06/15/2026
Nikola Tesla, one of the greatest inventors in history, was an Orthodox Christian.
He was born on July 10, 1856, in the village of Smiljan in Lika, today's Croatia, into a Serbian Orthodox family. His father, Milutin Tesla, was an Orthodox priest. His uncle was the Orthodox Metropolitan of Sarajevo. His mother took him to the Divine Liturgy every Sunday, and all three of his sisters married Orthodox priests.
Tesla was baptized at the Church of Saints Peter and Paul in Smiljan, the very church his father served.
In his old age, Tesla confided to his close friend, the Croatian sculptor Ivan Meštrović, that he had prayed to God on his bare knees every night since his youth. In Meštrović's memoirs, Tesla is recorded saying: "I prayed like that all the way until I was fifty. Since that time I pray differently, but the essence remains the same, and I pray to God every day."
In 2022, Serbian Orthodox Patriarch Porfirije personally consecrated the restored church where Tesla was baptized. He said that wherever Tesla went and whatever he did, he "never forgot his Orthodox faith."
To this day, a portrait of Nikola Tesla, painted in the style of an Orthodox icon, hangs inside a Serbian Orthodox church in Bosnia and Herzegovina, despite the fact that he has not been canonized as a saint.
The man whose inventions power the modern world prayed every day to God.
