The departure of the last authentic Justinian: the Society

The former bishop of Zahumlje-Herzegovina Atanasija (Jevtić) will be buried in the Tvrdoš monastery near Trebinje on Saturday 6 March.

Photo: BETAPHOTO / ARMENIA LOANS BESEVIC

Before that, a service will be held at the Trebinje Cathedral, followed by a liturgy in front of the church. The funeral procession, announced by the Diocese of Zahumlje-Herzegovina, must leave Trebinje for Tvrdoš at exactly noon. During his life, Bishop Atanasija determined the place where he wanted to rest: the Chapel of the Resurrection of the Lord in the cemetery of the Tvrdoš Monastery.

Due to the death of Bishop Atanasij, the Union of Municipalities and Cities of Eastern Herzegovina declared Friday and Saturday days of mourning. In all institutions and establishments in Herzegovina, flags are at half mast and cultural events are adapted to new circumstances. In the Cathedral of Trebinje, where the remains of Bishop Atanasij were transferred, yesterday the bishops of Düsseldorf and Germany, Grigorije (Durić) and Zahumlje-Herzegovina Dimitrije (Radjenović) served the liturgy.

According to news from church sites, memorial services and memorial services are being held throughout the Serbian Orthodox Church for the repose of the soul of Bishop Atanasij. Serbian Patriarch Porfirije (Perić) also held his memorial service yesterday at the Patriarchal Chapel. Bishop Atanasija died Thursday night at the age of 83 in Trebinje hospital from complications caused by the corona virus.

With his departure from the Serbian Church, the time of the authentic “Justinians” arrived, the spiritual sons of one of the greatest Orthodox theologians of the 20th century, Archimandrite Justin (Popović), who was canonized by the Serbian Orthodox Church in 2010 . an end.

Along with the recently deceased Metropolitan Amfilohije (Radović) and the dismissed Bishop Artemije (Radosavljević), he was part of the former extraordinary “trinity in A”, in which both priests and believers swore, hoping that Serbia would get rid of communism. Although he was not a member of Parliament as a “pensioner,” with his departure, the balance of power within the episcopate was further altered.

Immaculately educated, wide-ranging and knowledgeable, infinitely free-spirited, an ascetic and sharp-tongued prayer book that could not be monastically silent, Bishop Atanasija was one of the most authentic personalities among Serbian archbishops, in keeping with his attitude of “arrive and take refuge and exist in a terrible place.”

He was born on January 8, 1938 as Zoran Jevtić in, as he himself put it, “the house of the humble Serbian peasants Milan and Savka, where Saint Nicholas was celebrated”. He was born in Brdarica near Valjevo, and his education took him through Sabac and Belgrade to Athens, Istanbul, and the Sorbonne in Paris, where he was a professor at the “St. Sergius” Russian Orthodox Institute. He was dean and sole honorary professor at the Faculty of Theology of the Serbian Orthodox Church in Belgrade, where he has been teaching since 1972.

He received monastic vows from his spiritual father Justin at the Tronoš monastery in 1960, and in 1991 the Parliament of the Serbian Orthodox Church elected him Bishop of Banat. He soon moved to the war-torn Diocese of Zahumlje-Herzegovina, from whose chair he retired in the fall of 1999 at his own request. Even before receiving the bishop’s staff from Patriarch Pavle nearly three decades ago, Bishop Atanasija, as a speaker and theologian, was one of the most prominent figures in the Serbian Orthodox Church.

Due to his support for student protests against Slobodan Milosevic’s regime after his landmark Studio B interview on March 9, 1991, which had been circulating in Serbia for a long time on cassettes, the old Belgraders saw him as their candidate for the future patriarch. That authority was shaken ten years ago by his role in the case of Bishop Artemije, after whose removal he was the first administrator of the ERP.

Although he was initially misled in his assessment that Milosevic “saw the truth in Kosovo’s eyes,” he soon became one of its sharpest critics in the Serbian Orthodox Church. Due to the statements against the “grandfather’s teacher, the arrogant and evil president of Serbia”, the then SPS government also complained to the Synod, claiming that his behavior was more “a fierce political opponent than a bishop and a cleric”.

Bishop Atanasija was no less critical of Aleksandar Vučić’s current regime, which is why he sat in the fifth row at the so-called state funeral of the late Patriarch Irinej at St. Sava Church three months ago. Kosovo and Metohija “got into his blood” while he was still in the military, and he testified to his confession of the Kosovo Pact in part during the war conflicts and after the introduction of the UN protectorate in Kosovo and Metohija, when he often He rescued Serbs and visited destroyed churches in the most threatened parts of the southern provinces of Serbia.

from the ground, it gave him the right to criticize the Kosovo policy of officer Belgrade from Milosevic via DOS to Vucic, but also the movements of the leaders and the Synod when they got too close to the authorities. As a sign of protest at the granting of the highest ecclesiastical order to Vučić in 2019, he returned to the patriarch the panagia given a few days earlier in Žiča on the occasion of eight centuries of autocephaly by the Serbian Orthodox Church.

Bishop Atanasij’s biography is not only a national, pastoral and renewal work, but also a fruitful theological, translational and literary work, for which he is respected throughout the Orthodox world. Although he was fast and supernatural, he was essentially a man of love for his neighbor, which he considered a measure of love for God. Saying goodbye to him, the Decani monks said that he too played his last earthly game, as he was able to say “masterfully” and can cheerfully shout with the apostle Paul “I fought the war, I ran the race, I kept the faith! “

Spiritual children

There are three archbishops of the spiritual school of Bishop Atanasij in the current Assembly of the Serbian Orthodox Church: bishops Gligorija and Dimitrija, as well as the bishop of Western America Maksim (Vasiljevic).

Related texts: