John of Rila

Origins and early life

John was born about 876 in the village of Skrino on the river Struma, in the Sofia region of the newly baptized Bulgaria — he was a child when Boris the Baptizer still lived, and Bulgaria's conversion was younger than his parents. His family were poor peasants, and John herded the village flocks. The Lives tell of the boy's first miracles among the herds — a stray heifer and calf found across the swollen river, which he crossed dry-shod — and of the mockery of neighbours that early taught him the world's price for holiness. Orphaned and unremarkable in the world's eyes, on reaching manhood he gave what he had to the poor and entered the monastery of St. Demetrius beneath the Ruen mountain above his native valley. There he received the tonsure, and there — for the coenobium possessed books — he learned his letters and was formed in the Psalter and the Fathers.

Ascetic struggle: from the cave to the Rila wilderness

The monastery could not hold him long. Seeking the desert after the pattern of Antony, whose Egypt was now beyond reach, John went out into the mountains of his own land — the first of the South Slavs to carry the full weight of the hermit vocation, which is why the Bulgarians call him their "heavenly man and earthly angel." He lived first in a hut of brushwood on a bare height, where robbers beat him and drove him off; then in a deep cave, where his young nephew Luke, fleeing his father's house, joined him as a disciple. The boy's father dragged Luke home; the child died of a serpent's bite on the road, and the grieving father returned to beg the hermit's forgiveness; John buried the boy at a place still shown as "Luke's grave" — the one purely human sorrow his Lives allow him.

After some twelve years in the cave John withdrew deeper, into the granite wilderness of Rila, the highest massif of the Balkans. There he passed the legendary years of his sternest asceticism: living in the hollow of a great oak, later on a high crag, eating herbs and the wild chickpeas which — the folk Life says — God caused to spring up for him, sleeping little, praying without ceasing, and fighting the demons who beat him and scattered his poor sustenance. Shepherds chasing strayed flocks stumbled on the emaciated hermit and carried the report down the valleys; the sick began to climb to him, and the Lives record healings and the casting out of unclean spirits at his prayer. Disciples followed and would not be turned away, and around his crag and cave there grew up cells, then a church, then a monastery with John — against all his desire — as its first abbot and father.

The hermit and the tsar

The fame of the hermit reached Tsar Peter (927–969), son of Symeon the Great, in his capital. The Lives tell that Peter came with a great retinue into the Rila as far as the mountain called thereafter Tsarev Vrah, "the Tsar's Peak," but the wild gorges would not let the court reach the hermit's crag; the tsar sent men begging John to come to him, and John refused — "tell the tsar that he seeks what cannot profit him: let him not see my poverty, nor I his glory." Peter sent gifts: food, and a cup of gold filled with gold pieces. John kept the food, blessed the cup as a keepsake of the giver, and sent back every coin — a hermit has no use for gold, he wrote, and a tsar has great use for it: let him spend it on the poor and on his armies' peace. The letter of John to Peter which the tradition preserves — counsel to a Christian king from a man who wanted nothing from him — became a foundational text of the Slavic political conscience: the crown bows to the cave, and the cave asks nothing of the crown. The Bulgarians have never forgotten that their greatest saint refused their greatest tsar.

The Testament and repose

Near the end of his life, in 941 by its own dating, John gave his disciples the Testament (Zavet) that stands with the letter to Peter as his literary legacy: they were to keep the faith of the Fathers whole, to flee the love of money as the root of all evil, to hold no property beyond need, to receive strangers, to shun the courts of princes, and to remain — as he had lived — free men of God in the wilderness. He appointed a successor, withdrew again to his cave for his last years, and died there on August 18, 946, about seventy years old. His disciples buried him by the church he had never wanted built for him.

Relics and translations

The relics of John were found incorrupt and wonderworking, and their subsequent journey is a history of the Balkans in miniature. Translated first from Rila to Sredets (Sofia) — by the later 11th century they lay in a church of the city, and the Byzantine governor's circle knew them well (George Skylitzes wrote a Greek Life and service at Sredets in the 12th century). In 1183 the Hungarian king Béla III, taking Sredets in war, carried the relics to Esztergom; the tradition relates that the archbishop there, who doubted the sanctity of the Bulgarian hermit, was struck dumb until he did the relics honour, and in 1187 the king returned them to Sredets with gifts. In 1195 the tsar Ivan Asen I, having restored the Bulgarian realm, translated them in state to his capital Tarnovo, where Patriarch Basil laid them in a church built for them — the translation the Byzantine-rite calendars fixed on October 19 (the Russian synaxaria carry the variant date 1238 for this translation; see Disputed questions). Under the Ottomans, Tarnovo fallen and the Bulgarian patriarchate extinguished, the monks of Rila sought their father back: in 1469, with the intercession of Mara Branković — the Serbian widow of Sultan Murad II, protectress of Athonite and Balkan monasticism — the relics were granted to the monastery and carried across the enslaved land in a slow procession that the whole people came out to meet, an event described by the eyewitness Vladislav the Grammarian and commemorated ever since on July 1. The relics rest in the Rila Monastery to this day.

The monastery and the nation

The Rila Monastery, refounded in 1335 on its present site by the protosebastos Hrelyo (whose defensive tower still stands), burned and rebuilt more than once, grew into the greatest monastery of Bulgaria and one of the greatest of the Slavic world: through five Ottoman centuries it was the ark in which Bulgarian faith, letters, and identity survived, its monks walking the villages as confessors and its scriptorium feeding the manuscript culture of the whole Slavic south. The National Revival rebuilt it in splendour in the 19th century; UNESCO inscribed it in 1983. John himself was canonized by veneration almost immediately after his death; his Lives run from the anonymous folk Life and the Greek Life by Skylitzes to the great Life by Patriarch Euthymius of Tarnovo (14th century), and his cultus spread with the Slavic books to Serbia and Russia. He is invoked as the heavenly protector of the Bulgarian people, and the day of his chief feast, October 19, is kept in Bulgaria with national solemnity.