Saint Teodora de la SihlaOne of the greatest female ascetics of Moldavia, a daughter of the Carpathian Mountains during the time of the Unia, is Saint Teodora de la Sihla, whom we commemorate on the seventh of August. Saint Teodora is venerated in both Moldova and in Romania, being (like Saint Ioan Iacob) closely associated with the Neamț Monastery which is today located in northeastern Romania. She is mentioned in her hagiography alongside Saint Mary of Ægypt, Saint Pelagia the Penitent, Saint Kseniya of Saint Petersburg, Saint Euphrosynē of Alexandria and Saint Theodosia of Constantinople as one of the great women-ascetics of the Orthodox Church.
Saint Teodora [also Theodora] was born around the year 1650. Her father was a Moldavian boyar, Ștefan Joldea, who served the voivode Vasile ‘the Wolf’ as armourer and artilleryman for the Neamț Citadel – that same which Ștefan III had found to be of such strategic importance in defence of his territory against the Ottomans. For all his other faults, Vasile was nevertheless a firm defender of Orthodox faith in Moldavia. As such, he wound up facing political meddling and more overt warfare from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and allied himself with the Cossacks of the Zaporozhian Sich under the hetman Senovi Bogdan Khmelnitskii by marrying his daughter Ruxandra to the hetman’s son Timofei.
As can be seen from the position he occupied, Ștefan Joldea was one of Vasile’s most implicitly trusted men, and like Vasile himself deeply committed to the Orthodox faith. He raised his daughter to have the same reverence he had for the Church and for the Moldavian country. It must also be said that the area of the Carpathian Mountains in which Saint Teodora lived had a number of monasteries: not just Neamț but also Secu, Sihăstria and Agapia. Visiting all of these monasteries with her father left a deep impression on young Teodora. After the death of her younger sister Marghiola, Teodora resolved to become a nun.
Her parents, however, had other plans. They persuaded her to accept marriage to a young man serving at the Neamț Citadel, who was originally from the county of Ismail in Bessarabia. Dutifully she entered her husband’s house, and he treated her with no small affection. However, the two of them remained childless. When Ștefan Joldea and his wife died, Teodora again began to consider the idea of becoming a nun. Saint Teodora’s husband was not averse to the idea, and by mutual consent they both entered monasteries. He went to Poiana Mărului monastery and was ordained a hieromonk by the name of Elefterie. Saint Teodora herself entered the Vărzăreşti Monastery in Buzău, where about thirty nuns lived together. The abbess there, Paisia, took her on as a novice when she was about thirty years old.
As a novice in the Vărzăreşti Monastery, Saint Teodora gained an understanding and an appreciation of the ascetic life. She respected the rule of the monastery not only in its outward principles but also in its inward orientation and tutelage of the soul. She understood the meaning of obedience, of stability, of chastity both physical and spiritual, as being steps toward the renunciation of self-will. She sang the Seven Lauds, partook of the Holy Mysteries, prayed in her cell, read the Scriptures and studied the lives of the holy saints. This was her primary mode of spiritual life in Vărzăreşti as recounted by her hagiographer, Fr Constantin Galeriu.
The nuns of Vărzăreşti were soon forced to flee, however, owing to an attack by invading Turkish troops. These troops were busy plundering, burning the countryside and taking captives. The nuns took refuge from the Turks in the mountains and in the woods, finding secluded areas to take shelter. One of these was a small altar and a few cells in the mountains of Vrancea, to which the Abbess Paisia, Saint Teodora and a few other nuns repaired and prayed for deliverance. The terror and strain of flight took their toll on the aged Abbess Paisia, who reposed in the Lord not long after settling her nuns in Vrancea. Saint Teodora and the other nuns continued in their disciplines.
Saint Teodora spent ten years in Vrancea, enduring the hardships of the remote life in the mountains with her monastic sisters. However, at the end of these ten years she returned to Neamț, and sought to live in the place of her nativity and childhood as a holy anchoress. She sought, and was given, leave from Abbot Varsanufie of Sihăstria Monastery to settle in a hermitage in the Neamț Mountains. Abbot Varsanufie suggested that Saint Teodora go into the woods, where she spent a year in the wilderness which many holy men since Roman times had used as anchorages. Saint Teodora met an old hermit living in that place, who offered her his cell beneath a cliff at Sihla, while he himself sought further reclusion elsewhere.
From this point Saint Teodora began praying without cease and living truly as an anchoress. She ate only of what the woods offered her: mushrooms, nettles, blackberries and blueberries – or else whatever was offered to her by the monks from Sihăstria or by pilgrims wandering through. She was served the Gifts by the priestmonk Pavel, who also served at Sihăstria. In this way, she progressed in a life of virtue. She also gave shelter as the need arose, to sister-nuns who were fleeing the rapine of the Ottomans invading Moldova – some of whom reached the cell of Saint Teodora. They found her praying, and when they told her what had befallen them, without hesitation Saint Teodora gave up her own cell and moved to another cave further up the mountains. Here in this yet more remote cave she spent twenty years of her life, eating and sleeping on the rocks within.
It happened that the Abbot of Sihăstria noticed that, for several days in a row, a small flock of birds came in through the window of the refectory, where they took crumbs of bread and grapes, and then flew out over the mountains toward Sihla. The abbot sent two monastic brothers to follow the birds, and walking out along the path they reached the top of the mountain. One brother managed to climb a fir tree, and from there he managed to see Saint Teodora. Saint Teodora called to him, and told him that she had been praying for forty days for God to send her a priest so that she could confess her sins before she died. She asked the brother to tell the abbot her last wish, which was that the priestmonk Antonie and the deacon Lavrentie could be sent to her with the Holy Gifts. The two brothers went back to Sihăstria and related to the abbot what the anchoress had told them. The following day the abbot sent out the priest Antonie and the deacon Lavrentie to her cave, together with the two brethren and the Holy Gifts. Saint Teodora gave a confession to Antonie of all the wrongs she had done in her life, and received the full absolution, partaking in the Body and the Blood of Christ. The last words that she spoke before departing to the Lord were: ‘Glory be to the Lord for all things.’
Saint Teodora de la Sihla was buried right in her cave, with a full funeral service, and the monks of Sihăstria were present there to witness it. The fame of her holy life spread far, and many Moldovan villagers came to her cave to pray for her intercessions and help. Her earthly husband, the monk Elefterie, returned to Neamț from Poiana Mărului to find out whether or not Saint Teodora was indeed the woman who was once his wife. Having received the heavenly assurance that she was, Elefterie knelt and wept at her tomb, and took up a hermitage near hers under discipline to Sihăstria – in much the same way as Saint Aglaïa became a holy monastic and lived her life near the bones of her beloved Saint Boniface. Elefterie lived at his hermitage for another ten years before he, too, reposed in the Lord.
In the 1720s a monastery with a wooden church dedicated to the Transfiguration was built on the site of her hermitage. Sihla Monastery still stands there to this day. Saint Teodora’s relics rested in her cave. After the Russo-Turkish War when the Bessarabia Oblast’ was placed under Russia’s direct control, Mihail Sturza, who had ruled Moldavia in the 1840s and emancipated the Romani, had her relics interred in a precious reliquary, and then moved to his personal chapel in Iaşi. The Sturza family then arranged for her relics to be translated to the Kiev Pechersk Lavra in 1853. There she has been faithfully commemorated as ‘Teodora of the Carpathians’.
As this history witnesses, the Moldovan people commemorated Teodora de la Sihla as a local saint almost at once after her repose, and her memory has been passed down through the folkways of the Romanian-speaking northeast country to the present day. The Iaşi-educated Moldavian, later Romanian, writer Calistrat Hogaș, in his book Pe drumuri de munti, said this of her:
Beautiful St. Teodora, the anchorite legend of these places, appeared in my imagination as a second Mary of Egypt, her life haunted by the same misfortunes. St. Teodora had also cast off, perhaps, the intoxicating pleasures of the world, contenting herself, at last, with the damp crevice of a rock, instead of the gilded palaces where luxury and indulgence reigned…The Romanian Orthodox Church formally glorified Teodora de la Sihla as a monastic Venerable and Holy Mother of the Church at a synod on the twentieth of June, 1992, placing her feast-day on the seventh of August. Holy Mother Teodora, faithful bride of the Bridegroom, virtuous ascetic and friend of refugees, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!
Apolytikion to Saint Teodora de la Sihla, Tone 1:
Leaving behind the things of this earth and taking up the yoke of a solitary,
You were made a bride of Christ, O blessed one.
Through fasting, vigil, and prayer
You were granted heavenly gifts and became like the angels.
You overcame human nature and moved to the heavenly places,
Leaving us the consolation of your cave and of your holy relics.
Therefore, O holy and most venerable Mother Teodora,
Entreat Christ our God to save our souls.
Sihla Monastery, Sihla, Romania
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