Gregory of Wallachia
Our Father among the Saints Gregory the Teacher, Metropolitan of Ungro-Wallachia
Bishop · Confessor · b. 1765 — d. 1834
Commemorated 22 June — Repose at Bucharest
Gregory the Teacher — Grigorie Dascălul — was a monk of Neamț formed in the Paisian tradition, one of the great translators of the Greek Fathers into Romanian, who was drawn out of the monastery in 1823 to be Metropolitan of Ungro-Wallachia in the wreckage left by the revolution of 1821. He filled the empty sees with Romanian bishops, revived the schools and the press, and in 1829 was deposed and exiled to Chișinău by the Russian military administration whose demands upon the clergy he had refused. He returned in 1833 to a Church he had barely a year left to serve, and died on 22 June 1834. The Romanian Orthodox Church glorified him in October 2005; his relics rest at the monastery of Căldărușani.
Bucharest and Neamț
He was born Gheorghe at Bucharest in 1765, and was schooled in theology and the classical languages at the princely academy of St Sava in that city — an education that explains everything he afterwards did with a pen. Still young, he left for Neamț in Moldavia and was tonsured there.
Neamț in those years was the living centre of the revival begun by Paisius Velichkovsky (†1794), and its distinctive labour was translation: the recovery of the Greek ascetic and patristic corpus for Slavonic and Romanian readers. Gregory entered that workshop and became its foremost Romanian hand. With his fellow-monk and lifelong collaborator Gerontie he produced Romanian versions of a long series of Greek texts — homiletic, ascetic and liturgical, including works of John Chrysostom, Basil the Great, Theodore the Studite and Symeon of Thessalonica — printed at Neamț and at Bucharest. The by-name that has stuck to him, Dascălul, "the Teacher," is not an episcopal honorific but the name the monastery gave him for that work.
The two set out for Mount Athos in 1812 to gather manuscripts; Gerontie died on the journey, and Gregory returned alone and went on translating.
Metropolitan of Ungro-Wallachia
The Wallachian revolution of 1821 and the Greek rising that ran with it ended the Phanariot regime in the Danubian principalities, and the restoration of native princes brought with it the expectation of a native hierarchy. The metropolitan see of Ungro-Wallachia — the ancient title of the metropolitanate of Bucharest — was vacant; Gregory, a monk with no rank at all, was elected to it and confirmed on 11 January 1823, receiving the three ordinations in rapid succession.
As metropolitan he did four things. He filled the vacant eparchies of Argeș, Buzău and Râmnic with Romanian bishops, ending a long dependence on Greek appointees. He pressed the revival of schools, sending the scholar Petrache Poenaru to Western Europe in 1824 to study the educational systems there. He continued to print, turning the metropolitan press into an instrument of the same translating work he had begun as a monk. And he lived, by every account, as a monk still — the poverty and the manuscripts followed him into the residence.
Exile
The Russo-Turkish war of 1828–1829 placed the principalities under a Russian military administration which governed them until 1834. Its demands fell heavily on the Church: the requisition of clergy and of church property for the needs of the army and the civil administration, and the subjection of ecclesiastical government to the occupying authority. Gregory refused, and the conflict was not resolved but ended: he was removed from office on 24 January 1829 and sent into exile at Chișinău, in the Bessarabia which Russia had annexed in 1812.
He remained in Bessarabia until December 1831 and was not restored to the actual government of his church until August 1833. The exile is the reason the Romanian Church numbers him among its confessor-hierarchs: he was deposed for refusing the demands of a state upon the Church, and he did not recant them.
Repose and glorification
He returned to Bucharest exhausted and died there on 22 June 1834, less than a year after resuming his throne. He was buried at the monastery of Căldărușani north of the capital, where his relics remain.
The Holy Synod of the Romanian Orthodox Church proclaimed his sanctity in October 2005, with the title Sfântul Ierarh Grigorie Dascălul, "Saint Gregory the Teacher, Hierarch," and appointed his commemoration on the day of his repose, 22 June. The Russian and OCA calendars have since received the commemoration as "Saint Gregory, Metropolitan of Wallachia."
Feast and commemoration
June 22 (church date; Old Calendar civil July 5), the day of his repose. He shares the day with the hieromartyr Eusebius of Samosata, who carries its service. The commemoration is Romanian in origin and is kept by the Romanian Patriarchate with a proper office composed for the glorification of 2005; the Moscow Patriarchate and the Orthodox Church in America list him for the day, and he is the most recent saint on the June 22 calendar.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of a hierarch)
The truth of things hath revealed thee to thy flock as a rule of faith, an icon of meekness and a teacher of abstinence; therefore thou hast achieved the heights by humility, riches by poverty. O Father and Hierarch Gregory, intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.
Iconography
The icons of Gregory are necessarily modern, written since the glorification of 2005, and they follow the type fixed for him at that time: a hierarch of advanced years in the Romanian mitre and the sakkos or the great mandyas, the beard long and white, blessing with the right hand and holding in the left either the Gospel-book or — the attribute that distinguishes him — an open book or a scroll, in allusion to the translating labour from which his by-name comes. The monastery of Căldărușani, where his relics lie, appears in some compositions behind him. A few icons place beside him the walls of Neamț.
No pre-1900 icon of him exists or can exist, since he was glorified in 2005 and died in 1834; the portraits made in his lifetime and shortly after are not icons. The modern icons are the copyrighted work of living iconographers and none has been found free-licensed, so none is stored here.
Disputed questions
- The numbering. He is Gregory IV in the list of the metropolitans of Ungro-Wallachia and is frequently cited in Romanian sources as Grigorie al IV-lea Dascălul. The slug here uses the province rather than the number, per the epithet-first rule, and the numbered form is carried in alternate_names.
- The dates of the exile. Sources differ on whether he returned from Chișinău in 1831 or remained until the restoration of his office in 1833; the two dates are reconcilable — his physical return preceded his reinstatement by close to two years — and both are given above.
- Confessor? The Romanian glorification honours him as a hierarch, not formally as a confessor. The confessor type is carried here on the substance of the case: deposition and exile imposed by a civil power for a refusal made on the Church's behalf. The departure from the Romanian styling is noted rather than hidden.