Laurence of Pelion
Our Venerable Father Laurence, founder of the monastery on Pelion in Magnesia
Venerable · d. late 14th century (in peace)
Commemorated 10 May — Memory of the venerable father Laurence, who was perfected in peace
The Greek books of May 10 carry, after the Apostle Simon and the martyrs of Lentini, a notice of five words: "Our venerable father Laurence was perfected in peace." Modern Greek usage, and the Metropolis of Demetrias in whose territory his memory is kept, identify this Laurence with the fourteenth-century monk who left the Great Lavra on Athos when teaching he judged heretical spread there, came to Magnesia, and founded on the eastern slope of Mount Pelion above Volos the monastery from which the village of Agios Lavrentios still takes its name — its church completed in 1378 with a chrysobull and money from the emperor Alexios Komnenos — and afterwards a skete of the Transfiguration and the Prophet Elias, which drew learned monks to the mountain. He reposed in peace in great age. Whether the ancient bare notice was originally written of this man is not certain, and the entry says so.
From the Great Lavra to Pelion
What is transmitted of Laurence is a short and coherent monastic career, without dates for his birth or his tonsure. He was a monk of the Great Lavra, the senior house of the Holy Mountain, in the fourteenth century — the century in which Athos was convulsed first by the hesychast controversy and then by the pressure of Latin and Ottoman politics. The accounts say only that teaching he judged heretical began to spread in the monastery, and that rather than remain he withdrew from Athos altogether. They do not name the doctrine, and this entry does not supply one: the natural reference for a fourteenth-century Athonite would be to the controversies over the hesychast prayer or to the Latinizing party, but the sources are silent and the identification would be a guess.
He came south-west into Thessaly, to the country of Magnesia behind the gulf of Volos, and settled on the wooded eastern flank of Pelion. There he gathered a brotherhood and built a monastery. The building was not done out of poverty alone: the tradition records that the emperor Alexios Komnenos — Alexios III of Trebizond, on the usual reckoning of the date — granted a chrysobull and funds for the work, and that the church was completed in 1378. The monastery of Saint Laurence gave its name to the settlement that grew beside it, and the village of Agios Lavrentios on Pelion bears it still.
The skete of the Transfiguration
Laurence did not stop with the monastery. He afterwards established near it a skete dedicated to the Transfiguration of the Saviour and to the Prophet Elias — the two dedications belong together, for Elias stands at Christ's right hand on Tabor — and the skete became known for the quality of the men it attracted: the accounts speak of educated and lettered monks gathering there, which in the Thessalian fourteenth century is a real distinction, and suggests a house of copying and teaching as well as of prayer.
His own manner of life is described in the plainest terms the synaxaria use: fasting, vigil and unceasing prayer, sustained into old age. He was not a martyr, he wrote nothing that survives, and no miracle is attached to his name in the transmitted notice. He died in peace, full of years — which is exactly what the Menaion's one line says of him, and is the whole reason the day remembers him.
Veneration on Pelion
The cult is local and Thessalian. Laurence is honoured in the Metropolis of Demetrias (Volos) as one of the founders of its monastic life, and is numbered in the Synaxis of the Saints of Demetrias, a local Greek commemoration of the saints of Magnesia and the Pelion country. The monastery he founded did not survive the centuries intact, but the village church and the toponym preserve his memory, and the mountain itself carries his name in the speech of the region.
Feast and commemoration
May 10 (church date; New Calendar civil May 10, Old Calendar civil May 23). The commemoration is a synaxarion notice only: the day's office belongs to Simon the Zealot, and Laurence has neither proper stichera nor kontakion, so that where his memory is kept liturgically it is served from the common of a venerable father. The observance is Greek and local — the Slavonic and Russian books of May 10 do not carry him at all, their day being filled by the apostle, the martyrs of Sicily, Hesychius of Antioch, and the Russian commemorations. On Pelion the feast is kept in the village that bears his name, and he is remembered again with the local Synaxis of the Saints of Demetrias.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable father)
In thee, O father, was the divine image kept secure; for taking up thy cross thou didst follow Christ, and by thy deeds thou didst teach us to despise the flesh, for it passeth away, but to care for the soul, a thing immortal. Therefore doth thy spirit, O venerable Laurence, rejoice together with the angels.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Laurence has no ancient iconographic type. He is painted, where he is painted at all, as a venerable father of the Greek monastic pattern: an aged monk in the dark rason and koukoulion, white-bearded, holding a scroll — and, as a founder, sometimes carrying a model of his church on the open hand, the conventional sign of a ktētōr. In the local churches of Pelion he may appear beside the Transfiguration of his skete, or in a composition of the saints of Magnesia. Because the Menaion gives him no attribute and no narrative scene, an image of him is identified only by its inscription, and his name is shared with the archdeacon Laurence of Rome, whose gridiron makes that far more familiar figure easy to mistake for him in an uninscribed panel.
No pre-1900 image inscribed of this Laurence has been identified for this collection, and none is stored; an icon of another Laurence would misidentify him.
Disputed questions
- Is the Menaion's Laurence this Laurence? The classical synaxarion notice for May 10 — Ὁ ὅσιος πατὴρ ἡμῶν Λαυρέντιος ἐν εἰρήνῃ τελειοῦται — is undated and unplaced, and unlike the day's other commemorations it carries no distich in the printed Menaion. A notice of that form belongs, on the face of it, to the ancient stratum of the Constantinopolitan synaxarion, which cannot have known a monk of 1378. Two readings are possible: either the ancient notice remembers an otherwise unknown venerable Laurence and the fourteenth-century founder of Pelion was later attached to the same day (a very common process in the printed Greek books), or the notice itself entered the Menaion late, from Thessalian usage. Modern Greek sources and the local Church give the day to the Pelion founder, and this entry follows them while recording that the older notice may not be his.
- "Laurence of Egypt." No source consulted for this day — the Greek Menaion, the Greek synaxaristes, the Slavonic and Russian calendars, or the Orthodox Church in America — attests any Egyptian Laurence on May 10. The day's Λαυρέντιος is the venerable father of the bare notice, kept in Greek usage as the founder on Pelion; an "Egypt" attribution appears to be a confusion, and is recorded here so that it is not propagated.
- Not to be confused with the several other Laurences of the calendar: Laurence the Archdeacon of Rome (August 10), the most famous of the name; Laurence of Turov (January 29), the recluse-bishop; Laurence the Recluse of the Kiev Far Caves; and — the nearest trap — Laurentios, founder of the monastery of Panagia Phaneromeni on Salamis, another later Greek monastic founder kept on March 6/7, with whom the Pelion Laurence is easily interchanged in Greek lists of monastic founders.