The life of St Angelina of Albania
The couple built a family in the hard circumstances of exile, first in Albania and later in Italy, where they fled again as the Ottoman advance threatened even that refuge, and where Stephen died, sources giving either 1468 or 1476, leaving Angelina to raise their two sons, George and John, largely on her own. George would in time set aside his own claim to his father's title in favor of his younger brother, entering monastic life instead under the name Maximos; John himself died young, around 1502 or 1503, and was remembered afterward for miracles reported at his tomb. In her later years Angelina helped establish and richly endow the monastery of Krusedol in the Fruska Gora hills, and once her sons were settled in their own callings she retired there herself, taking up the monastic life in the community she had helped to build. She reposed in the early sixteenth century and was buried at Krusedol beside her husband and sons, the whole family venerated together there as saints of a single household that endured blinding, exile, and repeated displacement without losing what mattered most to them.
