Makarije of Jovanja

Venerable Macarius of Jovanje, in the world Milan Milovanović, was a Serbian hieromonk of the Jovanje monastery. The sources call him venerable and martyr; they do not say when or whether he was canonized. He was born on 5 August 1894 in Zakuta, near Kraljevo, and fell asleep on 29 June 1949 at the Jovanje monastery.

He completed primary school in his native village, then the Saint Sava Seminary in Belgrade, and in 1938 he finished the University of Belgrade. In the time of the war the monasteries of the Ovčar-⁠Kablar region, though themselves struck by various armies, were a refuge for monastics from other threatened regions. Among them was the great spiritual father, the hieromonk Macarius (Milovanović), from the monastery of Saint Naum on Lake Ohrid.

In the time of the war the Bulgarians expelled all Serbian monks from Macedonia to Serbia. Somehow only Father Macarius remained, probably from awe, because even the persecutors of the Serbian Church in Macedonia knew him as a great spiritual father and ascetic. Yet at the beginning of 1944 he too was driven out. He came to the diocese of his spiritual father, and the administrator of the diocese of Žiča, Bishop Vincentius, appointed him confessor of the Jovanje convent.

Sometimes Father Macarius went on errands to other monasteries of Ovčar-⁠Kablar, and came also to the Annunciation monastery. There the novice Gojko (the future Patriarch Paul, Gojko Stojčević) met him, and began and then carried on long conversations about monastic and spiritual life. Gojko saw in him a true monk and took him as his confessor, to lead him to monastic tonsure.

Father Macarius was such a spiritual father that he foretold exactly the hour of his repose, 29 June 1949, at the Jovanje monastery. When, after five years, in 1954, his grave was opened, because of the demolition and relocation of the Jovanje monastery for the planned construction of the hydroelectric plant at Međuvršje, his body was found whole and incorrupt.