Five points on the Ukraine conflict

1. The Russian assault on the Ukraine is morally wrong, full stop. Ukrainians do not in the least deserve what Russia is doing to them as we speak. Indeed, they have not deserved what has been done to them by multiple actors since (and including) the ouster of Yanukovych in 2014. I stand firmly with Metropolitan Onufriy of Kiev, and support and endorse his call upon President Vladimir Putin for an immediate cessation of violence.


2. This war was entirely preventable from multiple sides. It is an expression of a long-standing failure of diplomacy between NATO countries and Russia, going back at least to 2008, possibly even to 2004. Given what happened to Yugoslavia five years prior to that, Russian distrust of NATO is entirely legitimate and warranted.


3. It is also an expression of long-standing failure of peace-keeping in afflicted areas like the Donetsk Basin. The people in the Donetsk Basin have been suffering mortar attacks and wanton destruction of their schools, hospitals and homes for the past eight years, and the culprits of this waste of human life and limb have been overwhelmingly the Ukrainian Army.


4. The long ignorance of people for the humanitarian suffering in Donbass, over the past eight years, is intolerable. The people who are only now discovering that being mortared non-stop by a hostile army from across a line of control is bad, have some deep soul-searching to do.


5. Reiterate point 4, a fortiori, for Yemen, Syria, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia. Remember the commandment: Thou shalt give equal worth to tragedies that occur in non-English speaking countries, as to those that occur in English speaking countries.

May peace and justice prevail. May God have mercy upon the Ukraine. May God have mercy upon the Donbass. May God have mercy upon Russia. And may God have mercy upon us all.

The spirit of Patriarch Pavle lives on

A couple of weeks back, the Romanian website Iubesc Ortodoxia posted the above photograph of Archbishop Theophanes (Kim) of Korea, riding the bus. At a time when bishops of certain other jurisdictions are toodling about in Holden Caprices and such, at least the spirit of humility that motivated Patriarch Pavle of Serbia still lives on among the bishops of the Far East. May God grant Archbishop Theophanes many years!

Holy and Righteous Jovan Vladimir, Prince-Martyr of Duklja

Saint Jovan Vladimir of Duklja

Today in the Holy Orthodox Church we commemorate a young man of blameless life, the Serbian prince Jovan Vladimir, who ruled the principality of Duklja – what is now Montenegro – around the turn of the eleventh century. A young ruler who was killed unjustly for political reasons, his life mirrors those of the Russian princely martyrs Boris and Gleb, the Bohemian ducal martyr Václav and the Old English atheling Éadweard.

Jovan Vladimir [Srb. Јован Владимир] was born in the year 990. Having been raised according to Christian principles by his father Peter [or Petrislav] of Duklja, he ruled the principality from his childhood, and upon his majority he was already considered to be a thoughtful, peaceful and just ruler – and was described as such by the Byzantine historian John Skylitzēs. He ruled from a hill named Kraljič, which is currently the village of Koštanjica in southeastern Montenegro. It was his misfortune that he was born during a period of protracted warfare between the Bulgarian Empire and the Byzantine Empire. His father had been approached by Emperor Basil II ‘the Bulgar-Slayer’ for support against the Bulgarians; although Peter did not send any soldiers, the diplomatic relations between Duklja and Byzantium remained cordial under Jovan Vladimir. The Bulgarian Tsar Samuil attacked Duklja in the year 1009, in order to head off a possible alliance that could undermine him. Jovan Vladimir retreated with his armies to Oblik, which was infested with venomous snakes. Offering a prayer to the Lord, he asked for Christ’s aid. As a result, the snakes became tame and did not attack his soldiers.

Samuil lay siege to Oblik, and Jovan Vladimir, not wishing to cause his people any further suffering from violence and starvation, surrendered himself into the hands of the Bulgarian Tsar. He was taken in chains to the Tsar’s capital at Prespa (today Little Prespa Lake in Greece), and thrown into the dungeons. What happened afterwards became the basis for one of the truly great High Medieval romances.

Samuil had a daughter whose name was Teodora Kosara. This young woman was deeply pious and minded to follow Christ; upon hearing that her father had taken many captives in Duklja, she asked his permission to go with her maids and wash the feet of the captives in imitation of Our Lord. Seeing no harm in granting this wish, her father allowed it. Kosara descended into the dungeons and began to carry out her good work. She began to wash the feet of a young man of her own years. Looking up at him, she found him handsome. Engaging him in conversation, she found him to be sweet and gentle and modest in character, and full of wisdom and knowledge of holy things: ‘to her his speech seemed sweeter than honey and the honeycomb’.

Having fallen for her father’s hostage, Kosara went straight back to Tsar Samuil and asked to be given to Jovan Vladimir in marriage. Samuil found this proposition expedient, as it would allow him to retain control over Duklja without having to resort to force of arms. (Samuil seems to have been led by the nose by his daughters in this respect. His elder daughter Miroslava had similarly pled for the hand of the Armenian prince Ashot of Taron and was granted it.) He freed Jovan Vladimir from prison, married his daughter to him, and placed him as his vassal over the lands of Duklja.

Jovan Vladimir and Teodora Kosara had one daughter together, who ended up marrying the Serbian prince Stefan Vojislav. When Samuil died of a heart attack in 1014 following a military defeat at the hands of the Greeks, his son and Kosara’s brother, the chivalrous Gavril Radomir, ascended to the throne of the Bulgarian Empire. However, he did not reign long. The following year, however, his cousin Ivan Vladislav assassinated Gavril, and then usurped power for himself. Seeking to stamp out any further threats to his consolidation of power, Ivan Vladislav then made a plot to cut off Kosara from political consideration by murdering her husband. He issued an ‘invitation’ to the Serbian prince to join him in Prespa.

According to Skylitzēs, Jovan Vladimir would have gone himself, but his wife insisted on going in his place and making a demand for his safe passage. Vladislav welcomed Kosara and offered her a golden cross to take back to Vladimir as a token, but Vladimir refused it, saying that he would accept instead a wooden cross similar to the one that Christ was crucified on, from the hands of a priest. Vladislav sent two bishops and a hermit with the wooden cross which he had taken an oath on, and Jovan Vladimir kissed it and took it with him to Prespa. He went into a church to pray, and as he was leaving the church, he was taken by Vladislav’s soldiers and beheaded on the very church steps. In this way he met his death in a Christlike way at the hands of a political rival.

His wife, Teodora Kosara, never remarried. She transported the remains of her beloved husband from Prespa back to Duklja and had them buried at the Prečista Krajinska Church close to Jovan Vladimir’s main court. She herself became a nun and entered a community of monastics nearby. When she herself reposed, she requested that she be buried at her husband’s feet. The relics were translated from thence by the Despots of Epirus, from which they fell into the hands of the Arberian warlord Karl Topia in the late 1300s; he had a church erected in Saint Jovan’s honour in Elbasan in central Albania.

Saint Jovan Vladimir was the first of many Serbian princes to be recognised as a saint, as many of the descendants of Saint Stefan Nemanja, including most notably the glorious Saint Sava, were cut from a similar God-fearing cloth. Holy martyr Jovan Vladimir, blameless sufferer and believer in the saving Cross, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

Apolytikion for Saint Jovan Vladimir, Tone 3:

Your holy martyr John, 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!

Church of St Jovan Vladimir, Bar, Montenegro

Holy New Martyrs of Batak

Icon of the Martyrs of Batak

The Orthodox Church commemorates today the New Martyrs of Batak – the people who died in that village during the April Uprising, as a result of the Ottoman atrocities. The Batak martyrs are important not only to Orthodox history, but to the history of radicalism in the UK and the West more broadly. The Eastern Question Association was formed largely in response to the reports of the slaughter at Batak. Indeed, William Morris’s own pro-Russian and anti-imperialist sentiments were galvanised by his sympathy for the suffering Bulgarian peasantry.

The Bulgarian cause, which was highlighted and commemorated in literature by Ivan Vazov, in fact grew out of the Ottoman Empire’s attempts to modernise and to establish a bureaucratic uniformity over all of its territories. In order to meet a budget deficit in the mid-1870s, the Ottoman Empire began to cut services and raise taxes on its Christian population, particularly in the Balkans. This led to tensions and uprisings, particularly in Herzegovina by the Bosnian Serbs. The Bulgarian people as well rose in revolt in 1876 after several stages of careful planning. They stockpiled ammunition and had even begun making makeshift cannon out of cherry wood. Four revolutionary districts were established, at Vratsa, Veliko Tărnovo, Sliven and Plovdiv. Planning for a fifth revolutionary district in Sofia had to be discontinued on account of the poor local conditions, and the Plovdiv revolutionary district was moved to Panagyurishte.

The Panagyurishte district leaders met to discuss strategy, but one of the delegates of the district betrayed them to the Ottoman authorities. After the revolt started and the Bulgarian revolutionaries had attacked the local police, expecting other groups around the country to do the same, the Ottoman army, which had advanced warning of the uprising, moved in to crush the rebellion. They relied heavily on Slavic Muslim irregulars – başı-bozuks – commanded by Ahmet Aga, to subdue the populace. After an initial skirmish, the rebel leaders in Batak, one of the main villages in the Panagyurishte district, surrendered to the Turks on a promise that the village would be spared. That promise was not honoured.

What happened after that was one of the single most gruesome mass killings committed on European soil in the nineteenth century. As many as five thousand civilians in Batak were rounded up and systematically shot, tortured, mutilated, raped, beheaded, impaled and burnt alive. The last torturous death was the one Ahmet Aga commanded for the leader of the rebellion, Trendafil Kerelov. Some of the villagers fled for safety into the Holy Sunday Church (Света Неделя) in Batak and barricaded themselves inside. They held off the başı-bozuks for three days, during which time the Turks repeatedly fired on the church and tried to scale the roof and bash in the doors. It was thirst which drove the survivors out, and when they surrendered they too were put to the sword and beheaded.

The massacre was reported in the Western press by Ohio war correspondent Januarius MacGahan and New York diplomat Eugene Schuyler, who managed to visit Batak, albeit with significant hindrance from the Ottoman bureaucracy, several days after the massacre. MacGahan wrote:

We looked into the church which had been blackened by the burning of the woodwork, but not destroyed, nor even much injured. It was a low building with a low roof, supported by heavy irregular arches, that as we looked in seemed scarcely high enough for a tall man to stand under. What we saw there was too frightful for more than a hasty glance. An immense number of bodies had been partly burnt there and the charred and blackened remains, that seemed to fill it half way up to the low dark arches and make them lower and darker still, were lying in a state of putrefaction too frightful to look upon. I had never imagined anything so horrible. We all turned away sick and faint, and staggered out of the fearful pest house glad to get into the street again. We walked about the place and saw the same things repeated over and over a hundred times. Skeletons of men with the clothing and flesh still hanging to and rotting together; skulls of women, with the hair dragging in the dust, bones of children and of infants everywhere. Here they show us a house where twenty people were burned alive; there another where a dozen girls had taken refuge, and been slaughtered to the last one, as their bones amply testified. Everywhere horrors upon horrors.

As a result of this investigative reporting by MacGahan and Schuyler, the reaction to the Bulgarian atrocities was widespread and profound. The Disraeli government’s policy of support for the Ottoman Empire was roundly discredited in the eyes of the British public, and not least among the radicals, whose activity also began to take on an anti-war and anti-imperialist perspective on account of the ‘Eastern Question’. As a result, the British government declined to aid their traditional Ottoman friends during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877 – which resulted in the liberation of Bulgaria from Ottoman tyranny.

The cost borne by the Bulgarian people, however, was altogether too high. Even today, the Holy Sunday Church in Batak has been rededicated as a shrine to those killed in the massacre, and the bones of the victims have been preserved. The memory of these martyrs is still of great importance to the Bulgarian people and to the Orthodox Church. Holy new martyrs of Batak, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

Holy Sunday Church, Batak, Bulgaria

Holy New Martyr Raiko of Shumen

Saint Raiko of Shumen

The fourteenth of May in the Orthodox Church is the feast-day of Saint Raiko of Shumen, who is also called Ioan or John. This young Bulgarian martyr was another of the many innocent victims of Ottoman Turkish oppression in the Balkans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Saint Raiko [Bg. Райко] or Ioan [Bg. Йоан] was born in 1784 in the northeastern Bulgarian town of Shumen. He was quite good-looking for his age, but he worked as a goldsmith, which at that time was a fairly disreputable trade. He was suspected of working for the Ottoman lords who ruled Bulgaria at the time. However, his faith was quite firmly in Christ.

In 1802, when Raiko was eighteen, he was contracted for an order by a rich Muslim who lived across the street from his shop. One of the women in the house noticed Raiko, and she tried to take him into her room. Raiko refused her advances. Humiliated and enraged, the young woman then accused Raiko of trying to sexually assault her. The Muslim master of the house brought her accusation before the local qâḍî, or judge. The judge told Raiko that he had two choices: he could either convert to Islâm and marry his accuser, or he could suffer punishment. Raiko refused to convert, saying that he had done nothing to the woman, and that he had only fulfilled the order as a workman that he had been given.

The qâḍî then ordered that Raiko be tortured. The executioners beat him, flayed the skin from his flesh and poured salt in the wounds, drove wooden spikes under his nails. They even hanged him from the ceiling of his prison cell several times and cut him down before his neck broke, the result of which nearly killed him. Then he was brought back before the judge. This time he was promised gifts and various honours if he converted, but still Raiko refused to forsake Christ. Again he was tortured – he was broken on a wheel and his flesh was burnt with lit torches. At the end he was beheaded, and in this way he achieved the laurels of the martyrs and the kingdom of heaven. This occurred on the fourteenth of May, 1802.

The martyrdom of Saint Raiko was recorded by the great hagiographer Saint Nikēphoros of Chios, and an icon was painted of the saint and placed in the Church of the Ascension in Shumen. Local commemorations were held for Saint Raiko – for example, in 2001 – however, he was not formally glorified by the Bulgarian Orthodox Church until June of 2017. Holy new martyr Raiko, innocent confessor of Christ who bore false accusation and torture, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

Holy New Martyrs of Novo Selo

Holy New Martyrs of Novo Selo

The ninth of May is justly commemorated in the countries of the former Soviet Union as Victory Day, the day when the united forces of Eurasia were able to force Germany to surrender and stopped a genocide against Europe’s Jews, Romani and others who were targeted for extermination by the Nazis. However flawed the Soviet Union may have been, and however messy the historical truth of that victory, speaking as a descendant of European Jews, I am thankful to the Soviet citizens who gave their lives in defence of their homelands and in defence of humanity.

In Bulgaria, however, the Orthodox Church commemorates – more sombrely – the victims of another campaign of systematic mass murder, one carried out seventy years prior by the Ottoman Empire. After the failed uprising of 1876, remembered in Ivan Vazov’s seminal novel Under the Yoke, the Ottoman Turks took out reprisals on the civilian populations of a number of villages in central Bulgaria, and burned them to the ground. Among these were the four villages in the vicinity of what is now the town of Apriltsi in Lovech Province: Novo Selo, Zla Reka, Vidima and Ostrets. About seven hundred Bulgarian innocents died in this suppression. In the aftermath of the uprising, Turkish troops and bashi-bazouk irregulars killed a total of somewhere between 15,000 and 30,000 Bulgarian civilians.

In particular, the Holy Trinity Monastery in Novo Selo was plundered and burnt by the Turkish troops, and its defenders – the nuns of Holy Trinity, and the priest Fr Georgi Hristov – were slaughtered. After the liberation of Bulgaria from the Ottoman yoke, the surrounding villages pooled together their resources and volunteers set out to reconstruct the monastery. The chapel behind the monastery was turned into a museum, which still shows the bones of the people who died at Novo Selo. Together with the five thousand who died at Batak, the seven hundred who died in Novo Selo were glorified by the Bulgarian Orthodox Church on the eleventh of March, 2011. Holy martyrs of Novo Selo, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

Holy Trinity Monastery, Novo Selo, Bulgaria

Old Britain and the Balkans: similitudes of sanctity

I’ve observed several strong commonalities as I’ve explored the hagiographies of the old Celtic saints and the saints of Bulgaria, Romania and Serbia. The style of monasticism which prevailed in each place is remarkably similar, with the Celtic style of monasticism privileging the lonely hermitage over the organised abbey. This style of monasticism is also prevalent in Romania and in Bulgaria even in modern times. This similitude presents itself in several ways in the hagiographies of these saints.

It is easy enough to see the commonalities, for example, between the hagiographies of Saint Melangell of Pennant and Saint Teodora of the Carpathians. Both women were engaged to men by their parents against their wishes, and sought out lonely hermitages in the wilderness when the time allowed; both were also quite close to nature and befriended wild animals. Equally so between Saint Illtud the Knight and Saint Prohor of Pčinja: both hermits protected deer from kingly hunters in their cells, and in turn served as mentors to the same kingly hunters, giving them spiritual guidance. And even the princes can sometimes appear similar! The abdication of the throne and resulting monastic obedience willingly undertaken by Saint Boris Mihail of Bulgaria mirrors the earlier monastic abdications of Celtic princes like Saint Elaeth, Saint Pabo and both Saints Custennin.

Bulgaria always has been remarkably westward-facing even among the Orthodox countries, going as far back as Boris Mihail. The position that Bulgaria occupied in the mediæval world as a buffer state between Byzantium and Francia ensured that certain forms of cultural exchange would be welcomed there. But this does not quite explain the similitudes between the animal-loving, near-to-nature, eremitical asceticism of the Celtic countries in the far chilly northwest of Europe, and the same phenomenon on the milder, more temperate southeast end of Europe.

What may explain it more thoroughly are the shared roots that each monastic tradition, the upper Balkan one and the Celtic one, have in the hermitages of the Ægyptian desert. William Dalrymple in his excellent book From the Holy Mountain explores the linkages between the early Ægyptian monastics and the saints of early Scotland and Ireland; Fr Gregory Telepneff also discusses this linkage in The Egyptian Desert in the Irish Bogs. Bulgaria, Serbia and Romania also received tutelage directly from the Ægyptian deserts in the Middle Ages, in the form of the leader of the hesychast movement Saint Gregory of Sinai, who spent the bulk of his life and took the Great Schema on that mountain, and only later in his life made the journey to Athos and then to Strandzha in Bulgaria. Hesychasm had a profound influence on the spirituality of the upper Balkans, and certainly influenced the character of the ascetics of the region.

The similarities of the Old British saints and the Balkan saints, however, should prompt reflection. More important than their shared roots are the lessons that we need to take from their lives. The kenotic, forgiving, nature-loving and wealth-renouncing nature of the Old British and Old Irish ascetics in particular ought rightly to be considered a part of the spiritual heritage of the English-speaking world, including North America. The saints whose example we venerate publicly, such as Saint Patrick, convey to us a distinctive spirituality. The Christianity which comes down to us from the Celts is distinguished by its love of nature, by its insistence of the immanence of God in all created things, by radical hospitality to the poor, by simplicity of spirit, by everyday prayer, by a particular care for children (especially orphans) and widows, and by a love for both Scripture and scholarship.

It strikes me that to honour this spiritual heritage correctly, we must defend the natural created order from destruction and sacrilege – and in particular defend our precious sources of clean fresh water. We must insist on the presence of God in that order. We must not only personally show hospitality and care for the poor, but also advocate for public policies that humanise the poor and working classes and treat them as worthy of life. We must aim for a greater simplicity of spirit – even, I will dare say, chastity – in our public and private lives. We must make space for prayer. We must make policies that encourage the healthy growth and flourishing of children, and which protect the most vulnerable – including the unborn. We should witness to such policies with the help of the Old Testament prophets and the founders of the Church. And we should exert ourselves to defeat the spirit of anti-intellectualism and anti-professionalism that continues to manifest itself in our culture.

Now, I understand that I tend to romanticise certain places, times and trends. And I understand quite well that Bulgaria, Romania, Moldova, Serbia and so forth are far from perfect. But a country that can publicly honour someone like Dobri Dobrev, who would likely be simply ignored here, clearly has something going for it. I would like to see a society that can begin to honour its Dobri Dobrevs again. That would be a good first step towards honouring the Christian heritage shared by Celtic, Balkan and Middle Eastern Christians.

Righteous Tsar Boris Mihail, Equal-to-the-Apostles, Enlightener of the Bulgarians

Tsar Saint Boris Mihail of Bulgaria

Christ is Risen!

Today is Holy Pascha, the Feast of Feasts, the Resurrection of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Today we celebrate the holy eucatastrophe, the inversion of the logic of the fallen created order – in short, we celebrate the defeat of death. Rejoicing is a difficult thing for me right now, but still I rejoice in this: that human beings and systems will not have the last word, and that human faltering and failure are not the sum total of our existence, and that even death, which seems to be all-powerful and all-consuming in this world, is broken.

It also happens to be – and he would be a shame to ignore now, given just the fact of how fascinating the guy is – the feast day of Tsar Saint Boris Mihail, one of the pivotal figures in mediæval European history. To understand why he was so important to the shape of Europe of the 800s, it’s necessary to understand his historical and political surroundings.

First of all, there was the political crisis of the east-west division of Christendom, which had been a long time in the brewing. Although Empress Eirēnē of the Eastern Roman Empire had upheld the faith that was proclaimed in both West and East and officially ended iconoclasm by convoking the Second Council of Nicæa, in 800 Pope Leo III nevertheless anointed the Frankish king Karl the Big as ‘Roman’ ‘Emperor’ on the rather misogynistic legal pretext that the Roman Empire could not be ruled by a woman. (Ulpia Severina, Augusta of Rome after the death of her husband Aurelian in 274, may well have had a few things to say about that.) This political manœuvre, as well as justly infuriating Empress Eirēnē, further alienated the Church in the West from the Church in the East, and created a long power struggle between the Frankish kingdom and Eastern Rome that would shape many of the subsequent political conflicts in Central Europe.

Second, there was the unification of the Western Slavic tribes to Bulgaria’s northwest under Mojmír, which took place amidst the power vacuum left by the defeat of the Pannonian Avars by the Franks. This confederation was Great Moravia. And although the Moravians were technically a vassal state of the Carolingian kingdom, in practice they turned out to be far more independent than the Franks liked.

And third, there was Bulgaria itself. Upon his accession to the khaganate, Boris had inherited from his prædecessors Krum the Fearsome, Omurtag the Builder and his father Presiyan a sprawling, massive territory that stretched from Ohrid to the Dneister, and from the modern-day site of Budapest to the Black Sea. This territory, as any student of Balkan history can tell you, is difficult at the best of times to keep united and well-defended, and Boris was always going to have an uphill row to hoe when it came to protecting it all from incursions by Eastern Rome, by the Serbs, by the Croats, by the Pannonian Slavs, by the Magyars and by the newly-arrived Moravians. What’s more, under Presiyan – as prophesied by Saint Boyan-Enravota – the various tribes of Slavic peasants ruled by the Turkic Bulghar lordly class had already begun converting to Christianity. The new khaghan needed, as much for political and diplomatic reasons as for spiritual ones, to unite his people around one faith.

So. Enter Boris [Bg. Борис].

Boris, the son of the aforementioned Presiyan, had no sooner come to power in 852 than his rule was tested by numerous border wars with Greeks, Serbs, Croats and Franks… wars in which he tended to come off a bit the worse for wear each time. These wars lasted almost until the end of the 860s. He was first an ally and then a rival of the saintly King Rastislav of Great Moravia. He turned his attention between the Frankish Empire and the Eastern Roman Empire as both of them kept pressuring him along his borders.

Boris, thankfully for the Bulgarians, was no fool. He understood well enough that in order to keep the Slavs he commanded from rebelling against him or being subsumed into the kingdoms around him, he would need to convert to Christianity eventually. He understood quite astutely the nature of the rivalry between the ‘Roman Emperor’ in the West and the Roman Emperor in the East, and managed with remarkable political adroitness to ‘play both sides’… even when he was on the losing end militarily. At first, the khaghan leaned pretty heavily toward Rome rather than Constantinople. Needing to counterbalance against Rastislav’s Moravians combined with Karloman in revolt, Boris asked for an alliance with Louis the German – a provision of which would have brought Frankish missionaries into Bulgaria, and Bulgaria effectively into the Western Roman political-ecclesiastical ambit. However, in 863, the Eastern Roman Emperor Michael III launched a surprise attack into Bulgarian-controlled Thrace, and forced Boris to come to a peace agreement.

Fatefully, Boris decided to adopt the Eastern Liturgical rites of Emperor Michael III as part of this peace agreement. However, there are indications that he was already preparing to set his face eastward. For one thing, Boris’s half-sister Anna had already converted to Christianity in the Constantinopolitan style, having been held hostage in the Eastern Roman court for several years. For another thing, the Christianity of the Slavic peoples he ruled – coming as it did from the mission of Saints Cyril and Methodius – already followed the Constantinopolitan rubrics and used a language, Slavonic, whose status in the West was notably in dispute. Whatever his ultimate motive (or mixture of motives!), the khaghan Boris agreed to be baptised in secret along with his family at his capital at Pliska. The Byzantine Emperor himself was his sponsor, and he took the Emperor’s name in baptism as his own: Mihail.

Boris Mihail’s baptism provoked an immediate and violent response from the Turkic Bulgarian aristocracy. They saw the Christian faith as an affront to their nomadic traditions as well as their legitimacy. In 865 the pagan boyars staged an open revolt against the newly-christened khaghan. Boris managed to crush the revolt. But despite having been recently baptised, he wasn’t all in on the whole peace, love and forgiveness aspect of Christianity yet. Nope: he went full Shang Yang on the behinds of the defeated rebels. Boris ordered the executions of fifty-two boyars, their wives and their children, exterminating their entire families. To complete the turn away from paganism, Boris Mihail abdicated the Turkic title of khaghan and adopted the Slavic title of knyaz ‘prince’, and the Greek-derived title of tsar ‘emperor’.

There was also the much more delicate matter of ecclesiology, which Boris handled with a much defter and lighter hand. The missionaries which arrived from Constantinople in Bulgaria all served the Liturgy in Greek and commemorated the Patriarch of Constantinople as the head of the Church. But Boris’s ultimate aim was to establish a Slavonic-speaking church that was beholden neither to Constantinople and the Eastern Roman Empire, nor to Rome and the Western ‘Roman’ ‘Empire’. In this aim, he was perfectly happy to keep playing both sides against each other. Despite having had a Constantinopolitan baptism, he sent a very polite envoy to Rome with a list of 115 ecclesiological and legal questions addressed to Pope Nicholas I; he received back a famous reply of 106 answers. The Pope also sent Latin and Frankish missionaries into Bulgaria, headed by Formosus, the ambitious bishop of Porto.

This action produced no small amount of consternation in New Rome, where it was regarded as an encroachment on Constantinopolitan jurisdiction. Archbishop Photios of Constantinople took several steps in answer to the Latin missions in Bulgaria. He produced his own letter to Boris in 866, ‘On the duties of princes’. At the request of Boris’s Moravian neighbours to the northwest, he also sent among them Saints Cyril and Methodius and encouraged the adoption of a Liturgical rite in the Slavonic language. And he began attacking Latin missionaries in general – but Formosus in particular – for adding the filioque clause to the Nicene Creed. Photios’s combative approach to Rome was one decisive factor leading to the ‘Photian schism’ of 867. Boris was able to take deft political strides in the middle of this schism, and by turning his face again to Constantinople in 870 he was able to secure a promise of autocephaly for the Bulgarian Church, with its primate holding the rank of Archbishop.

In Great Moravia, the mission of Saints Cyril and Methodius was meeting both with success and with jealousy. The mission was baptising critical numbers of Slavs, who could now hear the Gospel of Christ spoken in their own tongue. However, this aroused the wrath of the Frankish bishops who sought Moravia as their own jurisdiction. When Rastislav was betrayed to his blinding, confinement and death at the Franks’ hands by his traitorous nephew Svätopluk, the resulting Frankish-controlled Moravian government, at the instigation of the Frankish bishop Wiching, began ruthlessly persecuting the disciples of Methodius, subjecting them to exile, torture, slavery and likely death.

Boris Mihail, never blind to a good opportunity, welcomed the survivors of the mission of Saints Cyril and Methodius into Bulgaria in 886 – in particular Saints Kliment and Naum. He instructed them to build schools and encouraged them to teach native clergy as well as teach any student who wanted the Slavonic letters. They also built up the first major corpus of Liturgical works, hagiographies and other documents in the Slavonic language.

The first Tsar of Bulgaria followed the example in old age of many mediæval princes and kings who had first embraced Christianity in their prime… and here again we see these incidental linkages (as with the eremitical saints in each) between the Church in Britain and the Bulgarian Church. Like Saints Elaeth ‘Frenin’ and Custennin of Strathclyde, Judicaël of Brittany, Ceolwulf of Northumbria, Æþelræd of Mercia and Sigeberht of East Anglia, Tsar Boris Mihail abdicated his throne in favour of his son Vladimir, and entered the monastic life.

Sadly, Vladimir’s faith was not as firm as his father’s. He began destroying the Christian churches, driving out the Christian priests, and proclaiming a revival of paganism. This met with a lukewarm reaction among the boyars (most of whom by now had already converted), and with a much colder reaction from the populace which were already strongly Christian. And it also enraged Boris, who came out of his monastic seclusion in order to raise an army with which to defeat his own son. Boris had Vladimir blinded and thrown into a dungeon, and set up his second son Simeon as Tsar before retiring again to his monastery. Two years later Boris emerged again from his monastery. This time, he helped his son raise an immense army to fend off an invasion of Bulgaria by the pagan Magyars. They defeated them decisively at the Battle of Southern Bug. He then returned to his monastery again, this time permanently, and he reposed in the Lord on the second of May, 907.

As with many of the kingly saints I treat here, Tsar Boris Mihail may not, on first glance, appear very saintly. In particular, his treatment of the pagan boyars after their rebellion and defeat seems unduly harsh. However, the importance of his conversion to the Christian faith of his subjects cannot possibly be overstated. Neither can his insistence on an independent Slavonic-speaking Church, an insistence which the ecclesiology of Constantinople found it could more readily accommodate than that of Rome. And although his conversion to Christianity may have had one or more motives which reek of political advantage, the fact that he forswore all political power after 896 and spent the last decade of his life in solitary contemplative prayer speaks to the influence that the Christian doctrine eventually had upon him. Holy Tsar Boris Mihail, apostolic guide of the Bulgarian people, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

Apolytikion for Saint Boris Mihail of Bulgaria, Tone 6:

Full of the fear of God, and enlightened by holy baptism,
Thou becamest a habitation of the Holy Spirit, O right-believing King Boris;
And having established the Orthodox Faith in the land of Bulgaria,
And set aside the scepter of kingship,
Thou madest thine abode in the wilderness,
Didst flourish in ascetic struggles,
And found grace before the Lord.
And now, standing before the throne of the Most High,
Pray thou, that He grant unto us who entreat thee salvation for our souls.

Holy New Martyr Ignatii of Stara Zagora and Athos

Saint Ignatii of Mount Athos

This Great and Holy Saturday, the day of Christ’s repose in the tomb, is also the first of May – International Labour Day. In addition to this, in the Orthodox Church commemorates on this day the Prophet Jeremiah who preached repentance to the Hebrews that included just wages for the workman, as well as Saint Tamara of Georgia, Saint Berhte of Kent, the seventy-nine monastic martyrs of Sînâ’ and aṭ-Ṭûr in Ægypt, Saint Pafnutii of Borovsk, and another holy monastic martyr: Saint Ignatii, the new martyr of Stara Zagora and Mount Athos. He is remembered alongside his fellow Athonites and fellow sufferers for Christ, Saints Euthymios and Akakios of Mount Athos.

Saint Ignatii [Bg. Игнатий] was born Ivan, in the city of Stara Zagora in Bulgaria. His parents were named Georgii and Mariya. His parents moved from Stara Zagora to Plovdiv when he was still only a small child, and enrolled him at school there. Despite performing well in school, young Ivan was an unusually pious child, and he soon evinced a strong desire for the monastic life. Upon graduating from school and becoming an adult, Ivan entered the novitiate at the Rila Monastery (the mediæval abode of Saint Ivan of Rila). He spent six years living under the rule of a wayward, irascible and tyrannical elder before returning to Plovdiv. The Bulgarian hagiography suggests that Ivan’s uncle Saint Ignatii (Kalpakchiev) – a bandit who repented, turned to God and became a monk – may have been the head of the monastery.

Ivan’s return to Plovdiv was eventful. The Turks were conscripting fighters to put down the Serbian Revolution under Karađorđe Petrović at the time. Georgii was summoned to command an Ottoman brigade in battle against Petrović, but he refused to fight and harm his Serbian brothers in the Orthodox faith. For this, the Turks executed him in a cruel manner, stabbing him multiple times and then beheading him. His wife Mariya and his two daughters – Ivan’s mother and sisters – were forcibly converted to Islâm, and Ivan himself was forced into hiding. He hid with a pious Orthodox woman nearby, but when his sisters learned of it, they betrayed him to the Ottoman authorities. However, the woman he took shelter with bravely defied the Ottoman gendarmes in order to help Ivan escape to the free part of Romania.

Ivan spent some time in Bucharest, where he made the acquaintance of a priest named Elefterie – the future martyr Euthymios – with whom he became friends. However, he soon was gripped by a desire to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Mountain. He left Bucharest some time later, and on his way to Athos he stopped in the town of Shumen, where he learned that Elefterie had renounced Christ and converted to Islâm, taking on the name of Rashîd. Saddened and dismayed by this news, Ivan resumed his journey to Athos. It was not long before he was stopped on the road by Turkish soldiers, who plundered him of all his possessions and at gunpoint demanded his own conversion to Islâm. In fear Ivan gave them a promise that he would, and they rode off, seemingly satisfied with his answer. This promise, however, weighed heavily on Ivan’s conscience.

He made it to Athos and spent some time in the company of a certain Fr Vasilii at the Skete of Saint Anna. After some time he moved to the Iviron Monastery of Saint John the Forerunner, where he was placed under the guidance of Elder Akakios. While at the Iviron Monastery Ivan learned that two men, David and his old friend Fr Elefterie – who had renounced his conversion to Islâm and become a monk by the name of Euthymios – had suffered martyrdom for Christ at the hands of the Turks. Ivan was filled with a flame of zeal, and seeking permission from his spiritual elder Akakios, he was blessed for martyrdom and tonsured a monk by the name of Ignatii. (The Bulgarian Life says that this was in honour of his uncle, the abbot at Rila.)

On the twenty-ninth of September of 1814, Saint Ignatii travelled from Mount Athos in the company of another monk, Grigorii. That Tuesday, he received the Holy Eucharist and thus prepared himself for his ordeal. He changed into Turkish garb and entered the Turkish court where the qâḍî was holding session. He tore the turban off his head and threw it to the ground in front of the judge. There he told his story about how in his travels he had had to lie and promise to convert to Islâm to save his own life, and he thereupon renounced his promise and professed Christ as God. The qâḍî, thinking that this man before him might be insane, tried at first to calm and assuage him, promising him gifts and honours if he would convert to Islâm. Saint Ignatii replied that he knew already about such ‘gifts’, and had come here specifically to refuse them. He further denounced Muḥammad as a false prophet, and invited the Muslims there present to put their faith in Christ.

Speechless with rage, the qâḍî had Saint Ignatii removed from his sight with a wave of his hand, and ordered him to be tortured. Saint Ignatii withstood two days of horrific tortures before the qâḍî summoned him again. Asking who had sent him, Ignatii replied that the Lord Jesus Christ had done so. And then the qâḍî remarked that he should put any hope out of his mind to be beheaded – that he would be sentenced to the more drawn-out death by hanging, so that his blood could not be collected by the Christians for a relic. Saint Ignatii replied that it was all one how he was killed, for he accepted all sufferings for the love of Christ.

Seeing that he could make no headway with him, the qâḍî sentenced Saint Ignatii to be hanged on the eighth of October, 1814. His body was publicly exposed for three days, before the monk Grigorii ransomed the body from the authorities, had it prepared and coffined, and shipped it to Athos. He had Saint Ignatii’s relics placed together with those of Saint Euthymios in the Iviron Monastery. The head of Saint Ignatii currently lies in a place of honour in the Russian Athonite Monastery of Saint Panteleimon.

It is worth remembering Saint Ignatii, Saint Akakios, Saint Euthymios and all those who suffered under the Turkish yoke today. They are holy martyrs for Christ indeed… for the same Christ who sides with all those who are suffering, those who are poor, those who are under exploitation and oppression. It is not an accident that Saint Ignatii’s father chose not to fight in the Ottoman Sultân’s war against Karađorđe and his peasant army, and suffered the ultimate penalty for his conscientious objection. It is also not an accident that God chose for holy martyrdom these two people – Saints Ignatii and Euthymios – who were not at first perfect in their courage, and who did falter and fear and make moral compromises in order to survive. Their experience reflects the struggles and plight of the great many Bulgarian people at the time who suffered under Turkish tyranny. Holy martyrs Euthymios, Ignatii and Akakios, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

Apolytikion for Saint Ignatii of Athos, Tone 8:

The image of God was truly preserved in you, O Father,
For you took up the Cross and followed Christ.
By so doing you taught us to disregard the flesh for it passes away
But to care instead for the soul, since it is immortal.
Therefore your spirit, O venerable Ignatii, rejoices with the angels.

Iviron Monastery of St John the Forerunner, Athos

Holy New Martyr Lazar the Shepherd of Bulgaria

Saint Lazar of Bulgaria

The twenty-third of April, which is the feast-day of Holy Greatmartyr George in the Orthodox Church, is also the feast of another greatmartyr for Christ from the nation of Bulgaria. Saint Lazar the New Martyr of Bulgaria was not a hierarch, not a monk, not an ascetic, not a priest, not a great prince and not even a soldier. He was a simple layman and a shepherd, one of the common folk of the Bulgarian people. But he is more than the equal of any prince and any soldier, and among the greatest of martyrs, when one considers the bravery he showed under questioning and his refusal to forsake Christ even in the face of the worst tortures.

Lazar [Bg. Лазар] was born in the year 1774 in the municipality of Gabrovo in north-central Bulgaria. His parents were simple but God-fearing folk. However, at a young age he was compelled to leave Bulgaria and went to the town of Soma, in the Ægean region of modern-day Turkey. Here he worked as a manual labourer – a shepherd – in the fields.

While tending the flocks of his master one day, he sat down to rest and fell asleep. While he was sleeping, a Muslim woman passed by on the road, and Lazar’s dog attacked her. Lazar woke up to the dog’s barking, and ran up to save her from the dog – he managed to calm the dog down and save the woman, but her skirts were slightly torn and her person somewhat exposed. This infuriated the woman, who went home and told her husband that a low-class Christian had attacked her and tried to rape her. The woman’s husband, equally piqued, went out himself to confront Lazar – but since he did not know Lazar to look at him, he lay hold of another man and beat him nearly to death. In order to cover up his crime, the husband had his wife’s relatives go before the vâli and have Lazar charged with attempted rape.

Lazar heard of this charge in advance, but he did not flee or go into hiding, knowing that he was innocent of the charge. He appeared in court on the seventh of April, 1802. At once he was charged and thrown into prison. The woman’s relatives, in the meantime, pled to the judge that Lazar must either convert to Islâm or suffer the death penalty for the dishonour he had inflicted upon a pious Muslim woman. They even bribed the judge with 1,000 kuruşlar (silver coins each roughly equal in weight to a Spanish silver dollar) if he could manage to convert Lazar to Islâm.

As such, the judge had Lazar regularly beaten over two weeks in prison, until the twenty-second, to make him more amenable to conversion. While he was in prison Orthodox Christians attempted to visit him, to give him gifts and words of encouragement, but Lazar himself told them to leave because they were putting themselves in danger. The vâli grew more and more angry, because the bribe of 1,000 silver pieces was slipping through his fingers and Lazar was no closer to converting to Islâm despite all of the judge’s threats, tortures and flattery.

The judge then appropriated the flock of forty sheep he looked after, and on the twenty-second of April he ordered that more tortures be applied to the unfortunate Lazar. After his tormenters got drunk, they started burning Lazar’s body with red-hot irons. Then they subjected Lazar to peine forte et dure, placing heavier and heavier stones upon his chest. All the while Lazar refused to forsake Christ, but called upon Saint George the Greatmartyr to help him and grant him strength. The torturers then burned out his tongue; and since he was no longer able to speak they told him to use sign language when he was ready to convert. They also prepared a red-hot band of iron which they placed around his head, causing him excruciating pain.

There was a Greek merchant from Zagora in Thessaly, whose name was John, who also served as a medical doctor and a physician to the judge’s family. He went to the window of the prison and saw Lazar sitting on the floor. Despite having been subjected to the iron band, he was clear-headed and lucid; and despite having his tongue burned out, he was able again by the grace of God to speak clearly. John, who was Orthodox, spoke to Lazar in Turkish – because Lazar being Bulgarian and John Greek, neither knew the other’s mother tongue. John encouraged Lazar to endure to the end. Lazar in turn assured John that he would never convert, but that he feared the torturers would just get tired and stop instead of putting him to death.

Upon learning that Lazar could speak, the judge flew into a rage and summoned the torturers, whom he thought had given him a false report. But seeing for himself the marks of the torture on Lazar’s head and tongue, he was convinced that the torturers had indeed done their jobs. Trying to make Lazar convert one final time, Lazar again rejected all worldly riches and honours that he was promised, and told him: ‘I have one God in three Persons; Whom I worship and adore. I was baptised as an Orthodox Christian, and as an Orthodox Christian I shall die.’ The judge then ordered that he be put to death by hanging.

En route to his place of execution, Lazar endured the mockery of the Muslims who jeered at him for the foolishness of dying for Jesus Christ. And when they arrived at the killing-ground, Lazar willingly placed the halter around his own neck and stood on a basket, before the executioner kicked it out from under him. Thus the holy martyr of God earned the laurels equal to those who died under the early persecutions of the faithful. He entered into the company of the saints where he glorifies eternally the one God in three Persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, which he confessed to the judge on his final day –the Feast of Saint George, the twenty-third of April, 1802.

The relics of Saint Lazar of Bulgaria came to rest at the Monastery of Saint Ignatios on the island of Lesvos in Greece, and also at the Chapel of St Kseniya of Russia in the town of Mandra-Eidyllias in Attica. A Church Service in honour of Saint Lazar was composed by Saint Nikēphoros of Chios. Holy martyr Lazar of Bulgaria, despiser of earthly treasures and willing sufferer for the living God, pray unto Christ for us sinners!

Apolytikion for Saint Lazar of Bulgaria, Tone 3:

Your holy martyr Lazar, 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!

Leimonos Monastery of Saint Ignatios, Lesvos, Greece

Holy Righteous Prince Boyan-Enravota, Protomartyr of Bulgaria

Saint Boyan-Enravota of the Bulghars

As well as being the Sunday of Saint Gregory Palamas this year, the twenty-eighth of March is also the feast-day of Saint Enravota, the first Bulgarian martyr for the Orthodox Christian faith. He is also called Saint Boyan, an epithet derived from the Slavic word for ‘warrior’. Saint Enravota is known for being a friend to the captives and merciful to his enemies, though these are not traits one normally thinks to look for in a Turkic chieftain. His conversion to Christianity and his prescient, Divinely-inspired prophecy of Orthodoxy’s spread in Bulgaria led to his martyrdom at the hands of his own family.

Saint Enravota, or Boyan (Bg. Енравота or Боян) was born probably in the early 800s. He belonged to the ruling family of the Old Bulghars, the Dulo clan, which claimed descent from Attila the Hun. The khaghan Asparukh of the Dulo clan, who had originally hailed from the banks of the Volga, migrated south and west along the Black Sea coast, and founded the first Bulgarian state in Thrace in the year 681. This state had a Turkic-speaking, Tengri-worshipping Bulghar ruling class – kin to modern-day Chuvash, Bashkir and Tatar peoples – and a commoner class comprised mostly of Slavs and Thracians, who had for the most part not yet begun the process of Christianisation. It is noteworthy that Saint Enravota is one of the Orthodox saints who is regularly portrayed in traditional iconography, as in the icon above, with Asian features.

Enravota was the eldest son of the Bulghar khaghan Omurtag the Builder, and the grandson of the great khaghan Krum the Fearsome (known for his immense territorial expansions; his strict-but-fair law code which had, for its time, generous welfare provisions for state assistance to beggars; and – oh, yes – fashioning drinking vessels out of the skulls of his fallen enemies). Enravota was of a considerably different temperament than his father and grandfather, which may be one reason why he was passed over for consideration as Omurtag’s heir in preference to his youngest brother Malamir.

The Bulghars were at this point in time constantly at war with the Eastern Roman Empire. This was the old nomadic style of chronic warfare which took the form of harassing one’s neighbours, stealing their chattel and occasionally carrying off captives. During Omurtag’s time this was the norm – the Bulghars would stage raids for cattle and slaves into Byzantine-held territories. One of the captives that was taken by the Bulghars in such a raid was a Christian bishop named Kinamon. When it was learned that Bishop Kinamon was literate and knowledgeable, Omurtag hired him as a tutor for his children – however, Kinamon began teaching them not only reading and writing and the seven liberal arts, but also began to teach them the præcepts of the Christian religion and encourage in them the Christian virtues. Kinamon also refused to take part in the pagan ceremonies of the Bulghar state. Omurtag, under pressure from his boyars and enraged at this corruption and ‘softening’ of his children, had Kinamon seized, tortured and thrown into a dark pit, where he remained as a prisoner for many years.

Malamir had not listened with particular attention to Bishop Kinamon. The elder brother, Enravota, had, and among the first requests he made of Malamir when he became khaghan was to release Kinamon from captivity. This request was granted, and Kinamon was released to Enravota as a slave. But Enravota listened further to Kinamon as he taught him about Christ and the good news of mankind’s salvation and reconciliation to God. Ultimately, Enravota chose to accept baptism and become Christian himself. He was filled with a love of prayer and fasting, and his younger brother took notice.

Malamir demanded that his brother renounce Christianity at once and return to the pagan worship of the Bulghars, but Enravota steadfastly refused. Malamir then ordered – taking upon himself the sin of Cain – that his elder brother be killed. The eleventh-century chronicler Saint Teofilakt of Ohrid gives us a record of the prophetic speech he gave to his brother Malamir before the sentence was carried out:

This faith, which I now die for, will spread and increase across the whole Bulgarian land, although you may wish to oppress it with my death. In any case, the Sign of Christ will establish itself and churches of God will be built everywhere and pure priests will serve the pure God and will deliver ‘sacrifice of praise and confession’ to the life-giving Trinity. Idols, and priests as well, and their ungodly temples, will crumble and will turn into nothing, as if they had not existed. Besides, you alone, after many years, will cast away your ungodly soul without receiving anything in reward for your cruelty.

Saint Enravota was then put to death by the sword, and he joined the ranks of the holy martyrs. This happened in the year 833. It was not long before his prophecies began to be fulfilled, for the mission of Saints Cyril and Methodius was about to begin among the Slavic peoples of Europe. As for Malamir, he died some years later, childless and heirless. The khaghanate passed to his and Enravota’s nephew by the middle brother Zvinitsa, named Presiyan. Presiyan’s son, Saint Boris, would be the one who invited the two remaining of the Seven Saints into Bulgaria – Saint Kliment and Saint Naum. And, just as Saint Enravota predicted, from their efforts the Sign of Christ did establish itself in Bulgaria, churches were built everywhere, and priests were lifted up from among the Bulgarian people to serve and praise God in gladness and singleness of heart. Holy protomartyr Enravota, bearer of God’s Good News to the Bulghar people, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

Apolytikion to Saint Boyan-Enravota of Bulgaria, Tone 3:

Your holy martyr Boyan, O Lord,
Through his suffering 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!

Holy Greatmartyr Georgi the Elder of Sofia

Saint Georgi of Sofia

Today in the Orthodox Church we commemorate a great Bulgarian martyr of the Ottoman yoke, Saint Georgi the Elder of Sofia. In fact, he lived at the time when the Turks had only recently established themselves on the European continent, and he was among the first victims of their fanaticism. Under Ottoman rule, in fact, he served in their army, but he bravely refused to brook insults against Our Lord from the officers, which was the reason for his execution.

Saint Georgi was born in Sofia, probably around the year 1407. We have little knowledge of his parentage, but we know that they were Bulgarians and that they loved him and gave him a good education. His hagiography describes Georgi as a handsome, powerfully-built young man who was also literate. He lived at a time when, as mentioned above, the Turkish enemy was advancing into European Thrace, and the few remaining holdouts of the old Eastern Roman Empire – which in its hubris had descended into petty political bickering, backstabbing and even apostasy from the Orthodox faith – were under significant political pressure from the Ottomans. Georgi may have belonged to one of these minor statelets before they were conquered by the Turks; however afterwards it appears he joined the Ottoman Army without having adopted Islâm.

He was in Adrianopolis, which was renamed Edirne by the Turks, in his armour and military insignia in order to have his bow repaired by a local craftsman in service to the army, who was also a Turk. As the craftsman while working on his weapon, some nearby Turkish soldiers began to blaspheme against Christ. And Saint Georgi, hearing this, could not refrain from saying back to them:

The Lord Jesus Christ, our God, is great and unique and His wisdom is unparalleled. Yours, whom you call a prophet, can’t even be counted among the dogs. Who is like the Lord Jesus Christ our God, Who dwells in the heights and watches over the humble? One alone is Holy, One is the Lord, One is worshipped, Jesus Christ, to the glory of God the Father, amen. What God is as great as our God? He is the sole Creator; all other things are created!

The Turks then flew into a rage, and beat Georgi mercilessly about the face, and then they tried without success to strangle him and then bind him with his own bowstring. However, Georgi being as large and powerful as he was, they could not restrain him, and he continued to confess Christ in His Lordship. The Muslims at last succeeded in binding his hands behind his back, and marched him to the local governor, the vâli. The vâli asked the young soldier if it was true that he had spoken as he had. Georgi owned every one of his words, repeated them, and added still more. The governor ordered him to be tortured on a rack and beaten, and then sent to another official of higher rank.

This official then asked him: ‘Is what I have heard true, you accursed man?’

Georgi answered back: ‘Shall I hide the truth now? What I have said, I have said. Yes, you tyrant – I have spoken everything that you have heard.’

The Turkish official then ordered him to retract his speech, forsake Christ and confess Muhammad as the prophet – promising him honour and gifts if he did so. But Georgi refused, continuing to confess one Lord Jesus Christ, as God and Creator, Who reigns eternally. Then the official handed Georgi over to the mob, which beat him, struck him, spat upon him, and then had him thrown into prison, where he continued to be mocked and tortured.

The Islâmic scholars then came before the official to protest his leniency against Georgi, whom they deemed a blasphemer. When Georgi was called again before the court, he appeared radiant and happy, as though he were about to be presented with high honours. The official had been content to follow the letter of the law, to have him horsewhipped and then released. But the mob demanded that Georgi be put to death by burning at the stake, and the Turkish official feared them, and so he handed Georgi over to the mob and to the pyre that they had already prepared. Georgi approached this fire bravely, knowing that although the enemy could burn his body they could not touch his soul.

Several Turks tried to impede his progress to the pyre and entreated him to recant his Christianity, but Georgi would not listen to them. Two Turkish soldiers struck him in the heart with a sword as he ascended the pyre. As the blaze was lit and he knelt upon the pyre to pray, another soldier ran him through with a spear, disembowelling him. In this way Saint Georgi of Sofia met his martyrdom and joined the ranks of the saints. The Muslims employed various means of preventing the Christians from finding his body. They threw animals on the pyre with him, added fuel to the fire and left it burning from the afternoon until the following morning so that everything was burnt to ashes, and then scattered the ashes away.

However, for several days after this, the Lord saw fit to honour His martyr in a perceptible way. A pillar of fire appeared over the spot where Saint Georgi had been executed, such that everyone living in Edirne could see it. Sometimes it appeared as the light from a gentle candle; at other times it appeared as a small flame; and at other times it appeared as a great star falling from the sky, but remaining in place for hours over that hallowed spot. In 1880 the Ottoman Sultân Abdülhamid II gave permission for the Bulgarians to build a church in Edirne in honour of the martyr. In this day as well let us remember Saint Georgi, and pray for his intercession for those who continue to suffer persecution and martyrdom for the Orthodox faith. Holy martyr Georgi of Sofia, bold confessor of Christ, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

Apolytikion to Saint Georgi of Sofia, Tone 3:

Your holy martyr Georgi, O Lord,
Through his suffering 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!

Church of Saint Georgi the Greatmartyr, Edirne, Turkey

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

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