Постављање парохијалних свештеника: обавезе села
Appointment of Parish Priests: Village Obligations

Summary/Abstract: Subsistance of parish clergy has been one of parishioners' obligations since the most remote times. Preserved material does not offer us the possibility to confirm with certainty when exactly was the practice of issuance of the written certificates by the villages, the so-called garanties (kaucije), established, stating that they would fulfill the aforementioned obligations. The first garanties preserved in their entirety were issued by the inhabitants of the village of Dobanovci in the Eparchy of Srem (in the year of 1731), followed by those of Veliko Selo in the Eparchy of Belgrade (in 1733). These two guaranties, as well as those dating from a later period, manifested the same structure that included the introductory paragraph in which the formal request to the mitropolitan was submitted, with whom the agreement concerning the appointment of certain priest had already been made in the meantime, while the parish obligations were enlisted in the principal segment of the guaranty. The inhabitants of Veliko Selo bound themselves to pay the bir (fix annual priest income which was collected by bed) to the new parish priest, Nikola, on a regular basis, but also to offer him the recompense for performing priestly duties, as well as field, garden and meadow together with their help with house construction works. By means of this document, the parishioners also offered guarantees to the priest that he would be exempted from all the fiscal and working obligations towards the state, which the rest of the population was bound to fulfill. Issuance of the garanty on behalf of the inhabitants of Veliko Selo was, in all probability, one of the indispensable measures, due to the fact that the former priest Stefan moved to Hasan-Pasha’s Palanka (Palanka of Smederevo), with the permission of Mitropolitan Mojsije; this event occurred at the time when, judging on his own words, the parishioners ceased to pay the bir to him and the monks from the Slanci started putting pressure on him. The guaranty of Veliko Selo is being kept in the Archives of the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences of Karlovci under call number 1733/6 in the “B” holdings. Under the same call number the written certificate is kept, in which the duke and peasants of the village of Slanci guaranteed that they accepted secular priest Nikola to perform a religious service together with the monks of Slanci in the parish composed by the villages of Slanci, Ošljani and Veliko Selo and to divide with them the income from the aforementioned villages.

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