Serbian Slava in the Appalachian Highlands

[00:00:01][music] [singing] >> Hello and welcome to Orthodoxy in Appalachia, where I am highlighting the lives of Orthodox Christians living in this region of the United States.

[00:00:20]Today I am bringing to you an interview I did with Michael Kessic.

[00:00:24]Um Michael and his wife Christine, we go to church together at St. Nicholas. I interviewed his wife last year. You can find her episode on this channel. It's titled from Roman Catholicism to the Orthodox Church with Christine Kessic.

[00:00:37]So you can hear her story as well.

[00:00:40]Um they're just very interesting people.

[00:00:43]Michael is a historian and so I enjoy talking about history with him as well.

[00:00:47]Um this unique prayer service that he's going to talk about, it's called a Serbian Slava. It is distinct to the Serbian Orthodox people.

[00:00:56]Um I have found it really fascinating to learn about in the last few years. And so he's going to tell more of his history today about how uh he grew up in the church and ended up back in West Virginia, as well as the history of this very beautiful and unique prayer service. Please enjoy.

[00:01:15]Michael, thank you for taking the time for this today.

[00:01:18]>> Sure.

[00:01:18]>> Really appreciate it. So tell us a little bit about yourself and how you ended up in West Virginia.

[00:01:24]>> Okay. Well, I was born and raised in Hancock County, West Virginia, up on the northern panhandle. We were it was a booming steel town at the time.

[00:01:32]Now the mill actually employed 15,000 people.

[00:01:36]Um but around 19 80, the world kind of started catching up to it. Um you know, more and more places were producing steel, there was foreign steel dumping, and the mill just started a steady decline.

[00:01:54]So I reluctantly gave up my dreams of being a steel worker like my dad and my uncles and grandfather and all that and went to WVU where I would meet my current my only wife and I had switched over to Soviet studies while I was there and originally went for a business but quickly found out that that just didn't excite me in any way and uh got into history really loved history but there's only so much you can do with a history degree so Soviet studies degree I thought had something more applicable so Chris was originally from the DC area she had graduated a year before me and I graduated just in time to see the Soviet Union go away so uh that kind of left me with a okay now what do I do well IT was booming in DC area and I started um taking courses through University of Maryland but the IT market was so super heated by that time I didn't even need to finish the second degree I I did about 25 hours and found employment and that led to a 35-year career at in DC uh culminating in 15 years with the Department of Labor doing web design and management we were planning to buy something in West Virginia anywhere in West Virginia would have been fine for me Chris is a was a geology major and she did summer field camp here in Greenbrier County and she fell in love with the area.

[00:03:52]So, we started looking here. Well, we actually we were looking at at some places a little bit more to the east, but there was already a huge spillover from DC area. So, there are these really nice home developments, but they all had HOAs. And the last thing we wanted to deal with was anybody telling us what we could do with our with our land, so Greenbrier County became One of the things we insisted on, we uh had owned the mineral rights and the water rights.

[00:04:27]We didn't want to, you know, have somebody else doing that. We didn't have a very good idea of what you could really get.

[00:04:35]Um so, we were looking at too small of a piece of property to really build on. Most of the property around here is bigger than that. So, after 2 years of looking, our real estate agent decided to throw our budget out the window and brought us to this piece of property, which is on 38 and 1/2 acres, and the log cabin, the original one, was built in 1850.

[00:05:08]And it was moved here around 1980.

[00:05:11]Um reassembled. Some new additions were added, so you know, it's got all the modern conveniences, modern kitchen, modern bathroom, and um it was a little bit of a shock moving from um a house with 3,600 square feet into a cabin of 1,200.

[00:05:32]But, we've never looked back. We sit on the porch sometimes and say, "Can't believe we pulled this off."

[00:05:41]This is just beyond our wildest dreams.

[00:05:45]>> It's beautiful out here. Very peaceful.

[00:05:48]>> The last um 3 years of my work career uh we were on full-time remote.

[00:05:57]That first due to COVID, but then they found out that the IT department our production went up by 25% when we were working from strictly from home. So, they said, "Okay, it's permanent."

[00:06:07]As soon as they said that, we were like, "We have no more reason to stay in the DC area." We sold our properties there, moved here. We used the money from our house sales to pay off the mortgage for this place. So, we own it free and clear. In April of 2024, I formally retired from the federal government, and we kind of shifted to a little bit more intense um activity on the homestead. We now raise chickens for eggs.

[00:06:39]Um we occasionally will raise additional meat birds.

[00:06:45]Um some of which we then sell to some of the local restaurants. We raise Cornish hens, and we do turkeys in the fall. So.

[00:06:56]We're talking about expanding, but we can't agree on what we're going to go with, so we'll be kicking that around for a while.

[00:07:06]>> So, Mike, what is a Slava? Um tell us a little something about the history of this fair service.

[00:07:12]>> Well, the the Slava is something that's unique to the Serbian Orthodox. We're the only uh Orthodox branch that uses this service. Oddly enough, it dates back to uh the pagan history of the Serbs, where they believed that every hearth, every home had a personal god that protected the family.

[00:07:36]And when the uh Christian missionaries were moving through the Balkans, they uh found that the Serbs didn't want to give that up.

[00:07:45]So, what they proposed was when they chrismated an entire family, they would choose the saint of that day to be this family's protector.

[00:08:00]And the Serbs were satisfied with that, but the Slava, uh, became a way of commemorating the family's personal saint.

[00:08:11]Uh, it's a huge tradition in Serbia. Um, if it's your Slava, you can't refuse any guest walking by.

[00:08:21]You will invite them in, at the very least give them a glass of wine, have a, you know, maybe a meal at the appropriate time.

[00:08:30]But then the, uh, the Slava prayer service is a unique set of prayers. You're going to recognize a lot of them in the way they're used. One of the things that is done in the name of the saint is to bless a special loaf of bread known as a kolach, which is only made for Slava, uh, which the priest blesses, uh, cuts the bottom not all the way through in the shape of a cross, blesses it with wine, and then the, uh, the priest, the assembled family, godchildren if any of those are present, will hold the bread up and slowly rotate it, um, while certain prayers, including Song of Isaiah, I think it's called, Rejoice, Isaiah, a virgin is with child.

[00:09:27]That's the, uh, third prayer that's done.

[00:09:31]At that point the, uh, Slava is completed, uh, with a few more litanies, of course.

[00:09:37]And then the bread is divided up and passed out to all of the guests.

[00:09:43]So, a meal usually follows, you know, priest will bless that. We'll just give everybody lunch.

[00:09:52]>> How wonderful. So, hospitality is a big part of >> Huge part. Yeah, the Serbs, especially the peasantry, have a reputation for their hospitality. Um, they take it very seriously. When I was growing up, my dad wasn't a big one for keeping the Slava service, but occasionally we would travel to his hometown, which was Weirton, is 30 mi due west of Pittsburgh. His hometown, Youngwood, was about 30 mi east. So, I would go up there and his family, um, would be holding the Slava. And they made it It was a big deal.

[00:10:31]>> Of course. How many How many people would be there at the service?

[00:10:34]>> Well, my dad had, um, he was one of eight. So, it would be you know, my dad and his brothers and sisters, their spouses, their children.

[00:10:44]Um, it would be about 40 >> Wow.

[00:10:47]>> plus people.

[00:10:48]>> Definitely a household. [clears throat] >> Oh, yeah. Yeah, [laughter] definitely.

[00:10:51]>> So, who is your family's patron saint?

[00:10:55]And tell us a little bit, are you cradle Orthodox, Mike? And how was this growing up?

[00:11:02]>> as an infant, uh, chrismated in the, uh, Serbian Orthodox Church here in America.

[00:11:09]So, it's a very ethnic church, which meant that a lot of the service was done in Old Slavonic. My parents were born here in America, but Serbian was their first language. It was spoken at home.

[00:11:26]And they were determined that their kids, and this was very common in the Serbian immigrant community, would learn English as their first and only language because they wanted us to be Americans, Americans don't speak Serbian.

[00:11:45]You know? And it also gave them a special language that they could use around the kids, the kids couldn't understand. They never had to spell words that we might not know.

[00:11:53]>> [laughter] >> They could just carry on a full-blown conversation and we would get so angry hearing them going on because we knew what they were talking about.

[00:12:03]>> Yeah.

[00:12:04]>> But that kind of created a bit of a barrier because you're not really learning the full depth of Orthodoxy as a kid. That was also one of the things that the only converts that I ever knew growing up were people who had married a Serb. So, there were a lot of Catholic wives in the parish and they seemed to be the people most willing to step up to try to do Sunday school.

[00:12:35]But no one had kind of gone through some of the hard differences between Catholicism and Orthodoxy.

[00:12:43]So, they'd be teaching us about original sin and the Immaculate Conception of Mary. Finding out that that wasn't part of our faith was kind of a shocker when I was an adult. One of the things that it's happens a lot with the ethnic parishes is the children don't remain Orthodox.

[00:13:06]>> Mhm.

[00:13:06]>> And a lot of fall away in their teen years, which is you know kind of a rebellious time in general.

[00:13:14]But I remember my one sister talking about growing up in the Serbian church and she said, you know you have to stand up for a while, you have to sit down, you have to stand up for a lot of it, and there'd be something going on up there that I couldn't understand.

[00:13:34]And it was long and tiresome.

[00:13:38]And I couldn't wait for it to be over and she said, "Yeah, that kind of encapsulated it."

[00:13:42]So, um when Chris and I decided to get married, neither one of us were church attending on a regular basis. We were dealing with trying to do a planning a wedding in the DC area, which is notoriously expensive.

[00:13:58]Now, granted, this was in the late '80s, and at that time, we were told you can't get away with a wedding in this area for under $10,000.

[00:14:12]And we're like, we're just starting our new careers. We don't have that kind of money.

[00:14:19]Um Chris's dad had a long career as a meteorologist through the federal government, but he was a notorious uh tightwad.

[00:14:30]And he was very proud of that.

[00:14:32]Uh so, he was grumbling.

[00:14:35]And then was like, "Okay, where are we going to get married?"

[00:14:40]And Chris had been raised Roman Catholic, but she'd completely fallen away. She had no uh adult connection with the church at all.

[00:14:49]So, she asked me, "Well, when you were a kid, did you ever think of where you would get married?" I said, "Yeah, I never thought of anywhere but my home parish."

[00:14:56]And she said, "Would they marry us there?" I said, "Oh, heck, yeah, you know."

[00:15:01]It'd be a big deal for the Serbian community back home.

[00:15:05]She she said, "Let's go with that." And then we later find out that the Roman Catholics fully recognize the uh Orthodox sacrament of marriage, but the Orthodox don't really recognize the Catholic. So, that to Chris was just, you know, another reason we should go with that because it'd be keeping both sides of the family happy. We got married [clears throat] and uh the the Serbs the Serbian Orthodox, the way they do it, you have three meetings with your priest that you have to go and do and it's about 2-hour meeting each time.

[00:15:46]And if you skip one, they're not going to marry you.

[00:15:50]>> Wow.

[00:15:51]>> Um >> Serious?

[00:15:53]>> Because Chris was not a member of the Orthodox faith, our priest had to write a letter to the bishop of that diocese and get permission to marry her to one of his to an Orthodox Christian.

[00:16:07]And you know, Chris thought, "Oh, that's kind of neat, you know."

[00:16:13]We got married, had a wonderful uh wonderful wedding typical of the Serbs in that area.

[00:16:21]We had about 300 guests.

[00:16:25]It's a It's the entire parish comes >> Mhm.

[00:16:28]>> when one of their people are getting married, so >> Tight community. Yeah.

[00:16:32]>> Very very much so. I mean, growing up as a kid, I never saw a wedding under 300.

[00:16:39]I saw some up into the 6 5 600 range.

[00:16:42]>> Wow.

[00:16:42]>> And that's just not uncommon for that uh the Eastern European families in the Rust Belt as it's now called. After the wedding, however, we'd been living our lives kind of outside of the church, so we weren't really getting right back into it. That changed when we were expecting the birth of our first daughter, Alexandra. We were kind of asking ourselves, you know, how are we going to give this kid a moral grounding?

[00:17:15]Cuz you know, even though we weren't dedicated church goers, um we both had our moral grounding in the Christian faith. That's where all the lessons came from. Those were the values we still held.

[00:17:29]So, we find a parish in the DC area, St. Luke's in McLean, which had begun as a Serbian Orthodox parish, but there was a a rift in the Serbian Orthodox faith around 1960, because the patriarch had decided to cut the American dioceses up into three separate dioceses.

[00:17:53]And a lot of people thought the reason might have been cuz Bishop Dionisije was an outspoken critic of communism.

[00:18:02]And we knew the Belgrade patriarch, you know, if he does the same, he's not going to be a living patriarch for very long.

[00:18:13]So, the split the Serbian church in America.

[00:18:17]And that split remained almost 30 years. But during that time, the the priest there, Father Milorad Milosevic, thought that the schismatic church was getting problematic in some of its teachings.

[00:18:36]Now, Father Milorad had started his seminary work in Serbia under now Saint Justin Popovic as his instructor, Father Nikolai Velimirovic also was one of his instructors.

[00:18:54]So, Father gets a chance to defect. He escapes into Greece, where he spends 6 months in a refugee camp, because the Greeks were very suspicious of people crossing over from Yugoslavia. Was this an infiltration? Greek of Greece had of course had a civil war where the communists tried to take over but they were they failed in that.

[00:19:19]Eventually father gets permission to emigrate to the United States.

[00:19:24]Picks up his um education with St. Vladimir's.

[00:19:31]With the other which was then under Russian church but they eventually were granted autonomy became the Orthodox Church of America.

[00:19:42]And at that time Father Milorad decided he should move the parish to them.

[00:19:48]So now we have this Serbian rooted parish doing all English liturgies.

[00:19:56]Exactly what we were looking for. Now I'm getting all of the lessons >> [clears throat] >> and the readings in English language I understand and Father Milorad had started what he called Orthodoxy 101 and it was for people in the parish to make sure that they were well grounded in the various elements of the Orthodox faith and the teachings.

[00:20:23]But now I'm getting these lessons as an adult.

[00:20:26]And they're starting to ring very very true to me.

[00:20:31]And Chris was going along to these so it's starting to have an effect on her as well.

[00:20:40]So by the time Alex is born I'm in full communion with the OCA church in in McLean.

[00:20:50]I think we began doing the Slavas probably before Alexandra's second birthday.

[00:20:57]You know and it was Father Milorad was very encouraging.

[00:21:00]>> He would come to your house.

[00:21:02]>> Yes.

[00:21:03]Yeah, he would come in the you know that's a big part of the uh the priest who married us, Father Rade Merick, encouraged us to do a Slava in the home. And he was very stern about and would invite the priest.

[00:21:20]>> Well, okay, so I was under the impression you have to have a priest to do it, but you don't have to. You >> You could You could celebrate it as a little bit more on the secular side. You know, maybe you have the kolach there, but it's not going to be getting blessed.

[00:21:34]>> Right.

[00:21:35]>> and um I've never uh actually attended one like that. We had Father Miller on for many years uh coming to our house.

[00:21:45]>> Who is your patron saint?

[00:21:47]>> My Our patron saint is Saint George, the Trophy Bearer, uh the Wonder Worker.

[00:21:52]He's He's various titles he's known by.

[00:21:55]Uh he was a Roman soldier.

[00:21:58]Um probably an officer, perhaps a centurion or even higher up.

[00:22:03]But during the reign of Emperor Diocletian, Diocletian began persecuting the Christians, and George had come from a Christian family.

[00:22:15]So, when the emperor insisted that his centurions all offer sacrifice to the idols, he refused.

[00:22:27]So, Diocletian began persecuting him like he was doing with thousands of Christians across the torturing them.

[00:22:35]But, uh because of his status, uh George's tortures were part of a public spectacle.

[00:22:44]And the way he endured these torments, um and refused to give up his faith, began inspiring people who were witnessing it, including one of the emperor's wives, who declared herself to be a Christian, he had her executed immediately and redoubled his efforts on George, who the according to the the legends, he would awake every morning healed.

[00:23:19]So, the torments went for many, many days and the effect of witnessing him do it started inspiring more and more Romans, including other centurions, to declare themselves to be Christians.

[00:23:34]So, finally Diocletian had enough, had George taken outside of the city and beheaded.

[00:23:40]And that was uh his martyrdom.

[00:23:45]And then later during the uh Roman Christian crusades into the Middle East, somewhere, we think probably in Syria or Lebanon, that's where the village that tells of St. George coming to them and saving them from the dragon came from. And of course, the English crusaders take that back to England, so the flag of St. George is now a part of their national identity.

[00:24:19]And uh it it became kind of odd cuz a lot of the Serbian icons of St. George, you don't see the dragon. It's not part of it, but in most of them, he will always be mounted on a horse and be slaying the dragon.

[00:24:37]>> Why is it important to continue holding this service?

[00:24:41]>> It is the celebration of when my family became Christian.

[00:24:46]So, we're commemorating that starting point.

[00:24:51]And um it's rejuvenation, the renewal. Um um you know, it's a reminder this is where we started.

[00:25:01]So, we keep coming back to that moment and it's like uh something unique, but you know, we we celebrate all the various feasts and fasts in the Orthodox faith. And it's a constant reminder that the church has been here, you know, for two millennia and it it's it's not changing.

[00:25:26]We're sticking to those traditions and those teachings because we believe them to be the truth. It's also uh great kind of share uh the Orthodox faith with uh non-Orthodox friends and I even family members. We've always used it as pulling members of our current parish uh together in our home and having that social faith-based connection outside of the church is big part of it because uh we know we teach that your home church is your focus.

[00:26:10]We have our icon walls in our homes, you know, and so having the parish come to us for this celebration is just a big connection. Uh and it's very essential to the faith.

[00:26:25]>> I love that. And that makes me wonder, have you had an opportunity to have maybe some of the local neighbors here that are not Orthodox come to a Slava?

[00:26:35]And if so, what has been their impressions?

[00:26:40]>> They they love hearing the prayers. Um of course, most of the people who come are people who are Christians, you know, occasionally we'll, you know, get somebody who will want to come and see what it's all about. But, once again, keeping with now the Serbian um hospitality tradition, you know, we'll do the Slava in the morning, we'll have lunch, um socialize for a couple hours, and then people have, you know, things that they need to do. So, um at that time, we just go to a general open house, where now we kind of reach out to members of the community who aren't really interested in this any of the religious aspect. So, we have them come and enjoy a Serbian kind of holiday celebration with, you know, I do a lot of the ethnic foods and uh we always serve šljivovica, which is a plum brandy that the Serbs favor. It's It's wonderful, you know. We have, you know, especially now we have this space, you know, people bring their kids. Of course, they're West Virginia kids, they're all through the woods, and the moms have come up to do not climb on the outcroppings because some of them are high enough if you fall, you can you can get hurt. So, you tell them that's not permitted. But, they love feeding the chickens, you know, so the chickens eat very well during our Slavas.

[00:28:08]>> So, it's really about connection.

[00:28:11]And what time of year is the Slava held?

[00:28:13]Is it the same time [clears throat] every year?

[00:28:14]>> Yeah, um because St. George is a very specific day. It's May 6th by the old calendar, which is how we grew up celebrating it in uh in the Serbs, and it's April 23rd by the new calendar. So, of course, St. Nicholas now we're on a new calendar, we usually go for that. They always tried to do a the celebration to St. George as the first Saturday after um Pascha.

[00:28:46]So, that's worked out a couple of times.

[00:28:48]We've had to do sometimes and Oscar's very late, we've had to do fastings a fasting Slav >> Mhm.

[00:28:54]>> And uh at that time we were attending um St. Mark in Bethesda, which was uh just an OCA church.

[00:29:03]And uh the priest there, uh Father Gregory Savchuk, used to love coming to our Slavs. He would brag on me, you know, tell people, "He's a Serb. You got to go to his Slav."

[00:29:17]But he enjoyed doing the service as well. That's one of the things I found that a non-Serbian Orthodox priests are very willing to do the service, even though it's not part of their uh tradition. Yeah, once we that established our roots here in West Virginia, we began looking for uh an Orthodox church. And there were a couple around.

[00:29:41]We ended up going with uh St. Nicholas uh in the Kean Orthodox Church in Beckley, which is a good hour and 15 minutes away from us.

[00:29:52]But that didn't uh that wasn't even a point to be considered as in DC the traffic guarantees you're going to be doing an hour commute minimum to get to a church, no matter what.

[00:30:10]And there you're sitting in traffic, so it's a lot worse. Of course, the first time we sit through liturgy and then get welcomed by Father Samuel, we knew um we were connected and it was funny cuz uh later Father Samuel talking to Chris said he looked out and saw us for the first time and it came to him, "They've found their home."

[00:30:39]>> [laughter] >> Wow.

[00:30:40]>> Boy, that was uh spot on.

[00:30:43]Um So, we've been attending there ever since. So, that would have been early in 2022.

[00:30:52]So, we've been going um there and uh Chris is getting more and more involved in the church, which has always been her calling. When we were attending St. Luke's in uh McLean, there was one Sunday, I'm not sure what happened, but the only members of the choir showed up were the choir director and our one of our deep deep bass singers.

[00:31:20]So, they're trying to carry it off on their own, and Chris says, "Okay, I think I could do this."

[00:31:31]So, I Okay, so she starts singing along.

[00:31:34]The choir director's head snaps around, you know, hears what she's singing, hears her pitch, gives him the big go for it.

[00:31:44]And Chris went and walked over and sang with the choir for the next year and a half.

[00:31:51]Then, one Sunday, the choir director doesn't show up. He's having a medical emergency. Nobody saw it coming, nobody knew.

[00:32:01]And the choir is in an absolute panic.

[00:32:03]But Chris was in the uh orchestra in junior high and high school, so she can read music, she knows what a conductor does and how to do it.

[00:32:15]She walks up, opens the choir director's books, looks at it for a few minutes, turns to the choir and says, "We got this."

[00:32:25]And she became the choir director.

[00:32:27]>> Wow.

[00:32:29]>> That [laughter] which Father Milorad noticed that he had to mention uh in his uh end announcements, "We seem to have acquired a new choir director, not that I own anyone told me.

[00:32:45]>> Wow, glory to God. She was right there at the right place at the right time.

[00:32:50]>> So, by the time we we moved to St. Mark's, Chris was ready for a little bit of a break, you know, cuz St. Mark's was a much bigger parish.

[00:32:59]And they they had four choir directors. They actually rotated 40 people plus in the choir.

[00:33:07]I mean, attendance is usually in the hundreds there.

[00:33:11]So, yeah, she kind of took a a little bit of a step back, but now she's, you know, doing more and more at St. Nicholas and she's the head of the women's group, Holy Myrrhbearers, um there.

[00:33:28]And that's just become more and more a part of our our lives. It was at St. Luke that Chris finally decided to convert to the Orthodox faith formally.

[00:33:41]And it was all triggered by uh I believe Alexander one time asking her, "Why don't you take communion with us, Mom?"

[00:33:49]And Chris had always said she was looking for a sign.

[00:33:53]Uh I think she mentioned this in her interview.

[00:33:56]A couple of weeks after that, we had gone home to Weirton where there's a huge Serbian church picnic every year, and she's talking with Father Rade, and uh she gets to the point where she was always looking for a sign.

[00:34:13]And when she men she gets to that point about Alex, Father asked her, "What more of a sign are you looking for?"

[00:34:23]So, that made the decision for her.

[00:34:27]Now, yeah, I couldn't couldn't imagine not being a part of the Orthodox faith and trying to bring it to my home. And the Slava gives me the perfect reason, the perfect excuse.

[00:34:41]And I get to cook all the Serbian food I grew up eating.