St. Nikolaj Velimirović

He was born in 1881 in the mountain village of Lelić in western Serbia, the eldest of many children in a peasant family, and was schooled by the monks of the nearby monastery of Ćelije. Gifted and devout, he studied theology and philosophy at home and abroad, earning doctorates in the West, and was tonsured a monk and ordained, taking the name Nikolaj.

His preaching and writing soon made him known across the Orthodox world. As Bishop first of Žiča and then of Ohrid, and afterward of Žiča again, he revived the spiritual life of his people, fostered a popular movement of prayer and repentance among the faithful, and poured out a great stream of homilies, poems, and meditations — among them the Prologue of Ohrid, a treasury of the lives of the saints for every day of the year, and the Prayers by the Lake.

When the Second World War came, Bishop Nikolaj was arrested by the occupying powers and at length deported, with the Serbian Patriarch Gavrilo, to the concentration camp of Dachau, where he shared the sufferings of the confessors and was delivered only at the war's end.

Unwilling to return to a homeland fallen under communist rule, he made his way to the United States, where he spent his last years teaching and writing in the Orthodox seminaries of the Russian and Serbian Churches in America — at Saint Sava's in Libertyville, at Saint Vladimir's, and at Saint Tikhon's — helping to form a generation of clergy for the growing Church on that continent.

He reposed on the eighteenth of March, 1956, at the monastery of Saint Tikhon in South Canaan, Pennsylvania, and was buried there; in 1991 his relics were returned in triumph to his native Lelić. In 2003 the Serbian Orthodox Church numbered him among the saints, and he is venerated wherever Orthodox Christians read his words, honored as a new Chrysostom for the richness and fire of his preaching.