Michael the Soldier of Bulgaria
The Holy Righteous Michael the Soldier of Potuka
Righteous · d. c. 866
Commemorated 22 November
Michael the Soldier (†c. 866) was one of the first Bulgarians to embrace Christianity, a native of Potuka who lived in the reign of the Byzantine emperor Michael III. A soldier by calling and, from the age of twenty-four, the commander of a troop, he was famed both for bravery in battle and for a life of prayer, fasting and almsgiving; the tradition remembers him routing an enemy host after prayer when his allies had fled, and delivering a district from a monstrous beast that its people had worshipped, whom he converted to Christ. He reposed in peace soon after and worked many healings at his tomb. His relics were carried from Potuka to Trnovo in 1206, and long after to Wallachia; the Church keeps him among the righteous on November 22.
Michael was born at Potuka (Potuke), a town of Bulgaria, and is remembered as among the first of his people to become Christian — set in the reign of the Byzantine emperor Michael III (855–867), the very years in which Bulgaria under Boris-Michael received the faith. From infancy, the synaxarion says, he was marked out as a "saintly child," and in youth he led a blameless life: he feared God, kept the fasts, gave alms freely to the poor, visited the sick, and was gentle and lowly in bearing.
At twenty-four he was made commander of a body of soldiers. The account tells of a campaign in which the Christians' allies fled the field; Michael, casting himself to the ground, prayed with tears for their deliverance, then led his own men into the thick of the enemy, threw them into confusion, and came off unharmed. Returning home, in a wilderness called Raipha he delivered the people of a certain city from a huge beast that came out of a lake to seize their children and to which they offered human sacrifice as to a god; he killed it, and when the crowds gathered to see the slayer of their "god" he preached the Gospel to them and turned them from idolatry and human sacrifice to Christ. This dragon-slaying episode gives Michael his likeness, in the iconography and in the popular memory, to the warrior-martyrs George and Demetrius, though Michael was not himself a martyr.
Soon after his return home he reposed in peace, still a young man, and gave up his soul to the Lord whom he had loved from childhood. Many miracles of healing followed at his grave for those who came in faith. His relics were translated from Potuka to the Bulgarian capital Trnovo in 1206, in the days of the second Bulgarian kingdom, where they were greatly honoured; at the beginning of the nineteenth century they were carried to Wallachia. The Church numbers him not among the martyrs but among the righteous — a layman and soldier glorified in an upright life in the world.
Feast and commemoration
November 22 (church date; Old Calendar civil December 5), within the afterfeast of the Entry of the Theotokos into the Temple and the Nativity Fast. His memory is kept especially in the Bulgarian Church, of whose first Christian generation he is a patron, and in the wider Slavic calendars and the OCA. As a righteous soldier who reposed in peace he is styled "the Soldier" (воин) but not martyr; a proper troparion in Tone 8 is appointed.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 8
Having lifted up thy mind to God and longed for the life of the angels, thou didst forsake the corruptible glory of earth, O blessed one, and didst lay down thy soul for thy people; thou hast received a crown in return for thy labours, O God-wise Michael. Entreat Christ God for those who honour with love thy holy memory.
Original translation from the Slavonic
Iconography
Michael is painted as a young soldier-saint in the manner of the warrior-martyrs — beardless or lightly bearded, in military dress with cloak, often bearing a spear or standard, and in narrative icons shown spearing the lake-beast he slew, a composition that draws him close to Saint George. No storable pre-modern icon of verified identity has yet been secured for this entry.