Gelasius of Rimet
Our Venerable Father Gelasius, Archbishop of Transylvania and Igumen of Rimet
Venerable · Bishop · Wonderworker · d. late 14th century, at Rimet in Transylvania
Commemorated 30 June — His memory as igumen of Rimet and archbishop of Transylvania; proclaimed at Rimet, 1992
Gelasius of Rimet (Râmeț) is the fourteenth-century abbot and hierarch whose name is cut into the wall of a small stone church in the Trascău mountains of Transylvania — an inscription of 2 July 1377 which names "the archbishop Ghelasie" and the painter Mihul of the Alb Criş, and which is among the oldest dated records of an Orthodox hierarchy in Transylvania. Around him, in the gorge of the Rimet stream in what is now Alba county, lived a colony of hermits to whom he was spiritual father, visiting them in the Fasts; he ate only on Saturdays and Sundays, kept the nights in prayer, healed the sick and cast out demons, and, tradition says, a spring of water rose at his prayer. His skull is kept for veneration in the church of Rimet monastery. The Romanian Orthodox Church glorified him on 20 June 1992 and proclaimed his sanctity at Rimet on 30 June of that year, which is his feast.
The evidence of the inscription
Very little of Gelasius is narrative and almost all of it is architectural. In the old church of the Rimet monastery, under the later coats of plaster, restorers uncovered a painted inscription which dates the decoration of the church and names those responsible: the archbishop Ghelasie, and the zograf (icon-painter) Mihul from the Alb Criş, with the day and year — 2 July 1377. The importance of the text is double. It fixes Gelasius in time, which no legend could have done; and it establishes that in the last quarter of the fourteenth century there was in Transylvania an Orthodox archbishop with a painter in his service and a stone church to decorate, at a moment when the Hungarian crown's policy in the province was steadily hostile to the Orthodox hierarchy and the documentary record of that hierarchy is otherwise nearly silent. Gelasius is therefore a historical figure of some consequence to Romanian church history quite apart from his cultus.
The hermits of the Rimet valley
The monastery lies in a narrow limestone gorge in the Trascău range, and the tradition — local, oral, and old — makes Gelasius first the igumen of the house and the spiritual father of the many hermits who lived in the caves and cells of the mountain above it. He went up to them during the Fasts, hearing them and giving them the rule, and it is this that the Romanian sources emphasise: not a founder who built, but a father who was consulted. The Trascău and Apuseni mountains carried such a scattered eremitical population for centuries, and Rimet was one of its centres.
His ascesis and his gifts
The account of his life kept at Rimet describes an ascesis of a severity that is recorded rather than explained: he fasted through the week, eating only on Saturdays and Sundays, and it was said of him that his food was the Eucharist. His days were given to the duties of the monastery and his nights to vigil. To this the tradition joins the two gifts that the Romanian hagiography of hermits regularly records: healings of the sick who were brought to him, and the casting out of demons. A spring of water is said to have risen through his prayers, and is still shown; and in his last years he served as bishop, which the inscription of 1377 confirms, going out among his people until his death after long labours.
Relics and cultus
The chief relic is his skull, discovered in the twentieth century in the course of work at the monastery and now kept in the great church of Rimet for the veneration of pilgrims; portions have been distributed to other monasteries in Romania and the Republic of Moldova, and healings are reported at them. The cultus at Rimet was continuous and local long before it was official — the monastery was burned and suppressed more than once under the Habsburgs and re-founded each time, and today is a convent — and the Holy Synod of the Romanian Orthodox Church regularised it on 20 June 1992, in the great series of canonisations by which the Romanian Church after 1989 entered its own local saints on the calendar. The solemn proclamation was made at Rimet monastery on 30 June 1992, and that day became his feast.
Feast and commemoration
June 30 (church date; New Calendar civil June 30; Old Calendar civil July 13), a Romanian commemoration, kept in the Romanian Orthodox Church and its diaspora and in the calendars that follow it; it is not in the Greek, Antiochian or Slavic books. Romania keeps the New Calendar for the fixed feasts, so the civil day of the feast is June 30 throughout the Romanian Church. Rimet monastery keeps it as its patronal festival, with the pilgrimage to the saint's skull; the day falls, as it happens, on the Synaxis of the Twelve Apostles, and the Romanian books sing the two together.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 8
In thee, O father, was preserved undistorted that which is according to the image; for taking up the cross thou didst follow Christ, and by thy deeds thou didst teach us to overlook the flesh, for it passeth away, but to care for the soul, a thing immortal. Wherefore, O venerable hierarch Gelasius, thy spirit rejoiceth with the angels.
Original translation from the Romanian
Iconography
All icons of Gelasius are modern, painted since 1992, and follow a type fixed at that glorification: a hierarch in phelonion and omophorion, or in the monastic mantia with the omophorion over it — the compromise the Romanian tradition uses for a monk-bishop — bearded, blessing, with the Gospel-book or a scroll, and very often with the church of Rimet in his hand or behind him, its stone bell-tower in the gorge. Some compositions show the spring at his feet. Nothing pre-1900 exists and nothing is stored here: he had no painted cultus outside Rimet before the twentieth century, and the modern icons are the copyrighted work of living Romanian iconographers — a copyright that is untouched by any photographer's or uploader's licence on Wikimedia Commons, and which this collection therefore does not treat as free.
Disputed questions
Nothing certain is known of his birth, his origins, or the year of his death; the sources give none, and none is invented here. Whether he was archbishop of a Transylvanian see with a fixed cathedral, or a wandering hierarch of the sort the Orthodox of Transylvania were reduced to under Angevin and Hungarian pressure, cannot be determined from a single inscription. The relation between the hermit-abbot of the tradition and the archbishop of the inscription is likewise an identification that the Romanian Church has made and that the evidence supports without compelling: one man, an ascetic of the Rimet valley who was also a hierarch. His feast on June 30 is the anniversary of the 1992 proclamation and not of any known day of his repose.