A prayer for peace, from a Christian of Gaza

Today, the fourteenth of October, is the feast-day of Saint Kosmas the Poet of Gaza. It is worth remembering Saint Kosmas today, when his fellow Arabs, including Christian Arabs, are under siege in the very place where he reposed, by a hostile army of nationalists following a deluded messianic vision. As I write this, the Gazans—over one million people—are in their literal eleventh hour, having been given a twenty-four hour ultimatum to evacuate Gaza in an order that the UN has deemed ‘impossible’. This is in response to a brutal attack by Hamas on several Israeli settlements bordering Gaza. There can be no real, cogent moral defence of such a surprise attack targeting civilians. But instead of producing a rational and thoughtful response as to how we got to this juncture, the war machine is gearing up once again to grind down, not only Hamas, but Palestinians outside of Hamas who are already helpless and already without defence. This includes the Christians of Saint Porphyrios Church in Gaza, who have requested our prayers. They face a true martyrdom: sacrificial suffering on account of a crime in which they had no part.

There are few who seek understanding of this conflict. But for those who are interested, I would recommend two books in particular: the work of George Antonius, The Arab Awakening, and William Dalrymple’s travelogue From the Holy Mountain. The latter is not about the history of the Holy Land per se, but intimates many things which are relevant to the present state of affairs. The autobiography of Iraqi statesman Adnan al-Pachachi, Living to Some Purpose, may also be of some interest to readers on this question.

The land which is called ‘holy’, is crying for peace, yet peace is very far from its grasp. I find myself in deep grief for those who have lost their lives on both sides already. And I find myself deep in anger, not only at Hamas, but also (and more so) at the Israeli state and leadership who failed to prevent this attack, and who will now wreak a vengeance that will target the innocent along with the guilty. There can be no true peace without justice; and justice can only be arrived at, when the rightful claims of the Palestinian cause are acknowledged, and when the security of the Jewish people everywhere, not just in the Holy Land, is assured. I can only add Rev’d Dr John Mason Neale’s English translation of the hymn for peace from the Christmas Canon, which was authored by the holy Palestinian of Gaza whom we commemorate today:

Father of Peace, and God of Consolation!
　The Angel of the Counsel dost Thou send
To herald peace, to manifest Salvation,
　Thy Light to pour, Thy knowledge to extend;
Whence, with the morning’s earliest rays,
Lover of men! Thy Name we praise.

’Midst Caesar’s subjects Thou, at his decreeing,
　Obey’dst and was enrolled: our mortal race,
To sin and Satan slave, from bondage freeing,
　Our poverty in all points didst embrace:
And by that Union didst combine
The earthly with the All-Divine.

Behold! The virgin, prophecy sustaining,
　Incarnate Deity conceived and bore;
Virgin in birth, and virgin still remaining,
　And man to God is reconciled once more:
Wherefore in faith her name we bless,
And Mother of our God confess.

歌罢仰天叹

群鸡正乱叫
客至鸡斗争
驱鸡上树木
始闻叩柴荆
父老四五人
问我久远行
手中各有携
倾榼浊复清
苦辞酒味薄
黍地无人耕
兵革既未息
儿童尽东征
请为父老歌
艰难愧深情
歌罢仰天叹
四座泪纵横

- 杜甫，《羌村（3）》

Translation:

The flock of chickens starts to call wildly,
As guests arrive, the chickens begin to fight.
I drive the chickens up into the tree,
And now I hear the knock on the wicker gate.
Four or five elders from the village,
Ask how long and far I have been travelling.
Each of them brings something in his hands,
We pour the clear and thick wine in together.
They apologise because it tastes so thin,
There’s no one no-one left to tend the millet fields.
Conscription still continues without end,
The children are campaigning in the east.
I ask if I can sing a song for the elders,
The times so hard, I’m ashamed by these deep feelings.
I finish the song, look to heaven and sigh,
Everyone around is freely weeping.

- Du Fu, Qiang Village III

The Prayer of a Broken Heart: a review

Fr Paul Abernathy’s new book, The Prayer of a Broken Heart, is a splendidly multifaceted exploration—from a perspective rooted in the Orthodox Christian tradition—of the religious history and spiritual character of African slaves in America and their descendants. Speaking as a white American Orthodox Christian, I’m sure that what I got out of it would be very different than what a black American would get out of it. And I’m sure that a ‘cradle’ Orthodox Christian from within one of the traditionally-religious immigrant communities that came here after slavery had been abolished would get something else entirely out of it. However, the fact that The Prayer of a Broken Heart has something to say to each of these groups is a mark of its strengths. Although it is an adaptation of his seminary master’s thesis, precisely as a work of religious history it stands firmly on its own merits.

The Prayer of a Broken Heart may be said to have three strands. The first strand is an apologia of African-American Christianity as an, if not the, authentic and valid expression of African-American culture (as opposed to being a ‘white man’s religion’ or a ‘slaveowner creed’ foisted upon the slaves by their masters). The second strand is a portrait of African-American spirituality as it was formed through and the experiences of slavery, race-based terrorism, segregation and informal discrimination. And the third strand is an exploration of the commonalities between the African-American religious experience and the historical witness of the Orthodox Church. Interspersed through all of these strands are the accounts of pastoral experiences Fr Paul himself has had, working as a priest in Pittsburgh’s Hill District. The men and women whom he encounters have lives shaped by profound grief and loss. But that same suffering leads them, just as it has led many generations of their ancestors, before the Cross.

The historical aspect of the book is logically presented and carefully argued from primary source materials—slave narratives in particular. Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, Charles Ball, Josiah Henson, Harriet Jacobs, William Wells Brown and others are given space to speak in their own words from their own experiences. If Fr Paul’s authorial voice is somewhat more distant in these passages, that is all to his credit, as these narratives have their own power. The picture he draws out of these narratives is one which complicates and deflates both triumphalist-panglossian white accounts of slavery as a ‘civilising mission’, and anti-Christian tendencies in black-nationalist thought that portray Christianity as a ‘white man’s religion’. It becomes quite clear in these accounts that slave-owners had no interest whatsoever in edifying their slaves or leading them to Christianity. Their sole interest in their slaves was as productive property. In fact: slave-owners feared slaves’ expressions of religiosity, as the prayers of slaves were a powerful implicit witness to their spiritual equality before God.

Slave-owners were known to hold dances and parties with music and secular entertainments for their slaves to keep them ‘happy’. But religious gatherings were feared and forbidden. It was common for slave-owners to have slaves beaten cruelly or even killed for praying. Slaves would therefore organise prayer meetings in ‘hush harbours’: backwoods or basement locations hidden from the eyes of masters and overseers. For two hundred years, African-American Christianity was by necessity an ‘invisible institution’—a phrase borrowed from the religious historian Albert J Raboteau, whom Fr Paul Abernathy quotes at length. The message that he draws from this is clear: African-American Christianity, far from being received by slaves from masters, was attained and held in spite of the suppression of Christianity by their masters. Fr Paul tells us outright that the first records we have of slaves converting in any significant number to Christianity occurred during the first Great Awakening, when ‘New Light’ itinerant preachers would draw mixed-race crowds to revival meetings… often over the strenuous objections of the supine ‘Old Light’ pastors who were the representatives of the slave-owners’ religion.

This leads Fr Paul to open a descriptive account of the character of the Christianity of black America. Because it was an ‘invisible institution’—a church of the catacombs, shaped by the ever-present reality of persecution—it quickly became characterised by a radical trust in the will of God; an extended hope of justice however long deferred; a reliance upon the power of prayer; deference to the witness of elders who had experienced God’s action in their own lives; and an emphasis on salvific suffering and the openness of a ‘broken heart’ to God.

This provides an opening for Fr Paul Abernathy to explore the parallels between the African-American religious experience and Orthodox theology. To a certain extent, he counts on the Orthodox Christian section of his audience to have a great enough familiarity with the rudiments of hesychasm and the words of Psalm 50 to make certain connexions on their own. But he deftly illustrates how the sublative, broken-hearted and penitential character of African-American Christianity shares fundamental similarities with Orthodoxy—drawing upon numerous Patristic writings from Saint Isaac of Nineveh through Saint Gregory Palamas to Saints Silouan of Athos and Sophrony of Essex for demonstration.

Here Fr Paul Abernathy has a much clearer and direct case to make for a connexion than does, say, Hieromonk Damascene Christensen in Christ the Eternal Tao. Fr Paul has enough respect for the tradition he examines to acknowledge the clear differences between it and the Orthodox tradition. At the same time, though, he makes an honest appeal for the Orthodox ‘case’ with African-Americans. He notices in the remnants of African religion which were carried over into Christianity still more similarities with Orthodoxy: communality, the person as a web of relationships, the closeness of the human world to the Divine. And he notes in the tradition of African-American Christianity certain unmet needs and expectations in itself, most notably: a desire for self-denial, for discipline (explaining the appeal of the Nation of Islam), for mystical communion with God. And he argues that the Orthodox Church is capable of meeting these needs and expectations, as Protestant churches are quickly finding themselves deficient of these things.

Ultimately, though, this book is a labour of love. I use that term advisedly. Fr Paul Abernathy is not a nationalist of any sort: indeed, he considers pride (including national pride) to be the very source of many of the ills which the love of Christ must heal. For him, the most salient and salvific features of African-American Christianity are its insistence on forgiveness and on love of enemies: both insistences which are shared by the best aspects of Orthodox Christianity. And it is clear that he himself speaks from a position of love, even when he issues criticism.

His analysis is not without its critical dimension. Although he has nothing but words of praise for the musical tradition of the black spiritual (that true cry from the bottom of a broken heart, expressed in a cappella harmony!), he waxes particularly critical of modern African-American culture when it comes to popular music and consumption habits. He considers much of modern black musical and popular culture to be a form of propaganda which weakens the spirit—in much the same way as the secular dances and parties held by the slave-owners kept their slaves docile. I was rather surprised and a bit dismayed to read the harsh words he had even for blues and rock-‘n’-roll music, both of which (instrument-driven, individualistic, disillusioned and worldly) he views as a qualitative falling-away from the otherworldly hope and communal fellow-suffering epitomised by the spirituals.

Many thanks to Fr Paul Abernathy for publishing this work in a form which makes it available to a broad audience outside the academy. The Prayer of a Broken Heart is very much worth the time taken to read. For American Orthodox Christians in particular (and anyone interested in the history of American religion and constructive modern approaches to race relations generally), it is an excellent source to ingest, to ponder, and to begin conversations from.

Lift the sanctions; end the pillage!

The earthquake that has struck Turkey and Syria has been devastating. So far there are seven thousand, two hundred and sixty-six people confirmed dead. For a comparison point: as a result of the earthquake yesterday, more civilians across four countries—Turkey, Syria, Lebanon and Palestine—have died in just two days, than have died in the entire past year of fighting in the Ukraine. This is truly a staggering human tragedy, deserving of deep mourning. The humanitarian response in Turkey has been quick to mobilise; in Syria, it has been slower—not at all for a lack of will on the part of the people or the government, but for a lack of resources.

The eastern Mediterranean has long been a hotbed of seismic activity, with the southeast of Anatolia basically being one long strike-slip fault zone. In the 520s Antioch—a great city in the heart of this very region—was levelled by a series of similarly crushing earthquakes, each of which also killed thousands of people at a stroke. Patriarch Saint Ephraim of Amida was among those who pitched in cleaning up the city and rescuing survivors in the aftermath, among whom were Saint Martha and her son Saint Symeōn the Younger Stylite. Prayers asking the intercession of any of these three saints with our Lord Christ and the Holy Theotōkos will surely be efficacious in aiding the victims.

We should not, however, be content merely to offer prayers. Our energy, our money and our hearts should go out to the victims as well. International Orthodox Christian Charities has set up a special response for the victims of the 6 February earthquake. So too has the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America. Please consider donating to either of these two response funds.

There is another important step that people in the United States and the European Union especially can take for the victims of this earthquake. That is: we can call for an immediate halt to the cruel sanctions policy of our government. Over ten million Syrians have already been placed in dire straits financially on account of this sanctions policy. But more to the point: this sanctions policy directly hinders international aid efforts for the Syrian people, which they need now more than ever.

Another thing we can and should pressure our government to do after this earthquake, is to recall our troops from the oil fields in al-Ḥasaka in northern Syria. We should begin allowing the Syrian people themselves to benefit from their own natural resources, instead of pillaging the stuff out from under their feet—a Trump-era policy that Biden has not seen fit to end. That wealth, which justly belongs to the Syrian people, could well represent the difference between suffering and flourishing, even between life and death, for hundreds of thousands of Syrians.

May God soften the hearts of our leaders, and preserve in faith and steadfast perseverance the long-suffering people of Syria!

EDIT: Russia and China have both offered Syria significant aid packages to help with disaster relief. The US is still slowing humanitarian aid from entering the country with its sanctions policy, which appears to be motivated entirely by geopolitical self-interest. The three Patriarchs of Antioch, including Patriarch John X, have issued a letter condemning sanctions against Syria, and calling for them to be lifted.

Woo Yee Sing, Liang May Seen and Minnie Wong

Chinese language class at Westminster Presbyterian Church
Minnie Wong is seated third from the left in the back row

This past Wednesday, I went with Fr John Schroedel to the Lakewood Cemetery, where several members of his extended family are buried, as well as the remarkable Father Anthony Coniaris of blessed memory, who founded Light & Life Publishing and was responsible for the translation and publication of some of the first Orthodox theological materials in English on the continent of North America. Orthodoxy in this country owes a great debt to Father Anthony. Although I never made his acquaintance in life, I am happy to have been given the privilege to visit his grave and offer prayers there.

One of the other grave markers that I saw in the cemetery, not that far away from the Greek section where Father Anthony is buried, belonged to a certain Minnie Wong. Minnie Wong is a name which deserves to be better-known in the Twin Cities. She was as important in her way for the Chinese community here as Father Anthony was for the Greek community. It is only on account of my work for Global Learning Alliance and Minghua Chinese School that I became aware of her in the first place. However, Minnie Wong’s history is closely intertwined with that of another outstanding Chinese woman here, Liang May Seen.

Chinese people have been coming to North America for a long time. Many Chinese folks worked as ship-hands on Spanish galleons operating out of Manila during the Age of Sail, and some of them ended up in Mexico and California in the 1500s and 1600s, where they worked primarily as hairdressers for the Spanish. These Chinese communities ended up as a part of the United States at the conclusion of the Mexican-American War. But there are interesting archaeological finds indicating that Chinese trade goods—belt buckles and beads made out of bronze—ended up in the hands of Alaska natives long before contact with the Europeans. (This doesn’t exactly prove the wilder theories of Gavin Menzies, but it is tantalising, and should force a massive rethink of the way archaeologists think about the region.)

The first Chinese woman in Minnesota, though, came here a different way. Born in Kaiping in Guangdong Province, Liang May Seen was essentially lured onto an America-bound ship by a human trafficker, who promised her a wealthy marriage to a Chinese-American businessman but sold her into a brothel instead. This happened in 1885. She managed to escape the brothel in 1889 and took refuge at the Presbyterian mission in San Francisco, where she availed herself of the opportunities to learn English, housekeeping and mathematics.

There she was introduced to Woo Yee Sing. Woo Yee Sing, originally a laundryman, had come to Minneapolis in the wake of the Chinese Exclusion Act in order to escape the persecution, harassment and violence that Chinese people faced in San Francisco. Together with his brother Woo Du Sing, he opened the first Chinese restaurant here, the Canton Café, in 1883. Woo Yee Sing had come back to San Francisco in 1892 to look for a bride, which is how he met Liang May Seen.

Liang May Seen and Woo Yee Sing

Liang May Seen took an active role in building relationships in her new town. Thanks to her excellent study of English, she befriended many white women through the Presbyterian Church—among whom was women’s suffrage activist, Urban League director and state congresswoman Mabeth Hurd Paige—and opened a curio shop in 1904 to bolster her family’s income and to broaden her network of friends. More importantly, though, she took the lead in welcoming other newcomers of Chinese descent to Minneapolis. Through the Presbyterian Church she established a Chinese Sunday school and an afterschool programme for English language learners to help recent Chinese immigrants acculturate to their new home.

It was in this capacity that she met and befriended Minnie Wong, the wife of George Wong Gee. Minnie Wong was also from Kaiping, and evidently hit it off immediately with Liang May Seen. She excelled in her own English studies. The two women’s shared interest in promoting the welfare and advancement of Chinese women in Minneapolis led them to found and co-teach the first ELL classes specifically for Chinese women in the state. The two of them collaborated on a number of charitable and advocacy projects together.

Unfortunately, Liang May Seen was unable to have children of her own with her husband. (This isn’t attested in the actual history, but reading between the lines, her infertility is likely on account of the sexual violence she experienced during her involuntary servitude at the San Francisco brothel.) She and her husband adopted a young boy from San Francisco, named Howard.

Even though they had come eastward to escape the organised anti-Chinese violence and racism that characterised life on the West Coast, life here in the Twin Cities was still hard. Canton Café changed its name to Yuen Faung Low (遠芳樓) or ‘John’s Place’, and it became famous as a restaurant which was open to everyone regardless of race. As Woo Yee Sing put it in an interview with the Minneapolis Journal: ‘They are men like you or me. They have got to eat and there must be some place for them to do so… They are all brothers, and there is no room for race prejudice.’ (It is worth remembering that at this time, even though Jim Crow didn’t exist de jure in Minnesota, segregation was still the de facto norm and was enforced extralegally.) Despite this, in 1912 Yuen Faung Low fell victim to a bomb attack, probably motivated by race prejudice. Woo and Liang’s foster son Howard, in another interview, also recalls being attacked and taunted with anti-Chinese slurs on the street when growing up.

Yuen Faung Low, however, expanded—a second-floor tearoom was built to accommodate more upscale clients, and the restaurant continued to operate until the 1960s. Woo Yee Sing passed away in 1925, and Liang May Seen twenty years later in 1946—by the end of her life she was able to see the end of Chinese exclusion.

Things have certainly improved for AAPI people in the United States since the days of Woo Yee Sing, Liang May Seen and Minnie Wong—and these improvements are largely the efforts of precisely such people who were active in their own communities. It is with gratitude, then, that we should remember these three people and their contributions, and continue working to ensure that the current atmosphere of anti-Chinese bigotry in the United States is dispelled. For this I ask the added prayers and intercessions of Fr Anthony Coniaris of blessed memory, whose own experiences as the son of Greek immigrants assuredly parallel those of Howard Woo.

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.

Holy Mother Agafia the Wonderworker of Cușelăuca

Saint Agafia of Cușelăuca

Gentle readers of my blogs, I apologise. I have been struggling with some fairly severe health problems as of late, including a stay in the hospital, and I haven’t been able to put up much of anything by way of content for the past month or so, absent one or two hagiographical pieces. I hope that I am well enough now that I can get back to blogging on a regular basis.

Yesterday was the new calendar feast day of Blessed Agafia of Cușelăuca, a wonderworking monastic saint of Moldova. She spent most of her years in one of the poorest monasteries in one of the poorest parts of Europe. Although she spent most of her life in a state of pain and bodily infirmity, she continued to be sweet, kind and patient to all who met her, and healed many who came to her with their own pains and disabilities.

Agafia Maranciuc [Ru. Агафия Маранчук] was born in the year 1819, in the village of Păsățel. This Moldovan village is situated between the Bug and the Dneister, very close to the city of Odessa. Her parents, Ioan and Eudochia, were highly observant Orthodox Christians who strove to live a life of humility and service to God. They would on occasion visit holy sites nearby. On one occasion, when Agafia was only a little girl, her parents decided to take a pilgrimage to the Kiev Caves Lavra. Little Agafia begged her parents, with tears in her eyes, to be allowed to go with them. However, this was in a day and age when most pilgrimages were made on foot, and small children were at particular danger on the roads. Out of concern for her, Ioan and Eudochia decided to leave Agafia in the care of some family friends when they left for the Kiev Caves Lavra.

Agafia was not content with this. Aflame with the desire to visit the holy relics of the Russian saints in the Lavra, a few days after her parents left, she escaped her guardians’ care on her own and tried to catch up with her parents. However, as the little girl travelled by night and tried to make her way in the darkness, she fell into a deep abandoned well, mangling both of her legs. For three years, nothing was heard of her. Her guardians and parents were distraught when they learned of her disappearance, and they mourned for her, thinking she was dead. But little Agafia survived at the bottom of that well for those three years, miraculously sustained by the grace of God. Some testimonies assert that she was visited by the angels, and fed by manna from heaven during her imprisonment in the well.

She was eventually found by a local shepherd named Dimitriu Baciu. The grass was thick in the field around the well, and Dimitriu led his sheep there to graze. Once there, he began to sing Psalms to himself as he watched over his flock. As if in answer, he heard unearthly sweet angelic voices emanating from the well. Examining the well, he was shocked to find the young girl inside, alive, and having been there evidently for a long time. He managed to lift her out, and contacted her parents, who came to her. Her parents were astonished at this wonder of God, and when they asked the young sufferer how she survived those years, Agafia told them that a pair of pigeons had come to her, bringing her food and warming her to keep her alive. Being unable to walk, her parents placed Agafia in a cart and wheeled her back to their home.

Even though she was returned to her loved ones, who cared for her and looked after her with the greatest solicitude and affection, a change had come over Agafia. Formerly a curious and talkative child, Agafia had grown taciturn, and she spent several years in a state of silent prayer. The injury to her legs was severe, and she would never physically recover from it. In her childhood years, she suffered a great deal of pain and illness on account of this injury. Yet she did not become bitter because of it. Even though she was quiet, she continued to be kind and considerate to everyone, and she also was given by God the gift of healing others through her prayers. Word of this went out, and many came from the surrounding countryside to visit her, and she healed their afflictions and gave them helpful advice. Some years afterward, two monks from Athos visited Agafia at her parents’ house. They were astonished at the young woman’s patience and kindness even in her suffering, and after several discussions with her, they gave her a copy of the Holy Gospels printed on Athos, which was her constant companion for the rest of her life.

Agafia retired to Cușelăuca Monastery. As mentioned before, this was at the time the poorest monastery in Bessarabia, and consequently one of the poorest in all of Europe. Being completely bedridden, she still kept as much of the nuns’ rule as she was able in her infirmity, and did not vary it in the slightest using her disability as an excuse. She was given for her patience not only the gift of healing by God but also the gift of prophecy. She foresaw both the flourishing of her monastery, and later its persecution under the Soviets. In her final months she kept counsel with the abbess and with her monastic sisters, and urged everyone to carry their crosses in a spirit of peace and penitence. She had harsh rebukes for some of them, but she assured them of her love and prayed for them.

On the ninth of June – or rather the twenty-second of June on the new calendar – Blessed Agafia received the Gifts for the last time in this earthly life. Some witnesses report that after she took the elements, her face began to glow with an otherworldly light. She reposed in the Lord, at peace with her sisters and her family, that same day. Saint Agafia was formally glorified on the fifteenth of July, 2016, by the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church, at the request of Metropolitan Vladimir and the Holy Synod of the Orthodox Church of Moldova. Her feast day is kept on the same day as her repose. Holy Mother Agafia, patient sufferer and kindly healer, pray unto Christ our God for us sinners!

Cușelăuca Monastery, Moldova

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

Remembering the Nakba and Gaza today

In the past six days, Israeli armed forces have killed 126 people, including 31 children, and wounded 920 more after shelling Gaza and bombarding from the air. Nearly ten thousand Palestinians have been forced to flee their homes from the assault. This coordinated and deliberate display of military brutality against a civilian population comes as a result of protests against Israeli police, who have been aiding illegal Israeli settlers to forcibly evict Palestinian families from their homes in East Jerusalem over the past several weeks.

According to any civilised measure of what constitutes just warfare, Israel’s retaliation to these protests is anything but just. The principles of necessity and proportionality are not only routinely ignored, but flouted, by Netanyahu’s misgovernment of miscreants. It is not, as the American press misreports it, a ‘clash’. It is not, as said misgovernment risibly calls it, a ‘civil war’. It is an act of ethnic cleansing, one which also targets and impacts the indigenous Christians of the Middle East.

It is necessary to remember that this is not a sectarian struggle. It is not about Muslims versus Jews. Christians have been integral to the Palestinian struggle since the beginning. The newspapers that were chiefly responsible for building the movement opposing Zionist settler-colonialism, al-Karmal and Falasṭîn, were run by Orthodox Christian editors: to wit, Najîb Naṣṣâr and ‘Îssa al-‘Îssa. The Palestinian Arab Congress arose out of the Muslim-Christian associations that arose as organic Arab nationalist societies in every major city in Palestine. The cause of Palestine is not a Muslim one only, it is a human one.

Of the Palestinian people who live in aš-Šayḵ Jarrâḥ, a significant proportion of them are in fact refugees from aṭ-Ṭalbiyyah in the western part of the city, which during the 1920s and 1930s was a predominantly Arab Christian neighbourhood. Between 1948 and 1967, the Israelis cheated or outright stole the land from the Arabic residents and kicked them into East Jerusalem. The current takeover by Israeli settlers, the evictions and the confiscation of property, are in fact a continuation of the initial Nakba which took place in 1948 and which is remembered each year today.

The Nakba is continuing in aš-Šayḵ Jarrâḥ and in Gaza, through the familiar pattern of people with guns terrorising people without guns. However, the people of Palestine are rising up against the unlawful evictions, and they deserve support. So far, that support has not been forthcoming from the United States or from the Biden Administration, which has been blocking UN Security Council action to stop the escalating violence against Palestinians. Moreover, they refuse to condemn the killing of children by the Israeli military. This is part of a definite pattern on the part of this administration, and one may be sure that the hypocrisy is being noticed abroad.

For that matter, it’s also necessary to remember that the Nakba is not just a Middle Eastern problem. It is a European problem. George Antonius’s book The Arab Awakening should be required reading on this topic. The British and French governments rankly betrayed their Arab allies during WWI, first with the Sykes-Picot Agreement and then with the Balfour Declaration. It was easier for them to foist off the ‘Jewish problem’ onto a subjugated and colonised population far away in the Middle East, than for them to deal with their own deep-seated anti-Semitism. The same principle held when it came to European support for Zionism after World War II. The same people who perpetrated the horrors of Shoah on European Jewry were content to send the rest of them packing to the Middle East: a way to assuage their guilty consciences without bearing any real cost.

(Even today, the openly anti-Semitic governments of Poland, Hungary and the Ukraine enjoy an alliance of convenience with the far-right ethnonationalist Likud misgovernment in Israel. And in the United States, men who can’t stand the idea of their children going to school with Jewish children openly tout their alliance with Israel. This ‘double game’ allows anti-Semitism in the West to continue to disguise itself as ‘friendship’, and also allows Israel to benefit from a continuing climate of hostility to Jews in Western nations.)

In the meantime, however, the Palestinian people cannot wait for justice. This Nakba Day, let us first begin by praying for an end to the violence. And then, in the spirit of that prayer, at the very least let us be courageous enough to acknowledge the truths of what is happening in Palestine. What is going on is not a ‘clash’ or a ‘civil war’ between two sides of equal strength which bear equal blame: one side has tanks and planes and nuclear weapons and the other side does not, and the more powerful side has no regard for restraint. What is going on is not a conflict over religion: it is a conflict over land. What is going on is also not a far-away iteration of irrational regional hatreds: it is the culmination of a long and deep-seated spiritual illness in the West, and it is one for which our governments and peoples bear responsibility. Once we have been courageous enough to acknowledge these truths, let us then translate that awareness into action. Israel’s ongoing crimes against Palestine must end, and international pressure must be brought to bear for that to happen. And the costs of Europe’s centuries-long mistreatment of the Jews must no longer fall upon an Arabic populace that bears no responsibility for that mistreatment.

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

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