documents is given variously across the sources, clustering in 1198–1199: the imperial chrysobull of Alexios III is dated to June/July 1198, while Grand Prince Stefan’s founding charter is dated 1198 or 1199 depending on the edition. The substance — imperial grant in 1198, Serbian charter immediately following — is uncontested (Hilandar and Charter of Hilandar, English Wikipedia; Obolensky, Six Byzantine Portraits, ch. 4).]

Symeon’s Death and the Completion of the House

Symeon did not long survive the founding. He died at Hilandar on 13 February 1199, having lived only a short time as a monk on the Mountain, and was buried there in the monastery he had helped raise (Saint Sava, English Wikipedia: “His father died on 13 February 1199”; see Bringing Back Symeon). Sava remained to complete and govern Hilandar, drawing up its typikon and establishing its life (see The Typikon and the Monastic Vision). It was around the tomb of Symeon at Hilandar that the first reports of myrrh-streaming relics arose — the beginning of the cult that Sava would carry back to Serbia and that would make his father the dynasty’s first saint (see The Cult of Symeon).

“The First Serbian University”

Hilandar’s significance ran far beyond a single monastery. As the one Serbian house among the great houses of Athos, it became the channel through which Byzantine monastic, liturgical, theological, and literary culture flowed into Serbia. Manuscripts were copied and translated there; monks were formed there and sent back to Serbia to staff its churches and monasteries; and the typika and texts produced there set the pattern for Serbian monasticism as a whole. The tradition’s description of Hilandar as “the first Serbian university” captures this: it was the cultural fountainhead of medieval Serbia, and it remains to this day the only Serbian monastery on the Holy Mountain, holding a place in Serbian Orthodoxy comparable to that of the Lavra in the Russian or the great houses in the Greek tradition (Hilandar, English Wikipedia; Chilandari Monastery (Athos), OrthodoxWiki; on the wider Athonite-monastic channel, compare Orthodoxy Guide: Russian Monasticism).

For Sava personally, Hilandar was both the achievement of his Athonite years and the base from which he would launch the rest of his career. When he returned to Serbia, he came not as a solitary but as the founder of a great monastery, a man who had dealt with emperors and patriarchs, and the bearer of his father’s relics and his father’s cult — credentials that made possible everything that followed.

The Holy Mountain: Athos as an Institution

To understand what Symeon and Sava did, one must understand the place they did it. Mount Athos — the easternmost of the three peninsulas of the Chalkidiki, in northern Greece — was by the late twelfth century already the most prestigious concentration of monastic life in the Orthodox world, a self-governing community of houses living under imperial protection (Chilandari Monastery (Athos), OrthodoxWiki). Its organized communal life dated from the foundation of the Great Lavra by St. Athanasios the Athonite in 963, under the patronage of the Emperor Nikephoros II Phokas; from that seed grew a whole federation of monasteries. By the twelfth century Athos had become a genuinely international monastic republic, drawing Greeks, Georgians (the house of Iviron), Italians (Amalfion), and Slavs alike (Chilandari Monastery (Athos), OrthodoxWiki; Obolensky, Six Byzantine Portraits, ch. 4).

The peninsula was administered from Karyes, its central settlement, where the heads of the houses met in council; the assembly church and seat of administration was the Protaton, and the community as a whole was presided over by an elected first-among-equals, the Prōtos (“the First”). This federated structure — many sovereign houses, a common council, a representative head, and direct dependence on Constantinople rather than on any local bishop — gave Athos a peculiar status: it was inside the Byzantine world yet enjoyed a charter of self-government, its monasteries holding their lands and their internal order under imperial and patriarchal guarantee (Chilandari Monastery (Athos), OrthodoxWiki). It was precisely this status that the Nemanjići sought for Hilandar: not a cell or a dependency, but a full house of the Athonite federation, Serbian in personnel and endowment yet canonically secured within the republic of the Holy Mountain. To plant a national monastery on Athos was, in effect, to plant the Serbian church within the most authoritative monastic order of Orthodoxy (Obolensky, Six Byzantine Portraits, ch. 4).

The Derelict Monastery Before 1198

Hilandar itself was not Symeon and Sava’s invention. A monastery of Chilandariou had existed on the southwestern slopes of the peninsula well before their arrival, but by the late twelfth century it had fallen into ruin and decay, abandoned or reduced to a remnant, its buildings derelict and its endowment gone (Chilandari Monastery (Athos), OrthodoxWiki; Hilandar, English Wikipedia). The existence of such ruined and depopulated houses was not unusual on Athos, where the fortunes of individual monasteries rose and fell with their patronage; a derelict house could be granted to new founders willing to restore it, which is exactly the transaction that brought Hilandar to the Serbs (Chilandari Monastery (Athos), OrthodoxWiki). Sava had first lived elsewhere on the Mountain — most importantly at the Greek house of Vatopedi, where he had been formed as a monk — and it was from that base, with his father now beside him, that the project of acquiring and rebuilding a house of their own took shape (Obolensky, Six Byzantine Portraits, ch. 4). The choice of a ruin to be raised again carried its own symbolism, well suited to the tradition that would grow around the foundation: a dead house restored to life by a prince who had died to the world.

The Diplomatic Setting, c. 1196–1204

The refounding of Hilandar was as much an act of diplomacy as of piety, and it belongs to a specific moment in Byzantine-Serbian relations. The 1190s were a period of recovering Serbian strength under Nemanja and of weakness and dynastic turbulence at Constantinople. Alexios III Angelos had seized the throne in 1195 by blinding and deposing his own brother, Isaac II, and his reign (1195–1203) was beset by instability that would end with the catastrophe of the Fourth Crusade and the Latin sack of Constantinople in 1204 (Fine, The Late Medieval Balkans, pp. 41–42). In this setting the Byzantine court had every reason to cultivate the Serbs, and the Nemanjići had every reason to seek the legitimacy that imperial favor conferred.

That favor was sealed by a marriage. Nemanja’s son and heir Stefan (the future “First-Crowned”) was married to Eudokia, a niece of Alexios III, binding the Serbian ruling house to the reigning imperial family (Fine, The Late Medieval Balkans, pp. 41–42; Saint Sava, English Wikipedia). It was within this web of kinship and mutual interest that Sava — himself a prince, and a monk of growing reputation — could approach the emperor directly and obtain the chrysobull for Hilandar. The grant of a derelict Athonite monastery to a friendly, allied dynasty cost Constantinople little and bought it goodwill on its northwestern frontier; for the Serbs it secured a permanent, canonically unassailable foothold in the heart of Orthodox monasticism. The transaction is a textbook instance of what Obolensky called the workings of the Byzantine “commonwealth”: religion, kinship, and statecraft operating as a single fabric (Obolensky, Six Byzantine Portraits, ch. 4).

Rebuilding and Endowment

Securing the grant was only the beginning; the ruin had to be rebuilt and the house provided for. The labor and expense fell on both the monks and the Serbian crown. Symeon and Sava set about raising the buildings — the katholikon (main church), the refectory, the cells, and the surrounding walls that an Athonite house required for defense against pirates and raiders — and the work was sustained from Serbia (Hilandar, English Wikipedia; Chilandari Monastery (Athos), OrthodoxWiki). Grand Prince Stefan “sent money and other necessities” and issued his founding charter endowing Hilandar with villages, men, and revenues in Serbia, so that the monastery on the far-off Mountain was supported by a stream of income from the homeland (Saint Sava, English Wikipedia; Charter of Hilandar, English Wikipedia). This pattern — an Athonite house materially sustained by a distant Orthodox state — would later be repeated by the Russians and other Slavs, but the Serbs were among its earliest and most thorough practitioners. The endowment also fixed Hilandar’s legal character: it was a zadužbina, a foundation made “for the soul” of its founders, its lands held in perpetuity for the salvation of the dynasty (Charter of Hilandar, English Wikipedia). The physical monastery and its economic base were thus raised together, and the family that built it expected to be prayed for there forever.

Hilandar as the Cultural Heart of Serbia, and Its Survival

What Symeon and Sava founded outlived them by eight centuries. Hilandar became, and remained, the single Serbian house on the Holy Mountain and the principal conduit through which Byzantine learning reached the Serbian lands (Hilandar, English Wikipedia; Chilandari Monastery (Athos), OrthodoxWiki). Generations of Serbian kings and lords added to it: the monastery was repeatedly enlarged and re-endowed by later Nemanjić rulers, who regarded its patronage as a dynastic duty, so that its very fabric became a record of medieval Serbian royal piety (Chilandari Monastery (Athos), OrthodoxWiki; Fine, The Late Medieval Balkans, pp. 116–117). Through the long centuries of Ottoman rule, when the Serbian state had ceased to exist, Hilandar preserved the manuscripts, the liturgical tradition, and the historical memory of medieval Serbia, functioning as a national archive and sanctuary in exile.

It has survived into the present. Hilandar today remains an active monastery, ranked fourth in the hierarchy of the twenty ruling houses of Athos, its great library among the richest collections of medieval Slavic manuscripts and charters in existence (Chilandari Monastery (Athos), OrthodoxWiki). It survived even a devastating fire in 2004, after which it was extensively restored. For Serbian Orthodoxy it is not merely an ancient building but the living root of the whole tradition — the place where, as the tradition holds, the Serbian church first learned to read, to pray, and to remember its saints (Hilandar, English Wikipedia).

The Three-Handed Theotokos (Bogorodica Trojeručica)

No account of Hilandar’s spiritual identity is complete without its most famous treasure, the wonderworking icon of the Theotokos “Three-Handed” — in Serbian the Bogorodica Trojeručica, in Greek the Panagia Tricheirousa. By tradition the icon is associated with St. John of Damascus, the eighth-century defender of the holy images: the story holds that, his right hand having been struck off through a slander and then miraculously restored at the Mother of God’s intercession, John affixed a votive hand of silver to the icon in thanksgiving, giving it its distinctive third hand (Chilandari Monastery (Athos), OrthodoxWiki). [Disputed: The attribution of the icon and its silver hand to St. John of Damascus, and the later account of its miraculous journey to Hilandar, belong to the realm of pious tradition rather than documented history; they are venerated as such and are not advanced here as established fact (Chilandari Monastery (Athos), OrthodoxWiki).]

A further tradition recounts that the icon came to Athos and, after a period of dispute over its keeping, was placed on the back of a donkey that of its own accord carried it to Hilandar and halted there, where the brethren received it as the abbess of the house; in token of this, Hilandar is said to have had no human hegumen (abbot) ruling in the old way, but to acknowledge the Mother of God herself as its superior, the icon enthroned in the abbot’s place (Chilandari Monastery (Athos), OrthodoxWiki). [Disputed: This account of the Trojeručica‘s arrival and of the Theotokos as Hilandar’s abbess is a venerated monastic tradition, not a documented event; it is recorded here as the tradition the monastery itself holds (Chilandari Monastery (Athos), OrthodoxWiki).] Whatever its origins, the Trojeručica has become inseparable from Hilandar’s identity and one of the most beloved icons of the Serbian people, copied and venerated wherever the Serbian church has spread.

References

Fine, John V. A., Jr. The Late Medieval Balkans. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1987, pp. 41–42, 116–117. On Nemanja’s abdication of 1196 and the division of the realm.
Obolensky, Dimitri. Six Byzantine Portraits. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988, chapter 4. On Symeon’s coming to Athos and the refounding of Hilandar.
Hilandar and Charter of Hilandar. English Wikipedia (used to locate the documentary dates; chrysobull of Alexios III July 1198, Serbian founding charter 1198/99; “the first Serbian university”).
Chilandari Monastery (Athos). OrthodoxWiki. On the ruined monastery refounded for the Serbs.
Stefan Nemanja. English Wikipedia. On Nemanja’s monastic name Symeon and his journey to Athos.
Saint Sava. English Wikipedia. Dates of the charter and of Symeon’s death (13 February 1199).