The saint who wrote the third gospel stands, in the Serbian year, at the door of winter. On 31 October (18 October on the old calendar) many households keep Lukindan, the feast of Saint Luke the Evangelist, as their krsna slava. The physician who set down the life of Christ is honoured here as a healer, and his day is the one that hears the first wolf.
The saint behind the day
Lukindan is the feast of Saint Luke the Evangelist, the Greek physician who travelled with the Apostle Paul and wrote the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles. A later tradition made him the first icon painter and the patron of iconographers, and because he was a doctor he is also the patron of healers. His full story is told on his own page. In the village year, though, it is the wolf and the flock that mark his day.
Luke comes, the wolf comes
Lukindan sits at the turn from autumn into winter, and the sayings tied to it are all about the cold coming down. Ide Luka, eto vuka, the old line runs, Luke is coming and the wolf is coming with him: from about this day the wolves grow bold and come down toward the folds. Another saying reads the snow, Sveti Luka, sneg do kuka, Saint Luke, snow up to the hip. The day is a boundary stone in the calendar, the last of the great October slavas before the season closes.
So the customs turn to the animals and the winter ahead. On Lukindan the rams are let in among the ewes, in the custom the folk call the ram-weddings, so that the lambs will come in the spring; the shepherds who have kept the flocks through the year are thanked with a better table. And against the wolf the sayings warn of, the sheepfold is bound: a rope or a thread is tied around the enclosure as a protection for the flock through the winter nights.
Reading the winter
Because the day stands on the edge of the cold, people read it for signs of what the winter will be. The first guest to cross the threshold on Lukindan is watched: a cheerful one is taken to promise a mild winter, a grave one a hard one. The flock is read the same way. If the ewes take the rams easily, an early spring is expected; if they hold back, a long cold winter is coming.
Lukindan closes the run of late-autumn slavas, Srđevdan and Sveta Petka before it, with Mitrovdan still to come in November, when the grazing year ends and the herds come in for good. Two millennia after a physician in the Greek east wrote down the life of Christ, a Serbian household lights his candle at the moment the wolves come down and the first snow is expected, and asks the evangelist to see them through to spring.
Sources
Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.
- Orthodox synaxarion for the Apostle and Evangelist Luke (18 October / 31 October).
- Serbian ethnographic and church coverage of Lukindan / Lučindan (the slava, the wolf sayings, the ram and sheepfold customs, the weather divination), October 2024-2025.
- The Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles (traditionally attributed to Luke).
