His Grace, Bishop of Great Britain and Ireland, The Right Reverend Nektarije
Archimandrite Nektarije (Samardžić) was born on May 18, 1983, in Sarajevo, to father Nemanja (†2009) and mother Nada (née Remić). At baptism, he was given the name Ratko. He began elementary school in Sarajevo and completed it in Gothenburg (Kingdom of Sweden), where his family moved due to the war in the 1990s.
With the blessing of Bishop Dositej of Britain and Scandinavia, he enrolled in the Seminary of the Three Holy Hierarchs (now St. Peter of Dabro-Bosnia) and graduated in 2003. After completing seminary, Bishop Dositej sent him to pursue theological studies in Moscow, where he graduated from the Moscow Theological Academy in 2006.
With Bishop Dositej's blessing, on June 1, 2007, he was tonsured into the small schema at the Church of Saints Cyril and Methodius in Malmö, taking the monastic name Nektarije, after St. Nektarios of Aegina the Wonderworker. He was ordained as a hierodeacon on June 2 and as a hieromonk on June 16 of the same year at the Pokrov Monastery of the Most Holy Theotokos in Smedjeryd. For a time, he served as a parish priest at the Church of Saints Cyril and Methodius in Malmö. With Bishop Dositej's blessing, he also worked at the "Bildа" Center for Christian Studies, where he participated in various consultations, lectures, and meetings with representatives of all Christian denominations in the Kingdom of Sweden.
On the Feast of St. Nicholas of Ohrid and Žiča, May 3, 2009, Bishop Dositej appointed Hieromonk Nektarije as the abbot of the newly established Monastery of St. George in Olofström, in southeastern Sweden’s Blekinge region. There, he successfully organised monastic life and developed the monastery complex. On September 10, 2011, during the consecration of the new iconostasis in the Monastery of St. George, Bishop Dositej elevated Hieromonk Nektarios to the rank of protosyncellus and subsequently sent him for further theological studies in Athens. In July 2013, Bishop Dositej elevated him to the rank of archimandrite.
He completed his studies at the Faculty of Theology at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in 2016, with a thesis on The Eucharistic Controversy in the Post-Byzantine Period. He continued his postgraduate studies at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki under the mentorship of Fr. Vasileios Kaliakmanis, focusing on Pastoral Aspects of the Ecclesiology of St. Nektarios of Aegina, which he successfully defended on April 4, 2019, in Thessaloniki. In addition to his native Serbian, he speaks Swedish, Russian, Greek, and English.
During his eleven-year stay in Greece, he often visited Mount Athos, where he learned monastic life at its source in the Hilandar Monastery. He spent two continuous years living in the sacred brotherhood, serving in that Athonite holy site.
At the invitation of Bishop Dositej of Britain and Scandinavia, Fr. Nektarije returned from Hilandar to Sweden and, on November 24, 2020, was appointed abbot of the Church of St. Stefan of Dečani in Gothenburg. His mission was to enhance the spiritual life of the city of Gothenburg, in the southwest of the Kingdom of Sweden, with a rejuvenated clerical brotherhood.
In October 2021, Archimandrite Nektarije assumed a new obedience at the Serbian Patriarchate in Belgrade, where he became an officer of the Office for Inter-Church Relations of the Holy Synod of Bishops. It was during this service that he was elected Bishop of Jegar, Vicar of the Serbian Patriarch, at the regular session of the Holy Assembly of Bishops on May 23, 2022, in the crypt of the Memorial Church of St. Sava in Belgrade.
On May 18, 2024, the Holy Assembly of Bishops of the Serbian Orthodox Church elected him as the bishop of the newly established Diocese of Britain and Ireland, with its seat in London. His enthronement took place on November 24, 2024, at the Cathedral Church of St. Sava in London.