At the very end of the autumn feasts, when the slavas of October have run out and Mitrovdan is a week off, comes the day of a hermit. On 1 November (19 October on the old calendar) the Serbian church keeps the feast of Saint Prohor of Pčinja, and many households keep it as their krsna slava. But it is above all a day of the road: the great pilgrimage to his monastery on the Pčinja.
The saint behind the day
The feast belongs to Saint Prohor of Pčinja, an eleventh-century hermit who lived decades in a cave on Mount Kozjak, and who is remembered for foretelling that a hunter named Diogenes would become emperor. The tradition identifies the hunter with Romanos IV Diogenes, who took the Byzantine throne in 1068 and, the story says, found the hermit’s relics after his death and raised a monastery over them. The full story is told on the saint’s own page.
A day of pilgrimage
Little in the way of village weather-lore attaches to this day, the way it does to the harvest saints of high autumn; what it has instead is the pilgrimage. The Monastery of Sveti Prohor Pčinjski, on the slopes of Kozjak above the river, is one of the largest in the Serbian church, and on the saint’s feast it fills with people who have travelled to reach it.
They come for the relics: tradition holds that holy myrrh flows from Prohor’s bones, and that those who pray at them are healed. The pilgrims who make the journey come to ask, as pilgrims have for centuries, for the health of someone they love, or for peace.
The close of the season
Prohor’s feast sits at the tail of the long autumn run of slavas: Srđevdan, Sveta Petka, Lukindan, and now, on the first of November, Prohor, with Mitrovdan and the end of the grazing year still to come. It falls the day after the feast of Saint Luke, the evangelist whose name the emperor is said to have given to one of the two churches he built on the Pčinja. A hermit who wanted only to be remembered is remembered, a thousand years on, by a mountain full of pilgrims at the door of winter.
Sources
Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.
- Orthodox synaxarion for the Venerable Prohor of Pčinja (19 October / 1 November).
- The Life of Saint Prohor of Pčinja (summarized in Nikolaj Velimirović’s Ohridski prolog, 19 October).
- Serbian coverage of the feast and the pilgrimage to the Monastery of Sveti Prohor Pčinjski, October-November 2024-2025.
