St. Lazar of Serbia

He was born around 1329 at Prilepac, of a noble family in the service of the Serbian kings. After the death of the last Nemanjić ruler and the breaking apart of the empire of Stefan Dušan, Lazar rose to gather the Serbian lands of the Morava valley under his rule, governing as Prince and laboring to restore the unity of his people and the order of the Church.

A pious ruler, he built and endowed monasteries — among them Ravanica, which he raised as his own foundation — and worked to heal the breach that had opened between the Serbian Church and the Patriarchate of Constantinople, securing the lifting of the schism and the recognition of the Serbian Patriarchate.

As the power of the Ottoman Turks pressed ever deeper into the Balkans, Lazar gathered a coalition of Serbian and allied lords to meet them. On the field of Kosovo, on the fifteenth of June — the feast of Vidovdan — in the year 1389, the two armies clashed in a battle of terrible cost. Both Prince Lazar and the Ottoman Sultan Murad were slain that day.

The Serbian tradition remembers Lazar's choice on the eve of the battle as a covenant: offered, in the words of the epic, the kingdom of earth or the Kingdom of Heaven, he chose the heavenly and eternal, and so consecrated his people's suffering under the long Ottoman yoke as a martyrdom borne for Christ. Taken after the battle, he was beheaded.

His body was laid to rest, and his relics, kept at Ravanica and venerated through the centuries of bondage, became a sign of hope and resurrection for the Serbian people. The Church honors him as the Holy Great-Martyr Lazar, and his memory on Vidovdan stands at the very heart of the Serbian Christian conscience.