Jovan Dabović: Early Life and Education

Jovan Dabović grew up in the San Francisco cathedral parish, schooled in the mission’s own “Graeco-Russian Seminary” and in American public schools, and served as a reader and chanter before being sent, in the 1880s, to the theological academies of St. Petersburg and Kiev. His unusual formation — American upbringing, Serbian household, Russian theological training, and command of several languages — made him a rare figure: a native son of the New World trained for the Orthodox priesthood in the Old.

Tradition: Serbian Orthodox / American (glorified 2015)

A Churchly Boyhood

The boy Jovan was raised in the orbit of the San Francisco cathedral parish of the Russian Mission (see The Russian Mission on the Pacific). Alongside the ordinary schooling of an American child of the 1870s, he attended the mission’s Saturday church school and then the “Graeco-Russian Seminary,” the missionary school that Bishop John (Mitropolsky) had transferred from Sitka to San Francisco, where he learned Russian, Church Slavonic, and Greek (Hieromonk Damascene [Christensen], Archimandrite Sebastian Dabovich: Serbian Orthodox Apostle to America, St. Herman Press, on his schooling in the mission school). At home the language was Serbian; in the street and the schoolhouse it was English; in church it was Slavonic and Greek. This four-language childhood is the root of the linguistic range that would later make him a translator and an English-language author, and it marks him as a genuinely bicultural figure decades before American Orthodoxy had a name for such a person.

After finishing his general schooling he served in the cathedral as a reader and chanter (psalt), the ordinary apprenticeship of a boy destined for the altar, and worked as a teacher in the mission school (Damascene, Archimandrite Sebastian Dabovich, on his service as reader and teacher; OCA, “Venerable Sebastian Dabovich,” oca.org, noting his early service as reader and teacher). He was, in short, formed inside the liturgical and pedagogical life of the mission from boyhood, so that his eventual monastic and priestly vocation grew out of a life already given to the Church rather than arriving as a sudden conversion.

Sitka and the Alaskan Connection

The Pacific mission was a single field stretching from California to Alaska, and its personnel moved along that axis. Around 1884 the young Dabović was assigned to assist at the historic St. Michael’s Cathedral in Sitka, the old cathedral of Russian America and the burial place of the mission’s traditions (Damascene, Archimandrite Sebastian Dabovich, on the Sitka assignment; OrthodoxWiki, “Sebastian (Dabovich),” used as locator, giving 1884 for the assignment to assist at Sitka). His time in Alaska bound him to the northern half of the mission and to its native and Creole Christians; the biographical tradition credits his early Alaskan years with initiating missionary contact among the Tlingit near present-day Juneau, work that would bear fruit in an Orthodox chapel there (Damascene, Archimandrite Sebastian Dabovich, on the early Tlingit mission). Whatever the exact extent of this first Alaskan labor — the details are thinly documented and best treated with the caution the sources themselves invite — the Sitka assignment is significant for placing him, from the start, in the missionary rather than merely the parochial stream of the Church’s life, and for tying his story to the Alaskan cradle of American Orthodoxy.

Studies in Russia

The natural next step for a promising native candidate was theological study in Russia, the mother country of the mission. In the mid-1880s Dabović was sent to the great theological academies of St. Petersburg and Kiev, where he pursued formal theological studies [Disputed: the sources agree that he studied at St. Petersburg and Kiev but differ on the dates and the sequence — the modern biography places the academic studies roughly in 1885–1888, while other accounts compress or shift the interval; the OCA Life speaks simply of study “at the Theological Academies of St. Petersburg and Kiev” without firm dates (Damascene, Archimandrite Sebastian Dabovich; OCA, “Venerable Sebastian Dabovich,” oca.org; OrthodoxWiki, “Sebastian (Dabovich)”)]. The biographical tradition holds that he completed his studies with the recommendation of Metropolitan Isidore (Nikolsky) of St. Petersburg, a mark of favor that helped launch his clerical career (Damascene, Archimandrite Sebastian Dabovich, on the recommendation of Metropolitan Isidore).

The significance of the Russian studies is twofold. First, they gave Sebastian a serious theological education at the heart of the Russian Church in its late-imperial flowering, connecting him to the same academic world that formed the hierarchs of the American mission. Second, they cemented his lifelong bond to the Russian Church: though a Serb, he was a Russian-trained priest of the Russian Mission, and he would spend the most productive decades of his ministry in Russian orders, honored by the Russian hierarchy and even decorated by the Tsar (see Alongside Tikhon and Raphael). His Serbian identity and his Russian ecclesiastical formation were held together in one person — a combination that would make him the natural bridge when the Russian archdiocese later needed a Serbian mission.

A Rare Kind of Man

By the time he was ready for tonsure, Jovan Dabović was something the American mission had scarcely produced before: a native-born son of the immigrant community, fluent in English and at home in American life, yet fully trained in Orthodox theology in Russia and equally fluent in the liturgical languages of the Church (Damascene, Archimandrite Sebastian Dabovich, on the unusual completeness of his formation). Most of the mission’s clergy in this period were sent from Russia and never mastered English or American ways; the American-born faithful, for their part, had almost no path into the priesthood. Sebastian was the exception that pointed to the future — proof that the immigrant Church could raise up and train its own clergy, and a living argument for the native, English-capable, missionary priesthood that the American Church would need if it was to survive the assimilation of its second and third generations. That is why his formation is not merely biographical background but part of his historical meaning: he is the first fully realized instance of the American-born Orthodox priest (see The First American-Born Priest-Saint).

See Also

• The Russian Mission on the Pacific — the mission school and the church of his boyhood
• Tonsure and Ordination — the next step, with its dating disputes
• The English-Language Books — the fruit of his four-language formation
• The First American-Born Priest-Saint — the meaning of a native son trained for the priesthood
• St. Innocent of Alaska — the Alaskan missionary tradition he touched at Sitka

References

• Damascene (Christensen), Hieromonk. Archimandrite Sebastian Dabovich: Serbian Orthodox Apostle to America. Platina, CA: St. Herman Press. (Schooling in the San Francisco mission school; service as reader and teacher; the Sitka assignment c. 1884; the studies at St. Petersburg and Kiev; the recommendation of Metropolitan Isidore.)
• Orthodox Church in America. “Venerable Sebastian Dabovich.” oca.org — used as locator for the OCA Life (early service as reader and teacher; study in Russia).
• “Sebastian (Dabovich).” OrthodoxWiki — used as locator for the 1884 Sitka assignment and the Russian academic studies.