Naum of Ohrid

Disciple of Cyril and Methodius

Naum was born about 830, of Slavic (or, in one tradition, mixed) parentage, somewhere in the region of the Byzantine Balkans; the sources are silent on his origins, and he enters history already as a companion of the brothers Constantine (in monasticism Cyril) and Methodius. He was among the closest of their disciples during the great mission to the Slavs, and one of the small band of "the Five" — Clement, Naum, Gorazd, Sava and Angelar — who continued the work after the founders. Learned and, the tradition says, master of several tongues, he shared in the labour of translating the Scriptures and the service books into Slavonic and of teaching the new alphabet.

He accompanied Cyril and Methodius on their journey to Rome (about 867–868), where Pope Adrian II blessed the Slavonic books and liturgy against the objections of those who held that only Hebrew, Greek and Latin were fit for worship. In Rome, Cyril died (869); Naum remained among Methodius's helpers through the years of his Moravian archbishopric, amid the mounting opposition of the German missionary clergy who resented the Slavonic rite.

Expulsion from Moravia and the coming to Bulgaria

When Methodius died in 885, the Frankish party in Great Moravia moved at once against his disciples. The Slavonic clergy were seized, imprisoned, and finally driven out — some sold into slavery. Naum, with Clement and Angelar, was expelled and made the hard journey down to the Danube and across into Bulgaria, where the prince Boris I, newly baptised and eager to give his people a Church in their own language, received the exiles as a gift from heaven and set them to work.

Naum laboured first in the north, at the old capital Pliska and then at the new one, Preslav, where under Boris and his son Symeon the Great a brilliant school of Slavonic letters grew up. There Naum was among the teachers and scholars who shaped the Preslav literary school — the milieu in which, in these very decades, the Cyrillic alphabet took form out of the earlier Glagolitic, and a whole Christian literature was translated and composed in Slavonic. Naum's own hand is traditionally seen in hymnographic and translation work of the period.

Ohrid and the monastery

About 893, when Clement was raised to be bishop in the south-western region of Kutmichevitsa, Naum was sent to take up and continue his educational work at Ohrid, the second great centre of Slavonic learning in Bulgaria. For some seven years he taught there, forming clergy and copyists and consolidating what became known as the Ohrid Literary School.

Around 905, having withdrawn toward the monastic life, Naum built a monastery on the southern shore of Lake Ohrid, at the place where the springs of the Black Drin rise — dedicating its church to the Holy Archangels Michael and Gabriel. He passed his last years there in asceticism, and reposed on December 23, 910. He was buried in the monastery church, and the house has borne his name ever since: the Monastery of Sveti Naum, one of the most venerated and most visited holy places of the region, its foundation among the oldest surviving in the Slavic Orthodox world.

Veneration and wonders

Naum was numbered among the saints soon after his death, his relics at the monastery quickly becoming a source of healing. He is especially invoked for the cure of mental and nervous illness, and a long-standing popular practice has pilgrims lay an ear to his tomb, where the faithful say a sound may be heard. The Greek Menaion styles him "Naum the Wonderworker, the enlightener and holy preacher of Bulgaria," and his cult spread through the Bulgarian, Macedonian and Serbian Churches and to Athos. With Cyril, Methodius, Clement, Gorazd, Sava and Angelar he is honoured among the Seven Enlighteners of the Slavs (the Sedmochislenitsi), whose common synaxis is kept on July 27 — a company whose work gave the Slavic peoples the Scriptures, the Liturgy and the beginnings of their letters in their own tongue.