Justin Popovich was a Serbian archimandrite, theologian, and professor of dogmatics, widely regarded as one of the most influential Orthodox theologians of the twentieth century. He was born in Vranje in southern Serbia on 25 March 1894 (Old Style), into a family that, by tradition, had produced priests for seven generations, and was baptized Blagoje, a name connected to the feast of the Annunciation. He studied at the Theological School of St Sava in Belgrade, where St Nikolai Velimirović was among his teachers and remained a formative influence on his life.
He entered the monastic order on 1 January 1916 at the Orthodox cathedral of Shkodër, taking the name Justin after St Justin the Philosopher. His studies took him to the seminary at Petrograd in Russia and to Oxford, and in 1926 he received the title of Doctor of Theology at the University of Athens with a dissertation on the problem of the person and of knowledge according to St Macarius of Egypt. He taught at the Theological Academy in Prizren and, from 1934, held the chair of dogmatics at the Faculty of Orthodox Theology of the University of Belgrade.
With the establishment of the communist state after the Second World War, Justin was removed from his professorship in 1945 and subsequently confined to the Ćelije Monastery near Valjevo, where he lived under effective house arrest and continuous surveillance until his repose. There he wrote prolifically, producing a body of dogmatic, philosophical, and hagiographical work that shaped a generation of Serbian theologians. He fell asleep in the Lord on 25 March 1979, the feast of the Annunciation, which was also the day of his birth.
He was glorified as a saint by the Holy Synod of the Serbian Orthodox Church in 2010 and is commemorated on 1 June (Old Calendar). His writings, ranging from a study of Dostoevsky to a multi-volume Dogmatics and an extensive collection of saints' lives, remain widely read across the Orthodox world.
