Stefan Dečanski

The tradition frames the life of this king around two betrayals: his father had him blinded, and his son had him killed. Between the two he built one of the great churches of the medieval Balkans and took his name from it. He is Stefan Uroš III, called Dečanski after the monastery of Dečani, and the Serbian church keeps him as a martyr among its holy kings.

The blinded son

Stefan was the son of King Milutin and a grandson of the Nemanjić line that had ruled Serbia since the twelfth century. He rebelled against his father over land in the south, and Milutin had him seized. On what came next, the tradition and the historians part. The tradition says the young man was blinded on his father’s order and sent into exile; the church keeps it as the first of his sufferings. The documented record is less certain. Some accounts hold that the man sent to blind him was bribed, that the sight was only half taken, and that Stefan kept a bandage over his eyes for years, until his father was dead, so that no one would know he could still see. One modern reading doubts he was blinded at all.

The church remembers the healing without hesitation. The Ohrid Prologue tells that Saint Nicholas appeared to the blind king in a church at Ovče Polje and told him not to be afraid, that his eyes had been given into the saint’s keeping and would be returned to him in time; and that the saint made the sign of the cross over him, and he saw. This is told as a miracle of the church, and we keep it here as the church tells it, alongside the historians’ doubt that there was ever a full blindness to cure.

The years in exile

Stefan spent the years of his father’s displeasure at the court of the Byzantine emperor Andronikos II in Constantinople, roughly six or seven of them. When Milutin died in 1321 the succession broke into a fight among his kin, and Stefan came home to claim it. He was crowned on the sixth of January 1322 as Stefan Uroš III, and married, two years later, into the imperial house of the Palaiologoi.

Dečani

The name that stayed on him came from the church. Around 1327 Stefan began the monastery of Visoki Dečani, in the valley of the Bistrica near Peć, dedicated to Christ Pantokrator. Its founding charter survives, dated 1330. The building went on for years and was finished under his son; the tradition says the king meant it for his own burial, and it became his tomb. On the fresco above the entrance to the nave he is shown as a crowned king with a halo, a saint who holds the model of the church he raised.

In the summer of 1330 he won the battle that fixed the balance of the southern Balkans for a generation. At Velbužd, on the twenty-eighth of July, the Serbian army broke the Bulgarians and their tsar was killed on the field. Stefan’s young son Dušan led a wing of the army, and it is from Velbužd that Dušan’s rise begins to overshadow his father.

The king killed by his son

Within a year the victory turned on him: in 1331 Dušan, pressed by nobles who wanted the old king gone, deposed his father and had him shut in the fortress of Zvečan. Dušan was crowned that September, and Stefan never left Zvečan alive.

The sources do not agree on how he died. The official biography written at the Serbian court, by the continuator of Archbishop Danilo, says only that the deposed king, held pending a reconciliation, suddenly gave up his spirit to God, and names no violence. The later hagiography of Gregory Tsamblak says he was killed at his son’s command, and the Serbian memory settled on drowning; an English reference files him among kings killed by strangling. The date is contested too: historians place the death on the eleventh of November 1331, while the Ohrid Prologue, keeping the church’s reckoning, says 1336. From all of it the tradition kept one line: a king blinded by his father and drowned by his son.

He was buried in his own unfinished church at Dečani. The Serbian church holds his relics there to be incorrupt, and canonized him as Sveti Stefan Dečanski, a martyr-king, one of the holy kings of the Nemanjić house.

Mratindan

In the Serbian calendar his feast falls on 24 November (the eleventh on the old calendar), and the name it carries is not his. The day is Mratindan, and Mrata is a Serbian worn-down form of Martin, from Saint Martin of Tours, whose western feast falls on the same date. The church feast of the martyr-king settled onto a day the folk calendar already kept as Mrata’s, and the two names have run together on it ever since. On the folk side, as the day’s own page tells, Mrata is a wolf-shepherd, and late November belongs to the wolves.

The king holds the church in his hands on the wall at Dečani, the model of the building where he lies. He is kept as a saint in the walls he raised, and remembered on a day that borrowed its name from another man entirely.

Sources

Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.

• The Ohrid Prologue (Prolog iz Ohrida) of Bishop Nikolaj Velimirović, the life of the Holy King Stephen of Dečani, 11 November
• Danilo II and his continuator, the Lives of the Serbian Kings and Archbishops (the 14th-century royal biography, the contemporary account of Stefan Dečanski’s reign and death)
• Gregory Tsamblak (Grigorije Camblak), the Life of Stefan Dečanski (the later hagiography, which names the killing)
• The Dečani chrysobull (the founding charter of Visoki Dečani, 1330)
• Visoki Dečani monastery (decani.org), on the founder’s fresco and the building of the church
• The Serbian Orthodox Church calendar entries for 11 November (Sveti kralj Stefan Dečanski)