Fifty days after Pascha, when the paschal greeting has finally been laid to rest for another year, the Serbian Church keeps one of its great feasts under a handful of names. Some call it Sveta Trojica, the Holy Trinity. Some say Duhovi, the day of the Spirit. The service books call it Pedesetnica, the Fiftieth Day. In many villages it is simply Trojičindan. The names are not interchangeable so much as they are four windows onto the same event, and a Serbian household that keeps the feast is usually keeping all four at once.
Biblical Roots
The fiftieth day was a holy number long before the Spirit descended. The feast inherits its name and its date from the Jewish Pentecost, Shavuot, kept fifty days after Passover in memory of the giving of the Law to Moses on Sinai. It was for that older feast that pilgrims from every nation had filled Jerusalem on the morning the apostles were gathered together. The Church has always seen the two days as one fulfilling the other: at Sinai the Law was written on tablets of stone, and on this fiftieth day a new law was written by the Spirit on the hearts of men. The setting was not incidental. The crowd was already there because the day was already holy.
The event itself is recorded in the second chapter of the Acts of the Apostles. The disciples were gathered together in one place when a sound came like a rushing wind, and tongues as of fire rested on each of them, and they began to speak in other languages as the Spirit gave them utterance. Pilgrims from every nation under heaven heard, each in his own tongue, the wonderful works of God. The Church has always read that morning as its own beginning. Before that day there was a company of frightened followers. After it there was a Church that preached, baptized, and did not stop.
This is why the feast is so often called the birthday of the Church. Sveta Trojica names the fullness of it, because on this day the whole life of God is revealed in His work: the Father who sends, the Son who has ascended, the Spirit who descends. Duhovi names the descent. Pedesetnica counts the days. Trojičindan gives the village its feast. Each is true, and together they hold the whole.
How the Feast Took Shape
The feast took its present shape slowly. For the first three centuries the whole stretch from Pascha to Pentecost was kept as a single unbroken season of paschal joy, and the descent of the Spirit was often marked together with the Ascension. Only from the fourth century did Pentecost settle into its own solemnity with its own evening service. The heart of that service, the three kneeling prayers, is traditionally ascribed to Saint Basil the Great, the fourth-century bishop of Caesarea, whose words the Serbian Church still reads on the feast more than sixteen centuries later. What a worshipper hears that evening is not a recent composition but one of the oldest continuously prayed texts in the Church.
The Kneeling Vespers
For that evening service is the most striking part of the day, and it comes not in the morning but at its close. On the feast itself the Church serves the Kneeling Vespers, Večernje sa molitvama klečanja, and during it the priest reads Saint Basil's three long prayers while the faithful kneel. It is the first time anyone has knelt in church since Pascha. For the entire paschal season the Church stands, because one does not kneel in the presence of the risen Lord. Now, with the Spirit given and the season of standing complete, the knees bend again. Anyone who has spent fifty days upright in that joy feels the change in the body before the mind explains it. The people go down to the ground, and they ask, in the words of the prayers, for the Spirit's grace and enlightenment.
Greenery, Custom, and Slava
The churches themselves are dressed for it. Fresh greenery is brought in, branches set about the walls, grass strewn across the floor, so that the building smells of cut green on the feast morning. The custom is older than the feast that absorbed it. Across the Serbian lands the days around Pentecost were once Rusalna nedelja, a green season of early summer with its own processions, its own water lore, and the girls' processions known as Kraljice that survived into modern times in the southeast. The Church did not so much abolish these older rites as baptize them, reading the green plainly: green is new life, and the Spirit is the giver of life. What the fields are doing in early summer, the Church says the Spirit does in the soul. Many families carry the same greenery into the home, and the feast is kept for three days, as befits a celebration ranked third only after Pascha and Christmas.
Here the feast touches something particular to the Serbs. For a great many families and a great many places, Sveta Trojica is not only a feast on the calendar but a slava, the patron celebration that a household or a whole town keeps as its own. The slava is among the most deeply held of Serbian customs, traced in the records at least as far back as the eleventh century and recognized in 2014 on the UNESCO list of intangible cultural heritage. Where Pentecost is the slava, the feast of the Church's birth becomes also the feast of the family's identity. The town of Valjevo keeps a traditional Pentecost festivity known well beyond its own county. In countless homes the day means the candle lit, the koljivo and the bread blessed, the door opened to whoever comes. The theology and the table are not two things on that day. They are one thing, which is rather the point of a slava.
It is worth saying, for those who keep the customs without always being told the reasons, that none of this is decoration. The greenery is the Spirit's new life. The kneeling is the Church returning to the ground to ask for what it was promised. The open door of the slava is the company in the upper room enlarged to the size of a nation. A feast that began with strangers from every land each hearing in his own tongue was never going to stay in one room, and the Serbian keeping of it, scattered now across continents, is simply that morning still going on.
The disciples were together in one place when the Spirit came. The Church has been gathering ever since, in Jerusalem and in Valjevo and wherever two or three keep the feast in their own tongue. The greenery will be cleared and the candles will burn down. The Church it celebrates was born to last.
The Icon of Pentecost (Descent of the Holy Spirit). Iconographer: Dmitry Shkolnik, St. Paul the Apostle Orthodox Church, Dayton, Ohio. Photograph: Fr. Ted Bobosh.