There is a day in the Serbian calendar that belongs to the doctors. On 14 November (1 November on the old calendar) the church marks the feast of Saints Cosmas and Damian, the two brothers who healed the sick and took no payment, and many families keep it as their krsna slava. The folk name for the day is Vračevi, from vrač, the old word for a healer.
The saints behind the day
The feast belongs to Saints Cosmas and Damian, physicians of Asia Minor who healed for free and are counted among the anargyroi, the unmercenary saints. The tradition tells that they quarrelled once over three eggs before a healed camel spoke to reconcile them, and that they died in peace, not as martyrs, and were buried together at Fereman. Their full story is on their own page. This day keeps their trade, which was healing.
The day of the healers
Vračevi is, more than most saints’ days, a day of a profession. Doctors and pharmacists keep it as their patronal feast, and hospitals and clinics across the Serbian lands mark it. In the home it is a healing day above all: families with someone ill turn to Cosmas and Damian on their feast and make a vow to them, or light a candle and ask the silverless brothers to restore the sick to health, as people have asked the healing saints for centuries.
Beyond the slava and the prayers for the sick, little that is peculiar to the fourteenth of November has come down in the folk record; the richer weather-lore and the longer rituals of the Serbian year attach to other days. Vračevi is simpler than that: the doctors’ day, and the day you ask for someone’s health.
Two feasts of the healers
The healers are kept twice in the Serbian year. This one, in late autumn, falls between Mitrovdan on the eighth of November and Aranđelovdan on the twenty-first; a summer feast of the same Cosmas and Damian comes on 14 July. Folk custom likes to split the two brothers between the two dates, so that one keeps his day in July and the other his in November, though the church counts both feasts as the memory of the same peacefully-departed pair.
Twice a year, then, at the turn into winter and again in high summer, a Serbian house with a sick child or an ailing parent has a day to bring the trouble to, and the two doctors who worked for nothing are asked, still, for the health of the sick.
Sources
Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.
- Orthodox synaxarion for the Holy Unmercenaries Cosmas and Damian of Asia Minor (1 November / 14 November).
- Serbian church coverage of Vračevi / Sveti Vrači (the patronage of healers, the household slava), November 2024-2025.
- The Life of Cosmas and Damian (Ohrid Prologue of Nikolaj Velimirović, 1 November).
