Isaiah the Serb

Isaiah the Serb was a monk of Hilandar and abbot of the Russian St Panteleimon Monastery on Athos in the fourteenth century. He reposed on 21 August 1380 and is canonized. He is known as the mediator of reconciliation between the Serbian Church and the Patriarchate of Constantinople.

He was born in Serbia, in the diocese of Lim, early in the fourteenth century, to the great nobles George and Kalina. He had a good education and served briefly at court, but left all and entered the monastery of St Joachim at Sarandapor, then, with his abbot's blessing, Hilandar. He was distinguished by patience, humility, obedience, fasting and vigil. Like St Sava of Serbia, he cared for the salvation of his parents: he visited them in his homeland and made them monastics, with the names Gerasim and Theodosia; they died on the same day and were buried in the same grave. He then submitted in obedience to his abbot, the great elder Arsenios. When King Stefan Dusan visited Athos in 1348, Arsenios, feeling his end near, gave Isaiah to the king as a spiritual son, and Dusan came to hold him in great esteem.

After Arsenios's death, Isaiah withdrew into stillness with his disciple Silvester in the desert of St Paul, with St Dionysios the Sanctified as adviser. From there he came to St Panteleimon Monastery, which he had helped before; he found it almost deserted and, with divine zeal, went to the king and obtained its renewal and rebuilding. Dusan sent the head of St Panteleimon in 1347 and confirmed the monastery's rights and estates. Through Isaiah the king was also reconciled with the Patriarchate: the excommunication laid by Constantinople on Dusan and on the Serbian archbishop raised to patriarch was lifted only through the labours of Isaiah, with the former protos Theophanes, the Greek Nikodemos and his disciples Nikandros and Silvester. The ecumenical patriarch lifted the excommunication for the living and the dead and recognised the Serbian patriarchate, sending two hieromonks with Isaiah to confirm the peace.

In his old age Isaiah suffered insults even from those he had helped, and withdrew for a time to Ungro-⁠Wallachia, where he built churches and founded communities. He was once seized at sea by barbarians and beaten, which brought him severe illness until the end. His Life was written by a disciple and discovered by Archimandrite Nikephoros Duchich in the library of Hilandar; it gives 21 August as his day of commemoration.