St Nikolai Velimirovich

A shepherd's son from the Serbian village of Lelić, Nikolai earned doctorates in Europe, but his eloquence — which made him famous in Britain and America during the First World War — was matched by a monk's heart. As bishop of Ochrid and later Zica he renewed monasteries, fostered the popular devotional movement of the Bogomoljci, and wrote constantly: the Prologue of Ohrid, his daily lives of saints with hymns and reflections, is read around the world, and his Prayers by the Lake is among the great works of modern Christian poetry. Under the Nazi occupation he was arrested and eventually taken with Patriarch Gavrilo to the Dachau concentration camp in 1944. After the war, unable to return to communist Yugoslavia, he served and taught in America, dying at St Tikhon's monastery in Pennsylvania in 1956. Some of his polemical writings remain debated; his sanctity and his gift to Orthodox letters are not. He was glorified in 2003.