Holy Hierarch Sofronii of Vratsa

Saint Sofronii of Vratsa

Today in the Orthodox Church we venerate Saint Sofronii of Vratsa, an Orthodox bishop of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, who was an instrumental figure in the Bulgarian National Revival at that time. Bishop Saint Sofronii was one of the first authors to write in colloquial modern Bulgarian. He was also a key figure in building ties of friendship between the Russian and Bulgarian peoples, as well as a ‘social saint’ who did a number of works aimed at improving the lot of the poor people of Bulgaria. It is meet and fitting that we should remember him on this day.

Saint Sofronii [Bg. Софроний] was born in 1739 in the town of Kotel in east-central Bulgaria, to the name of Stoyko. His father Vladislav was a cattle-herder by profession. His mother Mariya died when he was three years of age, and his father died of the plague just after Stoyko had reached his eleventh birthday. The orphaned Stoyko had already demonstrated an aptitude for learning, and while studying at the local monastic school he read and memorised religious literature in both Greek and Church Slavonic. The townspeople noticed his scholarly and spiritual aptitudes. On account of his father’s heavy debts, Stoyko’s relatives forced him to marry a girl named Ganka when he was eighteen years old, and then to become a parish priest. His early life was therefore marked by severe financial hardships and toil, although he devoted himself entirely to selfless service and care for his parish.

He encountered Saint Paisii of Hilendar in 1765 – a fateful meeting for the entire Bulgarian nation. Saint Paisii showed the young parish priest his opus, the Slavonic-Bulgarian History, and the young Fr Stoyko – most thankful for this honour that Paisii had bestowed upon him – took pains to copy out the entire thing by hand. Inspired by this work that he was copying out, Fr Stoyko began to focus his own efforts on the awakening and liberation of the Bulgarian people. In addition to his duties as a parish priest, Fr Stoyko also became a teacher, teaching young Bulgarian children in their own language. He even started one of the first grassroots organisations for Bulgarian independence, and spearheaded the movement to re-establish the autocephalous Bulgarian Orthodox Church.

Fr Stoyko’s family and community suffered during the Ottoman repressions, which accompanied the Russo-Turkish war of 1768-1774. Shortly after this he undertook one of his first trips to Athos, and came back to Bulgaria with more religious materials so that he could teach children. He fell foul of the Ottoman authorities at several points and was thrown into prison, where he developed illnesses of the digestive tract. His wife Ganka fell ill, was bedridden, and died after six months in 1787. Although it seems Fr Stoyko and his wife did not get along well together, they had four children – Tsonko, Vladislav, Mariya and Ganka. Tsonko would go on to father the great Bulgarian naval officer and statesman Stefan Bogoridi.

In 1794 Fr Stoyko was made a bishop, first taking on the monastic tonsure and the name of Sofronii. He was sent to Vratsa in northwestern Bulgaria, and continued there his social witness and his efforts at upbuilding and educating the Bulgarian people. However, the tensions and warfare between Russia and the Ottoman Empire necessitated Bishop Sofronii to move from Vratsa to Bucharest, where he stayed for a significant time. Here he was engaged in diplomatic exchanges between Russia and Bulgaria, and established ties of friendship and cooperation between the Russian Empire and the Bulgarian people. He helped to raise Bulgarian volunteers to fight alongside the Russians in the Russo-Turkish War of 1806.

He also compiled the Nedelnik, a homiletic text in Bulgarian, which gave practical guidelines for parish priests and laymen about Eastern Orthodox liturgics. He also published at this time his autobiography, The Life and Sufferings of Sinful Sofronii. It is noteworthy that Saint Sofronii writes not in Old Church Slavonic, or in a literary form of Bulgarian artificially crafted by Romantic scholars, but instead in the colloquial, folk style used by common people and easy for them to comprehend: his style is marked by frequent use of conjunctions, rhetorical questions and exclamations common to the oral Bulgarian of his time. He also writes in a confessional mode that portrays him as less of a saint and more of an anti-hero. With both humility and self-deprecating humour, Bishop Saint Sofronii describes the travails of the Bulgarian people under Turkish oppression and the moral compromises he himself had to make living under them, and asks the reader’s and God’s forgiveness to his sins of greed and cowardice.

Saint Sofronii was also a sketch artist and a landscape painter. However, the painting that is most famously associated with him is the oil painting of him done in 1812, which is shown above. Sofronii spent most of the rest of his life in a monastery in Bucharest, although he continued to care for his flock in Vratsa whenever the political climate permitted. We do not know the exact date of his blessed repose; the last document of his that we have is dated to August 1813. Saint Sofronii was officially glorified by the Bulgarian Orthodox Church on 31 December 1964. Holy hierarch Sofronii, edifying author and meek and humble servant of the Bulgarian flock, pray unto Christ our God on behalf of us sinners!

Vratsa, Bulgaria