Early Life and Formation
He was born Ivan Uskoković in 1889 in the village of Kornet in the Lješani district near Podgorica, Montenegro, to Petar Uskoković, a respected local captain, and his wife Jela, of the Božović family. Most accounts give his birth date as December 22, 1889, though the diocesan life records November 2. He attended school in Rijeka Crnojevića and Cetinje and continued at the gymnasium in Belgrade.
Drawn to the monastic life, he left school in his fifth year and entered Studenica Monastery, where in 1906, with the blessing of Bishop Sava (Barać) of Žiča, he was tonsured with the name Mardarije and ordained a hierodeacon while still in his teens.
Formation in Russia
Sent to Russia to complete his education, he studied at the theological school in Zhytomyr from 1907, graduated from the seminary in Kishinev, and completed the Theological Academy in Saint Petersburg in 1916, also pursuing studies in church law. He was attached as a hieromonk to the Alexander Nevsky Lavra in the capital.
During the First World War he traveled across the Russian Empire delivering lectures to Slav prisoners of war — journeys the accounts of his life trace through Siberia, Turkestan, and Bukhara. These years gave him both a thorough Russian theological formation and a taste for the itinerant missionary labor that would mark his American ministry.
Mission to America and Saint Sava Monastery
In 1917 the Russian Orthodox Church, which then administered Orthodox life in the New World, sent him to the United States to organize the Serbian Orthodox Church there, and he served as head of the Serbian mission. At the church council in Cleveland in 1919 he was elected bishop, but he declined to accept consecration without the approval of the Serbian Church and returned to Serbia, where he was made head of Rakovica Monastery and rector of its monastic school, the first of its kind in Serbia.
Early in 1923 he returned to America, and on December 1, 1923, he was appointed administrator of the Serbian American-Canadian Diocese. That same year he purchased about ten acres of land in Libertyville, Illinois, near Chicago, where Saint Sava Monastery was established. The synaxarion relates that he labored on the monastery at great personal sacrifice, giving his own funds and working with his own hands, and the monastery became the heart of Serbian Orthodoxy in America — the place of diocesan assemblies, a school, and eventually his own grave.
First Serbian Bishop of America and Canada
On December 7, 1925, he was elected the first bishop of the newly established Serbian Diocese of America and Canada, and on Palm Sunday, April 25, 1926, he was consecrated to the episcopate in Belgrade by Patriarch Dimitrije of Serbia with other hierarchs. He arrived back in his diocese, landing in New York, in July 1926.
To consolidate the young diocese he convened its first National Church Assembly at Saint Sava Monastery in Libertyville on September 1, 1927. Through the nine years of his episcopate he traveled constantly across the United States and Canada, organizing parishes, building churches, and knitting the scattered Serbian communities into an ordered diocesan life.
Illness and Repose
Through these labors he was fighting tuberculosis, which afflicted him for years and repeatedly forced him to seek treatment, yet the accounts of his life agree that he refused to spare himself. He reposed on December 12, 1935 (November 29, Old Style), while under treatment at the University Hospital in Ann Arbor, Michigan, at the age of forty-six; some accounts relate that in his final days he was composing a Nativity encyclical to his flock.
He was buried on December 18, 1935, in the church of Saint Sava Monastery in Libertyville, the spiritual center he had founded, where his tomb was honored by the faithful for the next eighty years.
Relics & Shrines
With the blessing of Bishop Longin of New Gračanica and Midwestern America, his tomb in the monastery church was opened on May 4–5, 2017. His relics, which had lain there since December 1935, were found substantially incorrupt — from the knees upward the skin, hair, beard, and fingernails were intact, and eyewitness clergy recorded that a sweet fragrance rose from the tomb when the vault was opened.
The relics were washed, vested, and placed in Saint Sava Monastery church in Libertyville, where they now rest and are venerated by pilgrims. The monastery remains the mother house of Serbian Orthodoxy in America and the site of his shrine.
Glorification
At its session of May 29, 2015, the Holy Assembly of Bishops of the Serbian Orthodox Church entered Bishop Mardarije in the calendar of saints, together with the American-born missionary Sebastian (Dabovich) — the first saints of the Serbian Church to have labored in North America.
His solemn glorification was celebrated at Saint Sava Monastery in Libertyville in July 2017, following the uncovering of his relics that spring. His feast is kept on December 12, the day of his repose.
Miracles & Traditions
Historically Documented: When his tomb was opened on May 5, 2017, his relics were found substantially incorrupt after more than eighty years, with skin, hair, and fingernails intact from the knees upward; the clergy present recorded that a sweet-smelling fragrance rose from the vault at its opening. The uncovering was carried out under the blessing of Bishop Longin and publicly reported by the Serbian dioceses in America.
Traditional Accounts: The faithful noted that he had been buried facing west rather than east, and that this, providentially, was what kept the collapsing vault cover from crushing his body. The tradition of the diocese remembers him above all for his self-emptying labor — a bishop who gave away his own money, worked on the monastery with his own hands, and spent his failing strength on his flock until his last days.
