Name Jerotej Racanin | ||
Jerotej Račanin (Јеротеј Рачанин ; likely the area of Bajina Bašta, c. 1650-Velika Remeta, after 1727) was a Serbian writer and copyist of church manuscripts and books. After visiting Jerusalem in 1704 he wrote a book about his travel experiences from Hungary to the Holy Land and back.
At the time of the Great Turkish War in the last quarter of the seventeenth century the Rača monastery was devastated. The Turks several times carried out reprisals against the monks of Rača for engaging in educational activities and promoting Serbian culture, copying church manuscripts and books. Eventually the monks were forced to take their manuscripts and books with them and with Arsenije III Čarnojević join in the Christian forces in northern Serbia at Zenta, and settled in the uninhabited regions bordering Hungary and deeper inland. They moved to the new regions and resumed their work at Szentendre, near Budapest, and assumed as their surname the name of their former monastery. Among the several who distinguished themselves as monk-scribes and illuminators of old manuscripts were Jerotej Račanin, Hristifor Račanin, Kiprijan Račanin, Gavril Stefanović Venclović, Simeon Račanin, Čirjak Račanin, Teodor Račanin and many others.
From Szentendre, Jerotej Račanin settled at Velika Remeta, a cultural centre of the Serbs in the 16th and the 17th centuries, and the home of a manuscript and book copying and illuminating school. Here Jerotej, who lived in this monastery in 1721, wrote "A Journey to Jerusalem", the first travel book in modern Serbian literature.