Two Roman officers who died in the Syrian desert became, in the Serbian villages, saints of the plough team. On 20 October (7 October on the old calendar) many households keep Srđevdan, the feast of Sergius and Bacchus, as their krsna slava. The name comes from Srđ, the Serbian form of Sergius, and the day belongs above all to the ox and the field at the close of the working year.
The saints behind the day
Srđevdan is the feast of Saints Sergius and Bacchus, two officers of the Roman imperial court. They refused to sacrifice to the pagan gods, and the tradition holds that they were stripped of their rank and sent east, in women’s dress, to die for their faith around the year 303. Sergius became one of the great soldier saints of the Christian East, and the desert town where he was buried grew into the pilgrimage city of Sergiopolis. The full story of the two martyrs is told on their own page.
The ox saint
In Serbian folk custom Sergius is a volujski svetac, an ox saint, and that shapes the whole day. Farmers do not harness the oxen for work on Srđevdan, and the field is left unploughed. In a farming year this falls at the right moment: the autumn work is nearly done, and the animals that pulled the plough and the cart through the season are given the day. The saint who was made to walk a road of nails watches over the beasts of burden.
The day carried other patronages too. In parts of the Serbian lands Sergius was the saint of the opančari, the shoemakers, and of the farmers, and families in those trades kept Srđevdan as their slava. Folk belief also turned his name into a cure: srdobolja, the old word for dysentery, sounds like Srđ, and the saint was asked to heal it, along with ailments of the bones. The healing rests on the sound of the name rather than any medicine, the sort of link the folk calendar makes everywhere.
The turn of the year
Srđevdan sits in a close run of late-October slavas, one after another as the outdoor year shuts down: Tomindan on the nineteenth, Srđevdan on the twentieth, Sveta Petka on the twenty-seventh, and on toward Mitrovdan in November. This is the season of the last ploughing and the autumn sowing, when the household turns from the field to the hearth, and each of these days gives a family its saint to gather around.
The observance itself is the quiet one of any slava: the candle is lit and the kolač broken for the guests at the table, with meat unless the feast falls on a Wednesday or a Friday. Two soldiers who kept their faith in a Roman court are remembered, seventeen centuries later, over bread and a candle in a house at the edge of a ploughed field.
Sources
Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.
- Orthodox synaxarion for the Martyrs Sergius and Bacchus (7 October / 20 October).
- Serbian ethnographic and church coverage of Srđevdan (the slava, the ox-saint custom, the folk healing of srdobolja), October 2024-2025.
- The Passion of Saints Sergius and Bacchus (Greek, 5th century), the source of the martyrs’ story.
