BALKAN SAINTS - Mirjana Detelić

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second construction was an Orthodox church in the Byzantine style, with three apses,
mentioned in a Papal letter of 1229 as a cathedral of the Greek rite. In the same century
the church was rebuilt for a third time as the seat of the bishop of Syrmia (Serbian Srem),
provided by the Benedictines, and contemporary Latin charters record its patron as St
Irenaeus (Popovic 1980, 2, 3, 6). Of great interest is the testimony of Theophylact, an
eleventh-century archbishop of Ochrid, regarding the reputation of Irenaeus and the belief
in the healing power of his relics. Chapter 54 of his Martyrium SS XV martyrum, printed
as Vol. 146 in J.-P. Migne, Patriologiae cursus completus, s. Graeca, hereafter PG (and
known in more recent editions as Sources chrétiens) , tells at 220 of a Bulgarian who
visited places where miracles occurred and who, having heard about Irenaeus, started
from Ochrid for Mitrovica (Zeiller 1918, 81 n. 3; Delehaye 1933, 256 n. 6). Finally,
acceptance of his cult by the Slavic population is evidenced by belief that the saint, being
from Srem, was ipso facto a Slav (Velimirovic 1991, March 26).
Widespread, popular memory of Sirmium‟s first bishop is obscured by the cult of his
deacon Demetrius, about whom it is written only that he was martyred on April 9, three
days after Irenaeus, together with a number of unnamed Christians including four virgins
(AA.SS. III, 614-5; MH 8, Id Apr.; Syriac Breviary 441; Vickers 1974, 343-5). There is no
evidence that Demetrius was commemorated in late antique Sirmium. A church
mentioned in The Miracles of St Demetrius was built during the first decades of the sixth
century and dedicated in honour of a high officer of Thessalonica of that name, patron of
the city (Barisic 1953). Indeed it is from Demetrius that the town got its name,
(Di)mitrovica. There are two general views regarding the problem of identifying St
Demetrius, deacon of Sirmium, with his namesake, the „megalomartyr‟ from
Thessalonica. However, either two different martyrs share the same name (Popovic 1987;
Popovic 1998; Milin 2001), or the Sirmium Demetrius is in the origin of the cult of
Thessalonica‟s patron. The first to offer the latter possibility was Delehaye (1933, 228-9).
Zeiller (1918, 81-83) wrote: „...martyr de Thessalonique... qui n‟a d‟existence que dans la
legende, mais qui s‟est substitué au modeste clerc de la métropole pannonienne.‟ More
recently this hypothesis has been supported by Vickers 1974 and others.
The silence in contemporary martyrologia about a martyr called Demetrius from
Thessalonica is sometimes taken to indicate that he never existed in that city. Partisans of
the other hypothesis use it as confirmation that the cult was transferred from Sirmium,
though there is no mention of a translation of the relics from that city. Nevertheless, the
same argument is used by partisans of the opposite hypothesis, who distinguish the
Sirmium deacon from the patron of Thessalonica. They go even further in their attempts
to intepret the Thessalonica cult, searching for its origins in an ancient pre-Christian cult
such as that of the Macedonian Kabir people (cf. Popovic 1987, 117, and Popovic 1998,
46, who accepts an earlier, similar point of view). Vickers (1974, 344) rejects this:
„Rationalist explanations... since they rest on analogies which are frequently superficial
and in particular do not take account of the fact that Demetrius does not seem to have
been honoured originally as a military saint.‟ He also challenges the idea that a
connection between Christian saints and local, pre-Christian cults is justified in every
case. Christianity took roots and spread within Thessalonica and northern Greece as early
as the time of the first apostles, and the number of recorded Christian martyrs was so
large that it is hard to understand why a new, non-existent case should be invented (Jarak
1996, 275). However, if the supposition about a translation of relics of Demetrius to