Readers Service

[methodius]

Today we went to St Thomas's Serbian Orthodox Church in Sunninghill Park for the Hours and Readers Service, which we are doing, with the blessing of Archbishop Seraphim, on alternate Sundays while the priests, Fr Pantelejmon and Fr Spyridon, are away

Comments

[djproject]

actually it would be slavonic if you sang serbian melodies (that is the language they use in liturgy)

Language of service

[methodius]

I think it was Slavonic, but didn't look closely enough at the book -- we just found it lying among the choir things, and in the book we had printed the middle Psalm (24) of the 3rd hour weas missing, and when we saw the Hours book there, we asked one of the people to read that Psalm from it.

But we don't know any Serbian melodies -- we used the English version which is used at our "home" parish of St Nicholas, which is English-speaking, and uses OCA melodies and words.

But at St Thomas's they have the Divine Liturgy in Serbian, other services in Slavonic. I served there several times when the priests were there, but read the litanies etc in English. But I haven't served there often enough to learn the Serbian melodies, or even try fitting them to the English words.

Most Sundays we do the Hours and Obednitsa in North Sotho, in our mission congregations, but with the OCA melodies we are familiar with.

[naqerj]

Serbs sometimes use Serbian, too-I've seen trilingual Serbian service books with Serbian, Slavonic and English.

[djproject]

figures there would be a grey answer =]