AFTER spending Christmas at the Bulgarian court, Sava felt very tired and exhausted.
Burning of the relics of Saint Sava, Photo Graphics by H. Gerhard, History Museum of Serbia
Although that winter in Trnovo was very cold, he still served liturgies every day between Christmas and Epiphany in the emperor’s endowment, the Church of the Forty Martyrs, preaching the flock after those services and blessing the Bulgarian believers as if they were his people. At the request of the emperor and the patriarch, on the eve of the Epiphany, he even consecrated the water in the baptistery in that church and sprinkled it on the emperor, the Bulgarian patriarch and all the believers present. He must have caught a cold that day during the service in the cold church, because he then felt that he had a fever and a high temperature, so he decided to send most of his companions to Serbia that day with all the gifts and relics he collected along the way. divided it into those that should be handed over to King Vladislav and those that he intended for the Serbian patriarch Arsenij and the patriarchate. Sensing that his end was near, he also sent them his farewell letters to King Vladislav and Patriarch Arsenij, in which he sent his pastoral blessing to them “and to the country of his people” as a last will, which is the final indication that he even then, as in many previous circumstances, he did not have any reservations or resentments towards his dear son, King Vladislav.
ABOUT HIS last moments before Theodosius’ death he says:
“And at midnight when Easter Sunday dawned,” . . partaking of the holy and life-giving mysteries of Christ, as he always said: Glory to God in all things! And immediately, as if he had been visited by some dear friends from ancient times, he was cheerful in spirit, and this joy confirmed the coming of the angels of God to him and showed himself unspeakably bright in the face, thus proving the purity of his soul. And so, thanking God to the end, he surrendered his soul into his hands. “
His departure into eternity happened on January 14, 1236, and according to the known external symptoms of his illness, modern doctors came to the conclusion that he most likely died of a cold caught in the church, which turned into pneumonia.
Since Sava left no indication of where he wanted to be buried, by order of the Bulgarian Emperor John Assen II and to the joy of his court officials and the capital’s flock, his body was buried with special honors in the most beautiful Bulgarian laurel, Trnovo Imperial Monastery of the Forty martyr.
As soon as the news reached Serbian King Stefan Vladislav that his uncle had died in Trnovo, he immediately sent his embassy to Bulgaria to beg Sava’s relics from his father-in-law, Tsar Jovan Assen II, so that they could be buried in Serbia. However, since Sava was widely known and very popular in Bulgaria during his lifetime, the emperor, in the absence of any written document on where the Serbian archbishop wanted to be buried, refused to listen to Vladislav’s request and negotiations on the advice of his ruler and clergy. they went on about it for a whole year, until finally King Stefan Vladislav had to come to Trnovo in person to beg for it, and with the abundant bribery of the Bulgarian nobles.
Both of Sava’s hagiographically determined biographers, of course, claim that even then the powerful Bulgarian tsar only relented because an angel and Archbishop Sava appeared to him in a dream with an order to do so.
After the final transfer of his uncle’s relics to Serbia in 1237, his nephew, Serbian King Stefan Vladislav, buried him with great solemnity in his endowment, the Church of the Ascension of Christ in the Mileseva Monastery, which he built two years earlier on the river of the same name. Lima.
FROM THE MOMENT of the burial of Sava’s relics in Mileseva, that monastery became a primary place of worship for Serbian believers, more important than Zice and Studenica, because the popular cult of Saint Sava even before his official church canonization became so dominant in Serbia that Mileseva has definitely become the most visited Christian shrine of all domestic religious pilgrimages of the Serbian population.
The first to try to use it a hundred years later, mainly for political purposes, was Bosnian Ban Tvrtko Kotromanic. After the military successes achieved in the conflicts with the armed forces of the Serbian lords Altomanović and Balšić, he, as the current lord of the Zlatibor region where the Mileseva monastery is located, came up with the idea that he was related to a certain line of extinct holy Serbian dynasty. Nemanjić (which has not been confirmed by reliable historical evidence to this day). And that is why he was crowned king of “Serbs, Bosnia and the Pomerania” at the tomb of Saint Sava in the Mileseva monastery in 1377, but unfortunately, neither then nor later did any of the Serbian rulers recognize the validity of that act.
ALSO, when in the late Middle Ages this place of worship became part of the estate of the Bosnian lord Hrvoje Vukčić-Kosača, he used the growing popular popularity of Saint Sava to proclaim himself duke of Saint Sava in 1448 in that monastery, and therefore the entire surrounding area then it got a new name Herzegovina.
Sava’s relics remained in the Milesevi monastery until April 27, 1594, when, after the suppression of the Serbian uprising in Banat in which the insurgents put the image of Saint Sava on their flags, the arrogant Turkish vizier of Albanian origin, Sinan Pasha, ordered that they excavated it from his Mileševo church tomb and transferred it and burned it on the lawn in front of the southern walls of the Belgrade fortress, in Vračar.
By burning the relics of Saint Sava, Turkish Grand Vizier Koca Sinan Pasha wanted to humiliate that Serbian saint and devalue his cult in order to destroy his spiritual greatness in the heavenly memory of the pre-Turkish greats from his glorious past, but with that oppression he achieved the opposite effect. His axial savagery further expanded Sava’s saintly cult among the Serbian population, because with his second symbolic death, Saint Sava shared with his people his most painful sufferings under Turkish oppression, which had lasted for almost two centuries.
There are also special ironies in the data about that Turkish vizier from a Dubrovnik document from 1571, which show that he was not a stubborn Islamic fanatic from Anatolia, but a Turk born in Topojan in northeastern Albania to a Catholic family that converted to Islam.
THE BURNING OF THE RELICS WAS ON TAŠMAJDAN
Although today it is widely believed that the magnificent modern Temple of Saint Sava in Belgrade was built on the site of Sinan’s bonfire, in reality this unpleasant event did not happen there but on a small hill much closer to the then southern city walls and called Čupina humka, located in today’s Tashmajdan in the park next to the existing church of St. Mark, in the middle of the then abandoned meadow called Vracar because the main imperial jade for the Ottoman capital Istanbul passed through it, where gypsies, looking at passengers in the palms, talked about what awaited them on their long journeys.
TOMORROW: Universal Folk Teacher
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