Valerijan Pribićević

Valerijan Pribićević (Serbian Cyrillic: Валеријан Прибићевић; 25 April 1870 – 10 July 1941) was a prominent vicar bishop of the Serbian Orthodox Church at Sremski Karlovci during the latter part of the 19th- and the beginning of the 20th-century. He died in Split after the Nazi-occupation of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia on 6 April 1941.

Life

Bishop Valerijan's secular name was Vasilije Pribićević, born on 25 April 1870 in the village of Dubica, near Kostanjica, to a well-known Serbian family in what was then Austria-Hungary. Valerijan had three younger brothers: Svetozar Pribićević, Milan Pribićević, and Adam Pribićević.

Vasilije Pribićević graduated from high school with honors in Rakovec near Karlovac, and the Kiev Theological Academy in Kiev, then part of Imperial Russia. After two years of teaching at the Monastic School in the Novo Hopovo Monastery, he became a monk on 8 May 1894 in the Krušedol Monastery and was given the name Valerijan.

From 1897 to 1899, Valerijan Pribićević was a teacher at the Serbian Gymnasium in Constantinople. He was dismissed from service because he refused to sign a congratulatory telegram on the occasion of King Milan's return to the Kingdom of Serbia. Later, he took post-graduate Greek and Byzantine studies at Vienna and Leipzig, and upon his return, he was appointed professor at the old Karlovci Theological Seminary.

Pribićević was one of the Serbs arrested and tried in Zagreb in what became known as the Agram Trial; thirty-one Serbs of the fifty-two arrested were sentenced to jail terms, among them Valerijan and Adam Pribićević, who each received 12 years in prison.