Venerable Roman of Tărnovo, disciple of Saint Teodosii

Saint Roman of Tărnovo

Today in the Holy Orthodox Church, the seventeenth of February, is the feast day of Saint Roman, the disciple of Saint Teodosii the Hesychast of Tărnovo, who was in turn one of the disciples of Saint Grēgorios of Sinai, the father of the mediæval hesychast movement in the Orthodox Church. Much of the information that we have on the life and deeds of Saint Roman the Hesychast comes from the hagiography of his mentor and spiritual father.

Saint Roman [Bg. Роман] was born in the early 1300s in Tărnovo, the capital of Bulgaria. His family came from one of the Turkic Old Bulghar stems which formed the basis for the first Bulgarian state – the Old Bulghars were related to the Bulghar Khanate to which Saint Abraham of the Volga belonged, and from which descend the Kazan Tatar, Bashkir and Chuvash peoples of Russia. His parents raised him to be a nobleman, but he had little interest in the martial disciplines of his upbringing. Instead he retired to a monastery in Tărnovo and became a novice.

Saint Teodosii arrived in Tărnovo to beg the help for the second time of Tsar Ivan Aleksandăr, that he might put to flight the Muslim bandits who were raiding the monastery of Saint Grēgorios in Paroria. When he heard that Saint Teodosii was in Tărnovo, the young novice Roman, who was seeking a deeper and holier life of quietude, came out from his monastery to meet the elder hesychast and threw himself at his feet, begging to be taken as a disciple. If Teodosii did not accept him, Roman pleaded, he would go and be slaughtered by some wild beast or throw himself from the rocks of Tărnovo – deeper than the thirst of the deer for spring water, was Roman’s thirst for Teodosii’s wisdom and guidance in Christ. Well might we imagine that the elder Teodosii still saw a bit of noble arrogance in these rash pronouncements. But the elder, who was acquainted with Roman from his youth, took pity on the lad, and brought Roman back with him to Paroria. Saint Grēgorios also took a liking to the young Bulgarian nobleman, and agreed to keep him on at his monastery.

At Paroria, Roman distinguished himself by a superlative meekness and obedience to his elders in all things, obeying them in imitation of how Christ obeyed His Father. He stayed at Paroria monastery until Saint Grēgorios reposed in 1347. The monks sought to make Teodosii their abbot, but Teodosii, who had no desire to lead men in a monastic community, made plans to leave for Mount Athos in secret. Roman discovered his plans and begged to be allowed to come with him. On Mount Athos the two monks studied and struggled to apply in their lives of prayer the methods of hesychasm. Again, however, they were driven from their home by the Turks, and they fled again into Bulgaria. Tsar Ivan Aleksandăr again welcomed them warmly, and gave Teodosii and Roman a plot of land at Kilifarevo where they could set up a hermitage.

Three years Saints Teodosii and Roman laboured at Kilifarevo, and through their earnest hard work and life of prayer and vigil the hermitage prospered. What’s more, they could not keep the secret of their presence from the folk of Bulgaria for long, and soon the hermitage was thronged with people from all walks of life seeking help and advice, which they did their best to give. And what’s more, many young men of Bulgaria sought to join Saint Teodosii and join the hermitage as novices and disciples. Soon enough there were fifty men living at Kilifarevo, and Teodosii and Roman were compelled to construct a monastery there to house them all. Despite Saint Teodosii’s determination not to become an abbot, God clearly had called him to be there.

Throughout all his endeavours, Saint Roman had been Saint Teodosii’s tireless and uncomplaining companion, helpmeet and supporter, and engaged in polemics against Judaïsers and anti-hesychasts in Bulgaria. Saint Teodosii eventually retired to Constantinople, and left Saint Roman as his prior in charge of the monastic brotherhood – he reposed in Constantinople in the year 1363. By this time, Saint Teodosii’s and Saint Roman’s monastic community had been established at Ustieto near Tărnovo, where the monastery was dedicated to the Holy Trinity. Here Saint Roman continued to promote hesychasm and to carefully shepherd his monastic flock faithfully as his mentor would have done.

During his last years Saint Roman developed a chronic illness that we recognise today as whooping cough. However, he did not alter in any way his prayer routine or his vigils. He slept only during the dawn hour, keeping the whole night for prayer. The one thing he did in response to this malady was to alter his daily fast only to include one small daily cup of wine. He did not complain or pay attention to his illness, but continued to advise the monks and give spiritual comfort to the laity for as long as God would allow. In the end, Saint Roman was given to know by God when he would repose. He gathered all of his monastic brothers around him, told them how much he loved them, exhorted them to continue to strive for Christ and to imitate one another in meekness and kindness and obedience, and celebrated the Liturgy with them one last time. He reposed at peace with God and with his brothers on the seventeenth of February. The monks grieved long over his loss, and buried him with all the honours due to a beloved spiritual father and abbot of their house. Holy and venerable Roman, steadfast student of the prayer of the heart, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

Apolytikion for Saint Roman of Tărnovo, Tone 8:

In you, Father, we have an example of how to care for our salvation:
You took up the Cross and followed Christ,
And taught us to despise the flesh for it is transient,
And care for the soul which is immortal.
Therefore, O Venerable Roman, your spirit rejoices together with the angels!

Holy Trinity Monastery at Ustieto, Bulgaria

Happy Year of the Metal Ox

I wish all of my gentle readers here a happy Chinese New Year of the Metal Ox! 新年快樂，恭喜發財，心想事成，牛氣衝天！

I did end up reading some of the Yijing-inspired prognostications for the year, which in the lunar cycle features the hexagrams gen 艮 (keeping still, mountain) and li 離 (the clinging, fire), which when combined form the twenty-second seal bi 賁 (grace). The judgement for this seal is:

GRACE has success.
In small matters
It is favourable to undertake something.

The image associated with this seal is:

Fire at the foot of the mountain:
The image of GRACE.
Thus does the superior man proceed
When clearing up current affairs.
But he dare not decide controversial issues in this way.

Coming out of quarantine, as I am sure many of us will do this coming year, this does indeed seem like a good year for beginning with small ventures. The Yijing here sounds almost Tolkienian, or even more broadly Christian, in its exhortation: to begin with the small undertakings, and to do them with grace. May this new lunar year indeed be a new start, and may God bless the world in it.

Holy Greatmartyr Georgi the Younger of Sofia

Saint Georgi the Younger of Sofia

The eleventh of February is, in the Orthodox Church, the commemoration of the great Bulgarian martyr Saint Georgi of Kratovo, who is also known as Saint Georgi the Younger of Sofia. He died as a martyr for the Orthodox faith under the Ottoman Turks, and his death heralded a series of struggles within Bulgaria for national liberation from the Turks throughout the following two centuries. Saint Georgi the Younger was commemorated with particular attention by Bulgaria’s historian-saint and hagiographer Saint Paisii Hilendarski. His cultus became particularly important in the 1700s and 1800s as a result of Saint Paisii’s efforts, and also as a mark of Bulgaria’s growing popular awareness of a national identity.

Saint Georgi [Bg. Георги, Srb. Ђорђе, Mk. Ѓорѓи] was born near the end of the 1400s in the town of Kratovo, which now lies in North Macedonia; however it seems he lived much of his early life in the Bulgarian town of Sredets, which is now a neighbourhood in the capital of Sofia. This may have been on account of a desire on the part of Georgi’s father Ivan, to avoid the young Georgi from being enslaved to the Ottoman state, conscripted into the Janissary corps and converted to Islâm. His hagiography suggests that he may have been an only child, born to his parents Ivan and Mariya in their old age after much prayer. He was named after the Greatmartyr George of Lydda, indicating that he may have been born in April. His father and mother were of the stock of skilled urban craftsmen, and Georgi too took up a trade, and became a deft silversmith. He received a good education and was literate, reading with keen attention the Holy Scriptures. He lived a blameless life in Sredets and was respected and honoured by many.

So much so, in fact, that the Turkish authorities took it upon themselves to recruit the young smith – perhaps thinking that if they could make him convert to Islâm that many other townsmen would follow. They tried to put a fez on his head and make him pray in the Muslim way, but he refused to do this and threw the hat upon the ground. The Turks then beat him mercilessly and dragged him before the vali, who was charmed by young Georgi’s upright, prepossessing manner. Taking a gentler tack, the vali promised Georgi great honours and wealth from the hand of Sultân Selim I himself, if he should convert to Islâm. But Georgi refused all of these promises and boldly proclaimed his belief in Jesus Christ. The vali ordered Georgi to be punished by falaka, and the soles of his feet beaten painfully with rods. This is a cruel form of torture that is still used in modern-day Turkey.

Georgi refused to give in, however, and continued to confess Christ although the tortures increased in severity and in cruelty. The Turkish authorities had him paraded through the streets to ritually humiliate him, but Georgi called upon the name of the Lord to help him. At last, the vali ordered that he be publicly executed by burning at the stake, and the authorities prepared a stake and pyre in the middle of Sredets, onto which they threw the greatmartyr still living, on the eleventh of February, 1515. In this way he attained the victory and entered the company of saints. The Turks burned his body, and as he was burning the Turks threw dogs onto the fire to prevent the Christians from finding and venerating his remains. Yet by a strange wonder, the body of the greatmartyr Georgi was not consumed by the flames, and the Christians of Sredets were able to find his body on the pyre unscathed. They brought it into the Church of St Marina secretly by night, and buried it with great respect and reverence.

On the twenty-sixth of May that same year, the relics of Saint Georgi were uncovered and translated into a fine reliquary wrought for the purpose by Georgi’s fellow smiths in fine metal, who now had particular cause to honour one of their own. This reliquary was brought into the nearby Dragalevski Monastery of the Mother of God of Vitosha, where it is still venerated every year, both on the day of his martyrdom and on the day of his translation. As mentioned before, Georgi’s cultus became important after his hagiography was committed to writing by Saint Paisii of Hilendar. He also became a focus for the Bulgarian movement for liberation and a model of bravery and insistence upon the truth for the Bulgarian freedom fighters. Holy greatmartyr Georgi, bold athlete for Christ and witness to the Truth of the Incarnation, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

Apolytikion for Saint Georgi the Younger of Sofia, Tone 3:

Your holy martyr Georgi, O Lord,
Through his sufferings has received an incorruptible crown from You, our God.
For having Your strength, he laid low his adversaries,
And shattered the powerless boldness of demons.
Through his intercessions, save our souls!

Dragalevski Monastery of the Mother of God of Vitosha, Bulgaria

Righteous Petǎr, Tsar of Bulgaria

Saint Petǎr of Bulgaria

Today is the birthday of our nation’s greatest president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And in the Orthodox Church, it is also the Synaxis of the Three Holy Hierarchs, as well as the feast day of Tsar Saint Petǎr I of Bulgaria. Saint Petǎr was a mild-mannered, sweet-tempered, peace-loving man who enjoyed a long rule over Bulgaria; and even though it was not a period of military conquest and glory, Bulgaria still enjoyed a period of prolific church growth and general prosperity under his enlightened rule.

Saint Petǎr was born around the year 903, presumably in what was then the Bulgarian capital at Preslav. His father, Tsar Simeon I, was a fierce and warlike ruler who made war upon the Eastern Roman Empire as well as the Magyars and the Serbs. The Tsar married twice, and Petǎr was the Tsar’s son by his second marriage, to Maria the sister of Georgi Sursuvul. Petǎr was of a very different temperament than his father, and this was evident early on in his life. When he was perhaps ten years of age, he went on a pilgrimage to Constantinople together with his elder brother Mikhail. However, despite the differences between himself and his father, he evidently earned his father’s favor enough to be named heir instead of Mikhail, whom Simeon forced to become a monk.

Tsar Simeon died of a heart attack in 927, leaving the 24-year-old Petǎr as king over a great Bulgarian Tsardom at the height of its territorial expansion. At this time, Petǎr’s closest advisor, friend and regent was his uncle Georgi Sursuvul, who was of like temperament to the new Tsar. Petǎr had inherited several territorial wars from his father, including those in Croatia and Eastern Rome, which he desired to bring to an end. Therefore, in utmost secrecy, Georgi Sursuvul sought to forge a peace treaty and a dynastic alliance with Eastern Rome. Petǎr gladly agreed to this.

In 927, a delegation of Bulgarians including Georgi Sursuvul and several of the Bulgarian Tsar’s kinsmen arrived in the City and met with the Roman Emperor Rōmanos I Lakapēnos, where they hammered out a peace agreement that also entailed the young Petǎr’s marriage to the Emperor’s granddaughter, Maria Lakapēnē, who was renamed Eirēnē at the wedding to signify her importance to the new peace.

The new Bulgarian Tsar and his uncle forged peace with Eastern Rome on terms quite favorable to the Bulgarians, speaking to the military brilliance of Petǎr’s father. The Roman Empire formally recognised the ruler of Bulgaria as a ‘Tsar’, and the marches between Eastern Rome and Bulgaria were fixed according to the treaties of 897 and 904. The Roman Empire paid a yearly tribute to Bulgaria as well, something similar to the contemporary danegeld which England paid to the Norse rulers. More importantly, the Bulgarian Church won its autocephaly, with its primate being given dignity equal to the Patriarchs of the Five Ancient Churches.

Petǎr unfortunately faced several rebellions from his brothers Mikhail and Ivan in the following years, which he was forced to quell, as well as several invasions by the Bulgarians’ ancient and cruel tribal enemies the Magyars. However, it soon became clear to all that his natural preference followed his uncle’s desire for peace. He waged no offensive wars during his reign, but he kept the peace within his borders quite firmly. As a result, Bulgarian society not only prospered, it flourished.

Much of this prosperity flowed to the Church, and Tsar Petǎr himself was a particularly eager benefactor of the Orthodox Church in Bulgaria, giving funds for the construction and adornment of many grand cathedrals and churches throughout his Tsardom.

It was during Petǎr’s reign that the Gnostic-Manichæan hæresy of Bogomil first appeared in the Bulgarian realm. This was the result of a number of factors. The resettlement of the Paulician sect from Armenia under the Emperors of Eastern Rome was one such; as was the still low level of literacy (let alone knowledge of right doctrine!) among the Slavic Bulgarians. Another unwitting factor may have been Tsar Petǎr’s lavish gifts to the Church, which gave the appearance of corruption. Tsar Petǎr did combat the new hæresy as well as he was able, however the first documentation we have of it comes from after his reign, from the hands of the Orthodox priest Kosmas. He retired from his throne in 969 and reposed in the Lord, having sought the solace of the monastic tonsure, on the thirtieth of January 970.

Though modern sources have not necessarily been as kind to Saint Petǎr as they ought, in the period immediately following his reign, he was considered to have been a ‘good king’ who was peaceable and orderly and generous, of the same ‘type’ in this era of historiography as Éadgár the Frithsome and Saint Václav of Bohemia. May God see fit to have mercy upon our many sins and grant us (though we do not deserve) leaders such as these in our own time! Holy Tsar Petǎr, peaceable ruler and generous benefactor of the Orthodox faith, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

Church of St George, Kyustendil, Bulgaria, possibly dating to the reign of Saint Petǎr

Holy Hierarch Evtimii, Patriarch of Tărnovo and All Bulgaria

Saint Evtimii of Tărnovo

Today in the Orthodox Church is the feast-day of Saint Evtimii of Tărnovo, another of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church’s great mediæval luminaries. Saint Evtimii is perhaps the greatest of the Bulgarian saintly patriarchs of his time; like Saints Teodosii (his teacher) and Romil, he was also a firm and vocal (er, so to speak) supporter of the Hesychast movement in the Orthodox Church spearheaded by the great Saint Grēgorios of Sinai, who had settled and reposed in Bulgaria. Saint Evtimii was also an accomplished linguist and a formidable scholarly mind, and he did much to uplift the Bulgarian Orthodox Church in his time as Patriarch.

Saint Evtimii [Bg. Евтимий] was born around the year 1317 in Tărnovo. He was Bulgarian, and his parents likely belonged to the eminent Tsamblak family of that city. He received a fine education from the monastic schools in Tărnovo, and around the age of thirty he chose to become a monk himself. He was tonsured and accepted into the monastery at Kilifarevo, which had been founded by Saint Teodosii. By dint of his humble attitude and his steadfast obedience he earned the trust of Saint Teodosii, who appointed him his assistant in 1363. Together they travelled to Constantinople and stayed at the Studion Monastery which had been founded under the rule of Patriarch Saint Gennadios, which was renowned for its library. It was here, shortly afterward, that Saint Teodosii reposed in the Lord.

Saint Evtimii distinguished himself among the monks at Studion for his obedience, for his willingness to learn, and the rapidity with which he soaked up the wisdom of the holy place. At some point he moved from Studion to Athos, where he established himself at the Monastery of Saint Athanasios the Athonite. Here he was influenced by Saints Grēgorios of Sinai and Iōannēs Koukouzelēs. He was punished with exile by the Emperor Iōannēs V Palaiologos and sent to the isle of Lemnos, possibly for speaking out against the emperor’s submission to the Pope of Rome. At length he was permitted to return to Athos. When he did he entered the Bulgarian Monastery of Zographou and stayed there for a brief time.

He returned to his native Bulgaria in 1371. Here he founded a monastery with attached school dedicated to the Holy Trinity in Tărnovo, and applied himself to a great linguistic task of educating the people… continuing and deepening the work that had been begun by the Seven Holy Saints of the South Slavs. On Athos, he had been exposed to, and discussed, a number of sacred texts in the original Greek, and had found that the Bulgarian equivalents he had grown up with had been poorly transcribed in an irregular manner, such that they gave cause to confusion and rise to disputes. Saint Evtimii set to work reforming Church Slavonic orthography to render it more intelligible to ordinary people. He also committed himself to a massive amount of work in translating and redacting works into Church Slavonic from Greek. The texts transcribed and redacted by Saint Evtimii still serve as the basis of the great bulk of the Liturgical texts still in use in the Slavonic setting, in Russia and the South Slavic nations. For this reason, Gregory Tsamblak, his biographer, compared his work to that of Holy Prophet Moses and of the Ægyptian Pharaoh Ptolemy I.

Saint Evtimii succeeded Patriarch Ioanikii as the Patriarch of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church upon the latter’s repose in 1375. Keeping true to his teacher Saint Teodosii and to the præcepts of the Orthodox Church even in a time of widespread hæresy and disputes, Saint Evtimii became the foremost supporter of the Hesychast movement in Bulgaria. He applied his wisdom and his skill as Patriarch to the rectification of moral order in the Orthodox Church and to the proper division of the word of Truth.

Saint Evtimii was in charge of commanding the Bulgarian forces at the disastrous Siege of Tărnovo in 1393, when the city was overthrown and razed by the rapacious Turks under the command of Süleyman Çelebi. Saint Evtimii had been left in command by Tsar Ivan Shishman, who was off with the main army defending Nikopol. For three months Saint Evtimii encouraged the Bulgarian forces to hold out against the Turkish foe, however – as Gregory Tsamblak suggests – Tărnovo may have been betrayed from the inside by members of one of the non-Christian neighbourhoods inside the city. The Turks entered and engaged in wholesale slaughter of the inhabitants, including 110 of the boyars and prominent citizens of the city, and desecration of the churches. Saint Evtimii was spared from this holocaust and sent into exile in Bachkovo Monastery in Thrace. Saint Evtimii reposed perhaps around the year 1402. Unfortunately, we do not know where he is buried. The death of Saint Evtimii and the destruction of Bulgaria by the Turks tragically spelled the end of the Tărnovo Patriarchate, which was subsequently subjugated to Constantinople. Only in 1870 were the historical rights of the Bulgarian Patriarchate restored. Holy hierarch Evtimii, holy hesychast and great teacher of piety to the Bulgarian people, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

Apolytikion for Saint Evtimii of Tărnovo, Tone 4:

In truth you were revealed to your flock as a rule of faith,
An image of humility and a teacher of abstinence;
Your humility exalted you;
Your poverty enriched you.
Hierarch Father Evtimii,
Entreat Christ our God
That our souls may be saved.

Patriarchal Monastery of the Holy Trinity, Tărnovo, Bulgaria

Congress as ‘sacred ground’?

Cross-posted from Every Thought Captive at Ancient Faith Radio:

To listen to the New York Times and the Washington Post tell it, the events of 6 January were nothing less than an unforgivable act of sacrilege and blasphemy. ‘Inside the most sacred spaces of American democracy,’ went the New York Times report by Grynbaum, Koblin and Hsu, unfolded an abomination of desolation worthy of the breaking news format ‘reserved for foreign wars, natural disasters or terrorist attacks’.

Now, I am someone who likes public order and stability as public goods. Order and stability are valuable no matter where they happen to be. So yes, I was naturally upset by what was essentially a riot aimed at overturning an election result in contravention of the established law of the land. I firmly believe that the rioters in DC were in the wrong, for the same reasons I believe that the looters and shooters here in Minneapolis over the summer were in the wrong. I also believe it is a very bleak indicator of the direction that our country is, in general, headed. But is it not intriguing that these established organs of the national news media would be so insistent on the sacrality of the buildings of the national government, when they have shown so little respect to public monuments elsewhere in the country? Is not the New York Times in its insistence on this public sacrality not being monumentally hypocritical, after having given space to a project – to wit, the 1619 Project – that was meant specifically to axe the root of American civil religion in the first place?

Of course, one can look at this in a cynical way. The New York Times arrogates to itself the right to attack national institutions, national statuary and national history, which it then denies to those who are not in the clique. We can look at this as a simple demarcation on the New York Times’s part between ‘friends’ (woke liberals, whose attacks on American civil religion are humane and righteous) and ‘enemies’ (conservative deplorables, whose attacks on the same are treasonous and wicked). But I think the actual stakes run quite a bit deeper than that. The riots that happened last week in DC, and the heated language around them in the press, are indicative of what is essentially a religious conflict, a contest of political myths, that attempt to orient the body politic toward very different objects of public veneration.

The 1619 Project’s actual aim from the beginning was to ‘reframe’ American history to centre the narrative around the oppressed. Unfortunately Nikole Hannah-Jones has been remarkably coy about her overall purpose (not to mention her corporate sponsors). However, I think it is reasonable to say that it attempts to create and promote an alternative revisionist history of the United States from its roots in British colonialism. The objects of veneration that can be seen most clearly in the 1619 Project are the individuals in American history, who: (a) belonged to groups seen to be historically oppressed, and (b) are seen to have worked toward ends of political or sexual liberation for their oppressed group.

On the other hand, we now also have a 1776 Project, supported by – for example – The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf, as well as a broad array of historical scholars from the (Trotskyist) left, the liberal centre and the conservative right. These scholars rightly point out that the 1619 Project is ideologically motivated. However, the aim of the 1776 Project goes further than simply debunking the factual or interpretive missteps of Hannah-Jones and her fellow contributors to the New York Times. Their aim is instead to preserve and expand an ideological reading of history that places the fundamentally deistic and nominalist ideas of the American experiment at the centre of the same world-historical struggle for liberation. The aim is to preserve the Founding Fathers, the ideological principles of the founding documents, and an abstract concept of liberty as the objects of public veneration.

As Orthodox Christians, the first thing we need to understand is that these duelling myths are not our myths. Both myths are grounded in a historical naïveté about human nature and the potential for human perfection apart from God’s grace. We do not and cannot recognise a salvation of the world through abstract ideas like representative government, or through pieces of paper like the Constitution of the United States. We do not hold any truth to be ‘self-evident’ other than the Living Truth, which is the truth of one Essence in three Persons that is rendered visible and intelligible to us in the God-man, Jesus of Nazareth. I stand in full agreement with Orthodox theologians like Christos Yannaras and Vigen Guroian – and, for that matter, non-Orthodox theologians like Stanley Hauerwas and John Milbank – when they voice their doubts about the fundamental soundness of America’s founding ideology and its commensurability with the revealed truth of Christ’s Person.

However, we can and should recognise that governments – even governments that are held captive to wicked men or to erroneous ideas – are nevertheless given their authority and legitimacy by God. Christians in America should still give due gratitude and respect to the establishment of justice and the insurance of domestic tranquillity – to borrow the language of the Constitutional Preamble – that the American state has (at its best) been able to provide to most of its citizens, including us. These public goods are precious and desirable, and we recognise them in every Divine Liturgy – when we pray to the Lord ‘for our country, for the president, and for all in public service… For this city, and for every city and land, and for the faithful who live in them… For favorable weather, for an abundance of the fruits of the earth, and for peaceful times’.

We are compelled to pray for the country, for our cities, and for those in public service. This means that we are also compelled to seek their good. It is therefore wrong to support an unlawful riot in our nation’s capital, which seeks to maintain the President in contravention of our established Constitutional order. On the other hand, however, we must be careful not to indulge in the sorts of sentimentality that the President’s most vocal critics indulge in, when they describe the halls of our government as ‘sacred’. This is a form of idolatry, and we must oppose this as well.

Holy Hierarch Ioakim, Patriarch of Tărnovo and All Bulgaria

Saint Ioakim of Tărnovo

The eighteenth of January in the Orthodox Church is the feast-day and commemoration of another great mediæval South Slavic holy man, Patriarch Saint Ioakim I of Tărnovo. Saint Ioakim was a stalwart defender of the Orthodox faith in the Bulgarian lands during troublous times, as well as being a firm friend of the poor, the widows and the orphans. He was known in particular for his opposition to the death penalty and his intercessions with the Bulgarian Tsars on behalf of condemned prisoners.

Saint Ioakim [Bg. Иоаким] was born toward the tail end of the twelfth century, and was a ‘native Bulgarian’ according to the hagiographical account. Little appears to be known about his early life, but he committed himself to the monastic life of ascetic struggle, and spent much of his early life on the Holy Mountain of Athos. Stern towards himself but lenient toward others, Saint Ioakim became renowned for his rigorous rule of prayer, fasting and vigils – as well as for his selfless obedience to the Athonite fathers he served, and for the persistence and consistency in applying himself to the struggle against the passions. His humility and piety became renowned on Athos, and monks began to seek him out.

After ‘a long time’, according to the hagiography, Ioakim returned to his native Bulgaria. The hagiography itself gives no reason for this, but later Bulgarian commentators suggest that it may have come from a humble desire to flee vainglory and his own fame as a spiritual elder, or perhaps from a righteous desire to enlighten the land where he was born. He settled in a place called Krasen near the banks of the Danube – which is probably somewhere near Cherven at the source of the Rusenski Lom in northeastern Bulgaria. He established the Church of the Holy Transfiguration, and settled there with three disciples: Diomid, Atanasii and Teodosii.

He was approached by Tsar Ivan Asen II, who was desirous of the counsel of the holy man, and wished to speak with him on the topics of salvation. As a gift the Tsar brought with him a great deal of gold. The hermit Ioakim used this gold to hire workers, and they built a great rock-hewn monastic complex near Ivanovo, which is still standing today, and which is famous for the beautiful frescoes which adorn the inner walls. This monastery Ioakim built so that it could house all of the postulants and seekers who came to him seeking the word of Truth, and here he kept to the rules of prayer and fasting that he had observed his entire monastic life.

According to the Life of Saint Sava of Serbia, on December of the year 1234 the great Saint Sava of Serbia visited Tărnovo, and was greeted with hospitality and enthusiasm by both the Tsar and by Saint Ioakim. Together Saint Sava and Saint Ioakim concelebrated the Feast of Theophany. When Saint Sava fell ill and died some days later, Saint Ioakim himself cared for the saint on his deathbed, presided at the saint’s funeral, and had him interred with great honour in the Church of the Forty Martyrs.

The following pages of his hagiography are sadly no longer extant. These pages deal, perhaps, with the (re)establishment of the Bulgarian Patriarchate in 1235 with its primary see at Tărnovo. This happened at a Church council convoked in Lampsakos in Asia Minor. It was here, perhaps, that Saint Ioakim was proclaimed Patriarch of Bulgaria at Tsar Ivan Asen II’s express request, and with the blessing of ‘the bishops of the whole Bulgarian land’, and was confirmed and granted the omophorion by the Œcumenical Patriarch Germanos II of Constantinople.

As Patriarch, Saint Ioakim ‘blessed and enlightened the whole of the Bulgarian land’. His hagiography also lays particular stress on the fact that he showed ‘mercy to the orphans, gave to the needy and to the poor, visited those in prison; and he offered unceasing prayers at every hour; and saved many who were sentenced to death, and saved many who resorted to him from the wrath of the Tsar’. The hagiography of Saint Sava refers to the ‘honest and holy’ Patriarch Ioakim of Bulgaria. Saint Ioakim came to the end of his earthly life on the eighteenth of January 1246, probably when he was of a very advanced age. He was given to know in advance of his impending death; therefore he gathered his disciples and the clergy around them, exhorted them to uphold the Orthodox faith, begged their forgiveness for any wrong that he had done them, and forgave them all in turn. He reposed peaceably in the Lord. So fondly did his contemporaries remember him, that the thirteenth century had not ended before Ioakim was glorified in the Bulgarian Orthodox Church as a saint. Holy hierarch Ioakim, friend to the poor and intercessor on behalf of the guilty and condemned, stand too before Christ our Lord on behalf of us sinners and beseech His great mercy!

Apolytikion for Saint Ioakim of Tărnovo, Tone 4:

In truth you were revealed to your flock as a rule of faith,
An image of humility and a teacher of abstinence;
Your humility exalted you;
Your poverty enriched you.
Hierarch Father Ioakim,
Entreat Christ our God
That our souls may be saved.

Rock-hewn Churches of the Ivanovo, Bulgaria