Gorazd, Sabbas and Angelar
The Holy Equals to the Apostles Gorazd, Archbishop of Moravia, Sabbas and Angelar, Disciples of Saints Cyril and Methodius
Equal to the Apostles · Bishop · Venerable · d. late 9th century
Commemorated 27 July — Kept with Clement and Naum as the Enlighteners of the Slavs
Gorazd, Sabbas and Angelar are three of the five chief disciples of Cyril and Methodius who carried the Slavonic letters and liturgy out of Great Moravia after their teacher's death in 885. Gorazd, a Moravian by birth and fluent in Slavonic, Greek and Latin, was named by Methodius as his own successor in the archbishopric and was deposed and driven out by the Frankish party before he could hold it. Angelar, a priest, crossed the Danube into Bulgaria with Clement and Naum and died within months of the journey, about 886. Sabbas, also a priest, disappears from the record after the expulsion. With Clement, Naum and the two brothers they make up the Seven Enlighteners of the Slavs, the Sedmochislenitsi, whose common memory is kept on July 27.
The five disciples
The Slavonic sources speak of Methodius's inner circle as "the Five" — Clement, Naum, Gorazd, Sabbas and Angelar — and it is in that formula, rather than singly, that Gorazd, Sabbas and Angelar enter the Church's memory. All were priests except Gorazd, who was raised higher; all had shared the work of translating the Scriptures and the offices into Slavonic; all were caught in the collapse that followed 885.
Gorazd is the one of the three with a name in the documents. The Life of Methodius records that when the archbishop was dying, the disciples asked him whom he named for his successor, and he pointed to Gorazd: a free man of this land, well taught in the Latin books, and orthodox — a Moravian, that is, and therefore unanswerable on the ground the Franks had chosen to fight on, and competent in the three languages, Slavonic, Greek and Latin. He is remembered in Slovak and Czech tradition as the first Slav archbishop of Moravia, though it is doubtful he was ever able to exercise the office: prince Svyatopolk took the Frankish side, Wiching of Nitra secured papal letters against the Slavonic rite, and Gorazd was set aside with the rest.
Sabbas and Angelar are names attached to the same events without independent dossiers. Both were priests; both were among those arrested, tortured — the sources say they were dragged through thorns and held long in prison — and expelled in the winter of 885–886.
The expulsion and the road south
The clergy of the Slavonic rite were driven out; the younger among them were sold to slave-traders and offered for sale in the market at Venice, where an envoy of the emperor Basil the Macedonian bought them out and sent them to Constantinople. The elder confessors were simply expelled across the frontier. Clement, Naum and Angelar made together for the Danube and crossed into Bulgaria, where prince Boris I received them.
Angelar, worn out by the journey and by what had gone before it, died soon after arriving — the date is usually given as 886. He is the first of the Seven to die, and effectively the martyr of the group, in the sense that the persecution killed him.
Where Gorazd and Sabbas went is not known. The Slavonic notices say frankly that it is not recorded. A Balkan tradition brings Gorazd south with the others and buries him with Angelar at the monastery of Sts Gorazd and Angelar near Berat in Albania, where their relics are venerated; another, kept in Slovakia, holds that he stayed in the north and died in Moravia or in Poland. The Bulgarian and Macedonian churches keep the first; the Czech and Slovak churches have made Gorazd a national patron on the strength of the second. Sabbas has no burial place at all, only a name in the list.
Feast and commemoration
July 27 (church date; New Calendar civil July 27, Old Calendar civil August 9), kept together with Clement of Ohrid and Naum as the memory of the Enlighteners of the Slavs; the day is July 27 because it is the day of Clement's repose, and the others are gathered to it. The Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbian, Russian and OCA calendars carry them; the Greek books generally do not. The full Sedmochislenitsi synaxis, adding Cyril and Methodius, is the form in which the company is kept in Bulgaria, where the church of the Holy Seven at Sofia is dedicated to it. Naum has his own principal feast on December 23 and a summer feast on June 20; Cyril and Methodius are kept on May 11.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (common of holy teachers)
O holy fathers Gorazd, Sabbas and Angelar, disciples of the teachers of the Slavs: having received the word from Cyril and Methodius, ye carried it through exile and chains and gave it to the nations in their own tongue. Wherefore, standing now before the throne of the Trinity, entreat Christ our God that our souls may be saved.
Original translation from the Slavonic
Iconography
The three are almost never painted alone. They belong to the group portrait of the Seven Enlighteners, a composition that appears in Bulgarian, Macedonian and Serbian churches from the late Middle Ages and becomes very common after the eighteenth century: Cyril and Methodius in the centre, Cyril in the monastic habit with a scroll bearing the Slavonic alphabet, Methodius as a hierarch, and the five disciples ranged about them — Clement and Gorazd in bishop's vesture with the omophorion, Naum, Sabbas and Angelar as priests or as monastics with scrolls. Gorazd, when he is distinguished, is shown as a middle-aged hierarch with a dark rounded beard; Angelar and Sabbas are simply young or middle-aged priests, without individual attributes, identified only by their inscriptions.
No pre-1900 image of the three by themselves has been located for this collection; the Sedmochislenitsi compositions available in reproduction are either modern or are photographs of church interiors in which the individual figures cannot be reliably identified.
Disputed questions
- How many disciples, and which? The number seven — Sedmochislenitsi, "the seven-numbered" — is a Bulgarian formula reached by adding Cyril and Methodius to the Five. The Five themselves are stable in the sources; occasionally a Lawrence is named among them in place of one of the three.
- Gorazd's archbishopric. That Methodius designated him is well attested; that he ever functioned as archbishop is not. The papal letter Quia te zelo fidei of Stephen V, which condemned the Slavonic liturgy, names Gorazd as the man to be prevented from acting.
- Gorazd's death and burial. Irreconcilable traditions place him at Berat in Albania and in the north; no source of the ninth or tenth century settles it, and the modern claims are entangled with national church histories. The relics at Berat are the older cult.
- The name Angelar is unusual, and the Slavonic scribes evidently found it so: the suggestion that it derives from the Greek anagoreuō, "to proclaim," is a medieval guess and not an etymology.
- Not to be confused with Bishop Gorazd (Pavlík) of Bohemia and Moravia, the twentieth-century Czech hierarch shot by the Germans in 1942, who took his episcopal name from this saint, nor with the several later Sabbases of the Slavic churches, above all Sabbas of Serbia.