BALKAN SAINTS - Mirjana Detelić

17
THE CONTRIBUTION OF TOPONYMY TO AN HISTORICAL
TOPOGRAPHY OF SAINTS‟ CULTS AMONG THE SERBS
Aleksandar Loma, Faculty of Philosophy, Belgrade
Abstract: In researching the cults of saints among the Serbs, especially on a deep
chronological level, we confront a lack of documentary sources which may be
partly overcome with the help of the indirect evidence provided by toponymy.
The author‟s study of Serbian place-names based on Christian hagionyms or
heortonyms has demonstrated how this discipline can identify religious
dedications (patrocinia) which were forgotten or changed over the course of time.
The history of Christian cults among the Serbs is hard to write, mainly for two
reasons, both connected with the tumultuous past of those parts of the Balkans where the
Serbs live or lived since their arrival in the seventh century. One is the repeated breaks of
continuity in the life of the Church and the other the lack of written sources, which I
discuss in my bibliographic note at the end of this essay. Consequently any attempt at
reconstructing sacral topography from Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages depends
heavily on indirect evidence from folklore and place-names.
The autocephalous Serbian Church became independent of the Byzantine patriarch (at
the time seated in Nicaea) in the early thirteenth century by the efforts of St Sava, who
also promoted the Serbian variant of Church Slavonic as its liturgical and literary
language. For the Serbs this activity also meant a turn from the Western Catholic Church
to Eastern Orthodoxy, leading to a break with some of their earlier Christian traditions.
More than 500 years earlier the Serbs, not yet Christians, settled in parts of the late
Roman provinces of Dalmatia, Upper Moesia, South Pannonia, Dardania, the
Mediterranean Dacia, and Praevalis, the southern part of Dalmatia, approximately
modern Montenegro and Albania, where Christianity was already deep rooted. They met
an ecclesiastical organisation dependent on Rome and on Latin as the liturgical language,
and also local saints, especially martyrs, whose memory was cultivated by the great
archiepiscopal centers such as Salona in Dalmatia and Sirmium in Pannonia. The
evangelisation of the Serbs was, it seems, gradual and more or less peaceful (cf.
Maksimović 1996). As among many other peoples, Christianity was propagated
downwards from the top of society and mingled with the remnants of the older religions.
As a result a Christian terminology arose, based on Balkan Latin, but permeated by
number of Greek words and forms of saints‟ names and showing some semantic shifts
due to the overlapping of Christian and non-Christian cults. Shared by Croats and Serbs,
this terminology is better preserved among Roman Catholics than among Orthodox,
because it was largely abandoned by the Serbian church in favour of Slavonic
nomenclature. Nevertheless many relics of it still survive in Serbian folklore and
place-names. For example, in the folk calendar the days of saints Martin and Vitus and of
the archangel Michael still approximate to feast-days celebrating them in the Western
Church. (Of course, as in the West, other saints are also venerated on these days in the
official menology of the Serbian church: St Menas and St Stephen of Deĉani, the