Biography
Teofan Beatovich
About Teofan Beatovich
Teofan Beatovich served Orthodox communities in Minnesota before joining Kosijerevo monastery in Montenegro. Metropolitan Amfilohije remembered him as a deacon in Minnesota and later a member of Kosijerevo monastery.
The American parish account associates him with Chisholm and Minneapolis. It also reports that he worked for the Red Cross in Minneapolis and returned to Yugoslavia in 1939.
A possible trace of his American life survives in an account of Serbian music in South Saint Paul. Writing in Minnesota History in 1955, University of Minnesota scholar Thomas F. Magner described his visit to the singer Risto Grk. Grk performed traditional narrative songs with a gusle, a bowed instrument with a single horsehair string. He had once improvised an instrument from tin cans. In 1933 he acquired one made by Father Teofan Beatovich, whom Magner identified as a former South Saint Paul resident who had returned to Yugoslavia. Grk later recorded songs for the university’s department of Slavic and Oriental languages. The distinctive name and Minnesota connection suggest the same cleric, but Magner’s article does not identify its craftsman as the later martyr.
After his return to Montenegro, Teofan belonged to the community at Kosijerevo. Aleksandar Stamatović’s history records his killing by Communists in 1942.
A wartime newspaper report published that July named him among clergy taken from their places of ministry. Its entry said that he had been removed from Kosijerevo, but that the time and place of his killing had not been established.
A later American parish biography places his death near Vidno and associates his abduction with Christmas Eve, without specifying the calendar.
His memory remains part of the Chisholm parish’s history.
Metropolitan Amfilohije included him among the Serbian saints connected with America in a sermon delivered in 2015.
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