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Biography

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Sava II, born Predislav of the Nemanjić dynasty, was the third Archbishop of the autocephalous Serbian Orthodox Church. He was a son of King Stefan the First-Crowned (Stefan Prvovenčani) and a nephew of Saint Sava, who had obtained autocephaly for the Serbian Church in 1219 and become its first archbishop. His brothers included the Serbian kings Stefan Radoslav, Stefan Vladislav, and Stefan Uroš I. Predislav was born in the early thirteenth century in the Serbian lands; no reliable source records an exact birth year or birthplace. Like other Nemanjić princes who entered the church, he took monastic vows and the name Sava in honor of his uncle. Surviving medieval notices do not record a marriage or children, and his career is that of a celibate monk-bishop.

Before his elevation to the archbishopric he served as Bishop of Hum (Zahumlje), the diocese covering the Adriatic hinterland of what is now Herzegovina, a see earlier associated with Saint Sava. In 1263 Archbishop Arsenije I of Srem suffered a stroke that left him unable to govern, and Sava II was chosen to succeed him. He thus became the third head of the Serbian Church, after Saint Sava and Arsenije I. His archiepiscopate fell during the reign of his brother King Stefan Uroš I, a period of consolidation of the kingdom and of the church organization created in the previous generation. The archiepiscopal seat, originally associated with the monastery of Žiča, had already begun to shift toward the monastic complex at Peć in Metohija in Arsenije’s time; Sava II continued that association.

He died in 1271 and was buried in the Church of the Holy Apostles at the Patriarchate of Peć, where his tomb became a focus of veneration. He was succeeded as archbishop by Danilo I. The Serbian Church at this date was still an archbishopric; it was raised to a patriarchate only in 1346, so Sava II did not hold patriarchal rank. Precise details of his early life, the identity of his mother (Stefan the First-Crowned married more than once, and the sources do not securely assign Predislav to a particular queen), and most administrative acts of his episcopate are sparsely documented. The narrative sources of the Nemanjić age concentrate on the royal brothers and on Saint Sava I rather than on the later thirteenth-century archbishops.

The Serbian Orthodox Church commemorates him as a saint among the holy hierarchs of the Nemanjić period. His feast is observed on 8 February in the Julian liturgical calendar of that church (21 February in the Gregorian calendar). He is remembered as a link between the ruling dynasty and the leadership of the autocephalous church, but he is not associated in the sources with a distinct list of patronages of places, professions, or causes.

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