A great man is one who collects knowledge the way a bee collects honey and uses it to help people overcome the difficulties they endure - hunger, ignorance and disease!
- Nikola Tesla

Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.
- Franklin Roosevelt

While their territory has been devastated and their homes despoiled, the spirit of the Serbian people has not been broken.
- Woodrow Wilson

Serb families honour their saints with slava celebrations

Slava is the celebration of the patron saint for each family in Serbia. Different families have different saints, handed down through the generations.

The tradition is a centrepiece of family life - festivities last three days, and include feasts and dancing as well as religious ceremonies.

The BBC's Guy De Launey joined one family as they marked the day of St Sava, also the patron saint of Serbia.

The Close-up series focuses on aspects of life in countries and cities around the world. What may seem ordinary and familiar to the people who live there can be surprising to those who don't.

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People Directory

Bishop Mardarije (Uskokovic)

The First Serbian Bishop of America and Canada
Bishop Mardarije was born in Podgorica on December 22, 1889, his father, Pero, being a tribal captain and mother Jela, nee Bozovic. He finished elementary school in Cetinje where he started high school, continuing in Belgrade. Leaving high school in his fifth year, he went to Studenica Monastery. In 1906, with the blessing of Bishop Sava (Barac) of Zica, he took monastic vows and was ordained a deacon. He graduated from the Seminary in Kisenjev where a collection of his sermons was published. From here he went to St. Petersburg, graduating from the Theological Academy in 1916.

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Publishing

The Presence of Transcendence

Essays on Facing the Other through Holiness, History and Text

by Bogoljub Sijakovic

The essays collected in this book venture into various domains of philosophy, such as ontology and epistemology, anthropology and ethics, philosophy of history and history of philosophy, philosophy of religion and theory of the mystical, poetics and hermeneutics. The problems here thematized, which are brought to us primarily by the tradition of Hellenism and Christianity as well as life itself, are both traditional and contemporary: self-knowledge and knowledge of God, transcendence and paradoxy, theodicy and anthropodicy, sacrifice, violence, holiness, responsibility, decision-making, evil, guilt, repentance, forgiveness, memory, as well as: wisdom, suffering, good, the other, freedom, fate, history, the Balkans, war, rationality, and also: reading, dialogue, poetry, metaphysic of light.