Paisius of Hilendar
Our Venerable Father Paisius of Hilendar, Author of the Slavo-Bulgarian History
Venerable · b. 1722, probably at Bansko — d. 1773, near Stanimaka (Asenovgrad)
Commemorated 19 June — Memory of the venerable Paisius, awakener of the Bulgarian people
Paisius was a hieromonk of the Bulgarian brotherhood at the monastery of Hilendar on Mount Athos who, in 1762, finished writing a small book called the Istoriya Slavyanobolgarskaya — the Slavo-Bulgarian History — and then carried it on foot through the Bulgarian lands to be copied. It was not a work of scholarship so much as a summons: an account of the Bulgarian kings, patriarchs and saints, written for a people who had lived under Ottoman rule for three and a half centuries and under Greek ecclesiastical administration for one, addressed to those who were ashamed of their own name. The book circulated for eighty years in manuscript, was the seed of the Bulgarian National Revival, and made its author, in the judgement of his nation, the man who began modern Bulgaria. He reposed on the road in 1773, and was glorified by the Bulgarian Orthodox Church in 1962.
Origins
He was born in 1722, most probably at Bansko in the Pirin mountains, then in the eparchy of Samokov; the birthplace is disputed and other towns have claimed him, but Bansko has the better case and is now generally accepted. His family were pious and of some means, and it was a family of Athonites: his elder brother Lawrence (Lavrenty) was already a monk of Hilendar and became its hegumen, and another brother was a merchant who supported the house with his gifts.
The monk of Hilendar
Paisius came to the Holy Mountain in 1745, to the Serbian foundation of Hilendar, where a Bulgarian brotherhood had long lived alongside the Serbs. He was ordained hieromonk and rose to be proigumen — deputy or former abbot, the office of a senior of the house — and in that capacity he travelled repeatedly off the Mountain on the monastery's business, collecting alms through the Bulgarian and Serbian lands and into the Habsburg territories. It was on those journeys, and in the quarrels of the Athonite brotherhoods themselves, that the question which came to possess him was put to him: what were the Bulgarians, and why did their own people despise the name?
The Slavo-Bulgarian History
He set himself to answer it out of books. On Athos he read what the libraries held; in 1761, on a journey to Sremski Karlovci in the Habsburg lands, he found and used two works that gave him a continuous narrative — the Kingdom of the Slavs of the Ragusan Mauro Orbini, and the ecclesiastical annals of Cardinal Baronius in Russian translation. He wrote at Hilendar and finished the book in 1762 at the neighbouring Bulgarian monastery of Zograf, where he had gone in the course of one of the disputes between the houses.
The Istoriya Slavyanobolgarskaya is short — a chronicle of the Bulgarian tsars from the first kingdom, of the patriarchate of Tarnovo, and of the Bulgarian saints, prefaced by two addresses to the reader. It is those prefaces, and not the history, that made the book. In them Paisius attacks his countrymen's shame of themselves directly and by name:
O unwise and foolish one! Why art thou ashamed to be called a Bulgarian? … Or had the Bulgarians no kingdom and no dominion? … Thou, Bulgarian, be not deceived: know thine own people and thy tongue, and learn in thine own tongue.
And he closes with the charge that gave the Revival its motto: "Know thy people and thy language."
The book was written in a plain vernacular-inflected Church Slavonic, deliberately below the level of learned style, so that a village priest could read it aloud. Paisius did not print it — printing in Bulgarian was not to be had — but carried the manuscript himself through the Bulgarian towns, urging men to copy it. Copies were made and copies made from copies: something over sixty manuscript transcriptions are known. The first and most famous was made in 1765 at Kotel by the young priest Stoyko Vladislavov, afterwards Sophronius, Bishop of Vratsa, who met Paisius on one of these journeys and became the chief carrier of his message into the next generation. The History was not printed until 1844, by which time its work was done.
Repose
Paisius died in 1773, on the road, in the district of Stanimaka (the modern Asenovgrad), while travelling — by most accounts returning towards Mount Athos. The exact place of his burial is not known.
Legacy and glorification
The judgement of Bulgarian historiography is that the National Revival begins with him: from his book descend the schools, the vernacular literature, the struggle for a Bulgarian church independent of the Patriarchate of Constantinople (achieved in the Exarchate of 1870), and in the end the political revival itself. The Bulgarian Orthodox Church glorified him as a saint on 26 June 1962, on the two-hundredth anniversary of the History, with the title prepodobni — venerable — and appointed his memory to June 19. He is honoured in Bulgaria as few saints are: on the banknotes and coinage, in the name of the university of Plovdiv, and on the map of Antarctica.
Feast and commemoration
June 19 (church date; Old Calendar civil July 2), appointed at his glorification in 1962. He is a saint of the Bulgarian Church; the Greek Menaion does not know him, and where he appears in Russian and American calendars it is by adoption from the Bulgarian usage. The OCA carries him for this day as "Venerable Paisius of Hilandar, Bulgaria." His memory falls on the same day as that of the Egyptian Paisius whose name he bore, which is almost certainly why the Bulgarian Synod chose it.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4
Adorned with the monastic life on the Holy Mountain, thou didst take up the pen as a weapon, O father Paisius, and didst call a forgetful people back to the knowledge of itself and of God; wherefore Bulgaria honoureth thee as her awakener and boast, and we cry: intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.
Iconography
Paisius is painted as a monk of middle years in the mandyas and koukoulion, dark-bearded, holding an open book or scroll on which the opening words of the Slavo-Bulgarian History are written — the address to the reader is the invariable attribute, and the icon is often lettered with "Know thy people and thy language." Behind him the painters commonly set the monastery of Hilendar on its Athonite hillside, or the towers of medieval Tarnovo; in some compositions he holds a quill. Because he was glorified only in 1962 the whole painted tradition is of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and is under copyright, and the same is true of the celebrated modern monuments and murals in Bulgaria.
No pre-1900 image exists to be stored, and none can: the saint had no cult before the twentieth century, and the eighteenth-century portrait tradition of Bulgarian monks did not extend to him.
Disputed questions
- Birthplace. Bansko is the reading of the majority of the evidence and of the modern consensus, but Samokov, Kralev Dol and other places have been argued for, and the question is not formally closed. His own book says only that he was "of the eparchy of Samokov."
- The history in the History. Paisius's sources were secondary, Latin and Ragusan by way of Russian, and his chronology and genealogy are frequently wrong. This has never been concealed by his admirers, and it is not the ground of his veneration: the Church honours the monk and the awakener, not the annalist.
- Not to be confused with the other saints of the name, all of whom are older or otherwise placed: Paisius the Great of the Egyptian desert, whose feast is this same day and after whom Paisius was named in religion; Paisius Velichkovsky (†1794), the Athonite and Moldavian elder of the Philokalia, his exact contemporary on the Holy Mountain and a quite different man; and the Russians Paisius of Galich and Paisius of Uglich.