Simeon of Dajbabe

Simeon Popović, venerated in the Serbian Orthodox Church as Saint Simeon of Dajbabe (Sveti Simeon Dajbabski), was an Orthodox monk and archimandrite whose life spanned the last decades of independent Montenegro and the era of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. He was born in 1854 in the village of Ubli, in the Crmnica region of the Principality of Montenegro. Crmnica, toward Lake Skadar in the south of the country, was a district of long-standing Orthodox parish and tribal life. Surviving historical notices of his childhood are sparse. Later church accounts place him in this rural Montenegrin milieu and do not preserve a fully documented record of his schooling or family circumstances beyond his origin and the surname Popović.

He entered monastic life in the Serbian Orthodox Church and received the name Simeon. In 1897 he founded a monastery in a cave on Dajbabe hill, a few kilometres from Podgorica. The house, dedicated to the Dormition of the Theotokos, is commonly called Dajbabe Monastery. Its church and cells were arranged within and beside the natural cave, which gave the foundation a distinctive character among the monasteries of Montenegro. Simeon became the first abbot and was raised to the rank of archimandrite. He remained at Dajbabe for the rest of his life, maintaining a small brotherhood rather than a large community. He never held episcopal office.

In the years that followed he was regarded by many of the faithful as a spiritual elder. Pilgrims from the Podgorica district and from farther parts of Montenegro and the Serbian Orthodox world came to the cave for prayer, confession, and counsel. Orthodox tradition remembers him as an ascetic of modest personal life, occupied with the daily office and with the reception of visitors. Independent archival detail about particular miracles or prophecies is limited; the portrait that has been transmitted is that of a locally renowned starets whose authority rested on long residence, priestly ministry, and reputation for holiness rather than on diocesan rank.

Simeon died at Dajbabe on 1 April 1941, while the region still formed part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and only days before the Axis invasion of that state. He was buried at the monastery. Subsequent Orthodox tradition at Dajbabe reports that his relics were found incorrupt, and they have been kept there for veneration. The Serbian Orthodox Church later glorified him as a saint, with the title of the Venerable Simeon of Dajbabe, and appointed 1 April as his feast day. He is commemorated especially within the Metropolitanate of Montenegro and the Littoral. Dajbabe Monastery remains the principal shrine connected with his memory. A number of particulars of his inner life, the exact date of his tonsure, and the full sequence of his early career are not firmly established in critical historiography and depend on liturgical tradition and later hagiography.