Vićentije Rakić

Vićentije Rakić (29 April 1750, Zemun – 29 March 1818, Fenek monastery) was a Serbian writer and poet, and a disciple of Dositej Obradović. He founded the School of Theology (now part of the University of Belgrade) when in 1810 he headed a newly established theological college and in 1812 the first students graduated from it.

Born in 1750 into a religious Serbian family, Rakić was baptized Vasilije on the 29th of April that year at Zemun, according to the customs of the Serbian Orthodox Church. After provincial schooling, he married and opened up a business selling merchandise.

Then tragedy struck, his wife died in 1785. That same year he sold his house, business, and went to the Fenek monastery, where Abbot Sofronije Stefanović gave him his monkish name of Vićentije after being tonsured on 9 April 1786. That year he was ordained deacon at Karlovci by Ćirilo Živković, and priest by Vladika Stevan Stratimirović, and appointed to a parish at Šabac, where he delivered sermons for which, along with "Život Aleksije čoveka Božiega", written in verse, he became recognized as a promising orator and author. He had no leanings towards a scholarship at first, however, his curiosity was always wide-ranging and various rather than particular and constant. At any rate, his studies supplied him with that fund of general knowledge he was later to say was indispensable for a writer and poet and with fondness and respect for those authors he would later emulate, namely Dositej Obradović.

On 9 January 1796, he became the abbot of Fenek monastery, but three years later he left for Trieste. From 1799 to 1810 he lived and worked in Trieste as the parish priest of the Serbian Orthodox Church looking after the spiritual needs of the Serbian and Greek congregation of St. Spiridon. At about the same time as the first Greek Karamanlidic translation of "Abraham's Sacrifice" was issued, the text was translated into Serbian by Vićentije Rakić and published in 1799 by him. Rakić was fluent in Greek, having attended a Greek school in his native town of Zemun and his position in Trieste probably helped him come in touch with some of the Venetian editions of the "Greek Sacrifice", albeit "Abraham's Sacrifice". The Serbian translation was reprinted at least twelve times until 1907 and apparently was widely read.

Sometime shortly after his sixtieth year, Rakić himself fell under the influence of Dositej Obradović, and thereafter his life in Trieste was never the same. He translated Italian authors, particularly Luigi Groto. He then went to join Dositej Obradović in Karađorđe's Serbia after the city of Belgrade was liberated from Turkish occupation.

Rakić's first editor and biographer, Dositej Obradović, made ample use of his letters to unfold Rakić's life in a monograph. Obradović, now Minister of Education, summoned Rakić from Trieste to help him establish both a university (Grandes écoles in 1808) and a theological college (in 1810). A letter by Obradović to the Very Reverend Vićentije Rakić, dated in late 1809, motivated Rakić, a professor of Pedagogy at the Faculty of Philosophy of the Grandes écoles in Belgrade, to fulfill his life's ambition by organizing a newly founded theological college in Belgrade and preparing students for the priesthood. In 1812 the first group of priests educated in the liberated country of Serbia graduated. It was with great effort that the insurgents restored and reconstructed their destroyed institutions of long ago.

After the re-conquest of Serbia by the Turks in 1813, Rakić left Belgrade and went back to Fenek monastery, in Srem, where he died on 29 March 1818.

His theological and moral writings were aimed at saving God from the atheists and even desists, and the man from the skeptical philosophers.