Jovan was baptized on 17 November of that year in the Serbian Orthodox Church of Archangel Michael, officiated by Very Reverend Georgije-Đuka Popović, one of the most erudite clerics of his day in that region of Potisje, and author of Put u raj (The Road to Heaven), a book in praise of moral principles.

The 1848 Revolution interrupted his university education and he left Pest for Sombor where Grand Župan Isidor Nikolić Džaver (1806–1862) of Bačka first appointed him secretary of the town's municipal court house, and then a position of judicial clerk at Lugos.

[1] There Đorđević came to loggerheads with the school's administrators, who were against Vuk Karadžić's language reforms, and left his teaching post to become secretary of the Matica Srpska and editor of the learned society's magazine Letopis Matice Srpske in 1857.

He eventually relinquished his position to Svetozar Miletić in 1861 and joined Dr. Jovan Andrejević Joles on their long, overdue project – the construction of the Serbian National Theatre in Novi Sad.

In 1868 he founded the Serbian National Theatre in Belgrade, where he offered increasingly elaborate contemporary productions of Serbian and foreign playwrights and dramatists, like Stevan Sremac, Milorad Popović Šapčanin, Milovan Glišić, Svetislav Vulović, Kosta Trifković, Branislav Nušić, Imre Madách, József Katona, György Bessenyei, Schiller, Henrik Ibsen, Oscar Wilde, Émile Augier, Jules Sandeau, Eugène Marin Labiche, Victorien Sardou, Ivan Turgenev, Gogol, Maksim Gorky and other.