[4] Pirot at the time was part of the Sanjak of Niš of the Ottoman Empire (now in Serbia, then called Bulgaria).

[5] As a seven-year-old, he fled with his parents to the village of Futog in Bačka in the Habsburg Empire (now in Serbia), where he was ordained as the priest of the Serbian Patriarchate of Peć.

[6] At that time the Patriarchate of Peć had in fact no pure ethnic nature,[7] and included not only Serbs, but also Bulgarians.

Eight years later, on the 20th of June 1786, Metropolitan Mojsije Putnik of Sremski Karlovci made him Bishop of the Serbian Orthodox Pakrac eparchy, a position he would hold from 1786 to 1807.

[10] He published two books the Austrian Empire: in Vienna in 1794: Domentijan and The Lives of Serbian Saints and Enlighteners Simeon and Sava,[11][12] and a redaction of John Damascene writings in Buda in 1803.