Mateja Matejić


Mateja Matejić was a Serbian American writer, translator, anthologist, Serbian Orthodox priest, and Professor Emeritus of Slavic languages and Literatures at Ohio State University.

Biography

Matejić was born in Smederevo in what was then the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes and educated there. As a seminarian at Bitola during the Axis occupation of Yugoslavia, he left the country and completed his seminary education in a displaced persons camp in Eboli, Italy. In 1949, at another camp in West Germany, he married Ljubica Nebrigić of Srem.
He was ordained as a Serbian Orthodox priest in a camp in 1951. He and his young family emigrated to the United States in 1956. As a priest, he founded two parishes and encouraged and physically contributed to the building of two places of worship, the Church of St. George in Monroe, Michigan, and the Church of St. Stevan of Dečani in Columbus, Ohio.
He graduated from the University of Michigan where he received his Ph.D.
Mateja Matejić was a founder of the Hilandar Research Library scientific project at the Ohio State University in Columbus, where he taught Slavic languages since 1968. He was the first director of the Resource Center for Medieval Slavic Studies and founder and director of the publishing house Kosovo, as well as the editor of the Paths of Orthodoxy magazine. A translator and anthologist of Medieval and foreign poetry, he had also authored several books of poems and Eastern Orthodox history, two of which are acclaimed: An Anthology of Medieval Serbian Literature and The Holy Mount and Hilandar monastery. In September 2000 he received two awards from the Serbian Orthodox Church, the St. Sava Medal, presented to him in Ohio, and the next day a gramata from Patriarch Pavle in Belgrade.

Works