BALKAN SAINTS - Mirjana Detelić

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re than in their homeland (St Anastasia, for example, was venerated in Constantinople,
Zadar, Rome, and Fulda).
Loma asserts that after settling down in the seventh century in the Byzantine province
of Dalmatia, the Serbs, not unlike theirs kinsmen and neighbours the Croats, found
themselves exposed to the influences of a local Christianity, whose terminology and
nomenclature were basically Latin, though impregnated with Greek admixtures. This
situation is reflected in the oldest loan words and names of Christian provenance in
Serbo-Croatian, and place-names with sut- from Latin sanctus, while some names of
saints were adapted in a phonetic shape based on middle-Greek pronunciation, for
example Ilija (Elijah), Varvara (Barbara), Vlaho (Blasius), and so on. After the schism
and together with the gradual shifting of the centre of their medieval state under
Nemanjic-dinasty southeastward, the Serbs definitely turned to the Eastern Church and
adopted Church Slavonic as their liturgical language. Nevertheless still survive some
remnants of this original syncretism among the orthodox Serbs, not only in onomastics,
but also in their folk calendar, as Loma demonstrates.
Three contributions address devotional themes from the Middle Ages. From the
historians‟ perspective, Tatjana Subotin-Golubović describes the cult of Michael the
Archangel in medieval Serbia, while Danica Popović explores the ecclesiastical and
political programme represented by the eremitism of St Sava of Serbia. The concept of
desert is one of the important categories not only in the history of east-Christian
monasticism, but also in the entire medieval civilisation and its religious mentality. The
art historical view is taken by Branislav Cvetković, discussing the icon and its functional
adaptability in medieval Serbia.
Religion was harnessed to national political agendas both in the time of St Sava and as
medieval attitudes gave way to modern. Miroslav Timotijević describes how leading
members of the ruling Despotic family Branković were remodelled first as saints and
then, in the Nineteenth Century, as historical heroes. They seem to have provided a
model for the parallel veneration of the sainted Stefan Ńtiljanović, popularly though
unofficially viewed as the last Despot of the medieval Serbian state. The growth of
devotion to his relics is traced by Jelena Dergenc.
From here the narrative moves into the field of popular understandings, customs, and
folklore. Gerda Dalipaj reports from her fieldwork on saint‟s day celebrations and animal
sacrifice in the Shpati region of Albania, focusing on how these reflect local social
structure and identities. Raĉko Popov describes the hugely important Balkan devotion to
the conflated saints Paraskeva, also represented as Petka, together providing a saintly
personification of women‟s rest days and other themes. Popov‟s essay traces the cult in
Bulgaria, Serbia, Romania, and Greece, and Paraskeva/Petka‟s personification of Friday,
her role in winter as patron of wolves and mice, and her summer aspect as rival and substitution
of God‟s Mother. Manolis Varvounis surveys the cult of saints in Greek
traditional culture, and Ljupĉo Risteski lays out the concept and the role of saints in Macedonian
popular religion. In Risteski‟s view, the starting point is a notion that self-consciousness
of popular religion is basically Christian, in spite of its scientific definition
and multilevel structure which are conspicuous only from the point of view positioned
outside the traditional culture. Christianity, though, popular as well as official, is based
on the cult of the saints. This cult is here fully analysed on Macedonian folklore material
and widely illustrated by the author‟s field research. Varvounis argues that the cult of