BALKAN SAINTS - Mirjana Detelić

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Bogorodica Đunisija, „Mother of God Dionysius‟. The original patron was obviously St
Dionysius the Great. The other place-name is Istaaglanga. It may be corrected to
Stratlat‟ or Stlatlat‟, the later fortress of Stalać, which is connected in folklore and epics
with the historically unknown personage Todor od Stalaća, „Theodor of Stalać‟. This was
in all probability the martyr saint Theodor Stratilates, „the General‟, in whose honour the
fortress and its church were dedicated. We may suppose that this dedication took place on
the ocasion of a conquest, judging by analogy with an event in 931, when the emperor
John Tzimiskius, having conquered from the Russians the fortress Durostorum on the
Danube, gave it the new name Theodōroúpolis in honour of the same saint, patron of
Byzantine army (Loma 1990, 3f., 10, 14, 16). A further instance of an early spreading of
Byzantine cults in Serbia is the name of the cathedral church of Prizren, Bogorodica
Leviška „Our Lady of Leviša‟, going back to Greek Eleûsa „The Merciful One‟, a name of
the Virgin Mary. It is attested on a thirteenth-century painting in the cathedral, but the
name Leviša, for philological reasons, must be much older, contemporary with the earlier
church on the same spot built in the ninth century or before. This is striking enough, for
in Greece itself the epithet Eleûsa is not attested until the eleventh century (Loma 1989).
Finally, the interdisciplinary study of Serbian place-names may help advance the
knowledge of ancient diocesan boundaries. For a very long time, it has been known that
north-western part of Serbia must have fallen under the jurisdiction of the archbishops of
Sirmium, because in the Middle Ages it was given the same name Srem, Latin Sirmia
ulterior for the region of Srem, and Sirmia citerior, for those parts between the lower
Sava and the Danube. Now in view of the cult of the Sirmian martyr Archilius at Arilje,
we are permitted to move this boundary more to the south, over the mountain range
separating the basins of the Sava and the western Morava. Moreover, since St Achilius,
as substitute for Archilius, counts among the patron saints of Serbs in north-eastern
Bosnia, it seems probable that this region belonged to the Sirmian diocese also.
Furthermore, the Archangel Michael being the patron saint of the eleventh-century
Adriatic state of Doclea (around Bar on the Macedonian coast south of Kotor), some
early instances of his cult may be taken as indices to the sphere of influence of the
Doclean archbishopric at Bar.
Bibl iographica l note
No historical dictionary of Serbian place names is available. RJA (the Yugoslav
Academy of Science Dictionary of the Croato-Serbian Language) gives useful toponymic
data, but is far from exhaustive. In RSA (the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts
Dictionary of the Serbo-Croatian Language) toponyms are included more scarcely, and
without their historically attested forms. For a more complete insight into the
contemporaneous materials, readers are referred to IM (see Bibliography below) and to
detailed topographical maps. Since 1975 within the frame of a long-term project
organized by the Onomastic Board of SANU, an intensive field research is under way,
which has resulted in a card index of many hundreds of thousands of (micro)toponymic
items, collected in different regions where Serbs live(d). Only a small part of it has so far
been published, mainly in OP (see below). As for saints‟ cults, especially the dedications