Donatus of Euroea

Epirus and the see of Euroea

Donatus belonged to the Latin-and-Greek-speaking world of Old Epirus, the province on the western edge of the Balkan peninsula that today straddles north-western Greece and southern Albania — which is why the Russian and American calendars, following an older geographical note, sometimes place his city "in Albania," while Greek usage places it firmly in Thesprotia. The Greek tradition has him born about 310 and occupied for some thirty years in teaching at Buthrotum (Butrint) before he was raised to the episcopate.

His see was Euroea, a late-antique city of Epirus whose exact site is still argued: modern scholarship inclines to a location near the village of Glyki on the Acheron, while Michel Le Quien identified it with Paramythia and others with nearby ancient Photike. The name itself was connected in antiquity with the abundance of its waters — an etymology that the tradition of Donatus's water-miracles either explains or was explained by. Sozomen knows of "Isoria, a village in the territory of Euroea," whose inhabitants were still the living witnesses of the saint's wonders in the historian's own day; this is the "Soreia" of the later lives.

The witness of Sozomen

The earliest account of Donatus is not hagiography in the ordinary sense but history. Sozomen, writing at Constantinople about 440 — within two generations of the saint's death — gives him a chapter of Book VII of his Ecclesiastical History, coupling him with Theotimus of Tomi in Scythia as the two bishops of the age most worth instancing for sanctity outside the great sees. He reports:

• The dragon of Chamaegephyrae. A serpent of enormous size had settled on the high road at a place called Chamaegephyrae and was devouring sheep, goats, oxen, horses and men. Donatus came upon the beast unarmed — with neither sword nor lance nor javelin; as it reared to strike him he made the sign of the Cross with his finger in the air and spat upon it, and it died at once. Sozomen adds, with the historian's characteristic care about his evidence, that stretched on the ground it was not smaller than the famous serpents of India, and that he was told the country people yoked eight pair of oxen to drag the carcass to a neighbouring field, where they burned it lest its decomposition should corrupt the air and breed disease.
• The spring in the waterless place. Passing through an arid tract where there was no water and seeing his companions suffering from thirst, Donatus moved the soil with his hands and prayed; before the prayer was finished a spring rose from the ground, and it had never failed. Sozomen names the villagers of Isoria as those who vouched for the story.
• The tomb. By Sozomen's time the bishop's tomb lay in "a magnificent house of prayer which bears his name," standing beside that same fountain of many waters — the first attested shrine of the saint, and evidence that his cultus was already established and monumental in the first half of the fifth century.

Very few fourth-century provincial bishops are so early and so soberly documented. Whatever view is taken of the dragon, the chapter shows a living local veneration, a martyrium-church, and a named village of witnesses less than sixty years after the saint's repose.

The wonders of the synaxarion

The later lives, as they are printed in the Greek and Slavonic synaxaria and in the modern jurisdictional calendars, keep Sozomen's two great miracles and add others, mostly of the same kind — Donatus is a saint of water:

• The brackish spring at Isoria. Near the city, at the place the lives call Soreia, was a spring whose water was bitter and undrinkable. The bishop went out to it with his clergy, cast out the destroying serpent that haunted the spot (in this recension the dragon and the spring are joined in a single episode), prayed and blessed the water, and then drank of it first himself before the crowd, so that the people, seeing him unharmed, drank after him; and the water was sweet thereafter.
• Water from the rock, and rain in drought. He brought water out of a dry and stony place, and in a season of drought obtained rain from God for the country by his prayer.
• The emperor's daughter. Summoned to Constantinople, he healed the daughter of the emperor Theodosius the Great, who was troubled by an unclean spirit; the lives say that the demon departed at the saint's mere arrival at the palace.
• The dead man raised to testify. A creditor demanded a second payment of a debt from the widow (or the family) of a man who had died after discharging it. Donatus called the dead man back to life to bear witness that he had paid; the man testified, the creditor was confounded and the proof produced, and the dead man fell asleep again in the Lord.

He reposed in peace, about the year 387, and was buried at Euroea in the church that Sozomen describes.

Relics, and the wandering of his city

The subsequent history of the shrine is bound up with the collapse of late-antique Epirus. Procopius records in the Buildings that Justinian, finding the site of Euroea unhealthy or indefensible, resettled its inhabitants on an islet in a neighbouring lake and built there a strong city — commonly identified with Ioannina. Euroea itself did not long survive the Slavic invasions: about 603 its people abandoned it and fled across to Kassiopi on Corfu, and they carried the relics of St Donatus with them. The see, under the name of Photike and afterwards of Paramythia, continued in the mountains of Thesprotia, and Donatus remained its patron; he is to this day the protector of Paramythia, whose cathedral bears his name and whose people keep April 30 as the city's feast.