Peter of Korisha
Our Venerable Father Peter of Korisha, Hermit of Serbia
Venerable · b. c. 1211 — d. c. 1270
Commemorated 5 June — Repose in his cave above Koriša near Prizren
Peter of Korisha (c. 1211 – c. 1270) is the great hermit of medieval Serbia: a peasant's son from the Hvosno country between Peć and the plain of Kosovo, who after his parents' death gave away what he had, settled his sister in a convent, and went out to live in the caves of the wilderness — first by the Black River (Crna Reka) and then in the rock above the village of Koriša, near Prizren, where he spent the rest of his life in the extremes of fasting, vigil and combat with the demons. A monastery grew at his cave, his Life was written within two generations by Theodosius of Hilandar, and he is remembered as the pattern of the eremitic, as opposed to the royal and monastic-founder, sanctity of the Serbian Church. He is commemorated on June 5.
Childhood in Hvosno
Peter was born about 1211 in the village of Unjimir (Hvosno, in the district between the city of Peć and the field of Kosovo), of poor and devout parents. His Life stresses two things about the boy: that from his earliest years he was meek, silent and given to fasting — refusing meat, keeping to bread and water, avoiding the games of the other children — and that he had one sister, Helen (Jelena), to whom he was closely attached.
When his parents died, the children were left alone in the world. Peter divided the little inheritance among the poor, and he and his sister set out to live an ascetic life together in the hills.
The wilderness of the Black River, and the parting from his sister
They first withdrew to the wild country of the Crna Reka, the Black River — a gorge in the mountains of the upper Ibar whose caves had already been used by hermits and which afterwards became a famous Serbian skete. There they lived austerely; but the Life records with unusual candour the difficulty that the arrangement produced. Peter judged, or was brought to judge, that the presence even of a sister was an obstacle to the perfect solitude he wanted, and — with great grief on both sides — he placed Helen in a convent and went on alone.
The cave above Koriša
His final refuge was a cave in the rock face above the village of Koriša, on the mountain of Rusinica near Prizren, in a place approachable only by a narrow ledge. There he lived for the remainder of his life, walled up in the cliff with a stone for a pillow, eating wild plants and what the villagers brought and left below, keeping night vigils and unbroken prayer.
The bulk of the Life is taken up with what he suffered there, and it is one of the most vivid accounts of demonic assault in the Slavonic hagiographic corpus: the demons came at him in the shapes of wild beasts, serpents and armed men, in noises and voices, in terrors that pressed him to abandon the cave, and — after the manner of the desert literature it consciously imitates — in the subtler suggestions of despair and of spiritual self-satisfaction. He answered them, the Life says, with the sign of the Cross and the Psalter, and after long endurance they left him, and he was given the peace and the gift of wonderworking that mark the end of that struggle in every such narrative.
His fame spread. Disciples came to live in caves near his, the villagers of Koriša brought their sick, and out of the cluster of cells there grew in time the monastery of St Peter of Koriša, with a church cut and built against the rock. He reposed in his cave about 1270.
Relics, Life and cultus
Peter's body remained at Koriša and was venerated there. Between about 1310 and 1320 the monk Theodosius of Hilandar — the same writer who reworked the Life of St Sabbas — composed his Life, together with a service and hymns, and it is to Theodosius that almost everything known of him is owed. Stephen Dušan confirmed and endowed the monastery, which was afterwards attached to Hilandar on Athos.
The relics were later carried out of Kosovo. The tradition is that in the fourteenth century they were taken to Bulgaria, and they are associated with the church of Sts Peter and Paul at Tarnovo; portions of the relics have at various times been reported at Koriša, at Tarnovo, and in Serbian monasteries. The monastery of Koriša itself has been repeatedly ruined and repeatedly restored, most recently in the twentieth century, and remains a place of pilgrimage; his cave is shown there.
Peter's importance in the Serbian calendar is that he is not a king, an archbishop or a founder. Serbian sanctity in the Nemanjić centuries is overwhelmingly dynastic and hierarchical — Sabbas, Simeon, Stephen the First-crowned, Milutin, Lazar — and Peter is the great exception: a landless orphan who did nothing but pray in a hole in a cliff, and whom the Church set beside them.
Feast and commemoration
June 5 (church date; Old Calendar civil June 18) — a Serbian commemoration, kept also by the Orthodox Church in America, which prints his Life among the day's saints. He is named in the synaxis of the Serbian saints and is honoured particularly in the eparchy of Raška and Prizren, whose ancient territory contains his cave. The Greek and Antiochian menaia do not keep him, and the Moscow Patriarchate's calendar for the day does not list him. Where his memory is kept liturgically the service composed by Theodosius of Hilandar is used, otherwise the common of a venerable father.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable father)
In thee, O Father, the image was preserved unfailing; for taking up the cross thou didst follow Christ, and by deed thou didst teach us to despise the flesh, which passeth away, and to care for the soul, a thing immortal. Wherefore, O venerable Peter, thy spirit rejoiceth with the angels.
Original translation from the Slavonic
Iconography
Peter is written as a cave-dwelling hermit, and Serbian painters distinguish him by setting rather than by attribute: the figure of an ascetic, gaunt, long-bearded, in the monastic schema or in a garment of skins, standing or kneeling at the mouth of a cave in a rock face, with the cliff of Rusinica rising behind him and sometimes the church of Koriša at the foot. His hands are raised in prayer or hold a scroll. Where the Life is illustrated, the scenes are the parting from his sister, the assaults of the demons in the shapes of beasts and serpents, and the repose in the cave with the monks gathered on the ledge. He appears among the ascetics in the synaxis of the Serbian saints.
No pre-1900 image of Peter of Korisha has been secured for this collection. One candidate was examined and rejected: a Wikimedia Commons file of a fresco from his own hermitage near Prizren (Freska iz isposnice Svetog Petra Koriškog, Prizren) proved, on reading its description, to depict "the Apostle Peter, the Archangel Michael and an unknown holy monk" — not the saint of this entry — and to be a photograph of a 1967 painted copy made by named living-memory copyists rather than of the twelfth- or thirteenth-century original, so that the identification fails and the licence chain of the underlying work is not clean either. As a June saint he is far outside the range of the Menologion of Basil II.
Disputed questions
- Dates. Birth about 1211 and repose about 1270 are the received figures; the Life gives no years, and both are inferred. Some accounts put the repose in the 1260s, others as late as 1275.
- The sister. Her name is given as Helen (Jelena) in the tradition; some versions of the Life leave her unnamed, and the episode of the separation is told with varying degrees of severity.
- The relics. Whether the relics were removed to Bulgaria in the fourteenth century, and how much remained at Koriša, is not settled; local claims at Koriša, at Tarnovo and elsewhere coexist.
- Feast day. June 5 is the day in the Serbian calendar and in the OCA's June 5 synaxarion. He does not appear in the Greek Menaion or in the Russian synodal calendar for the day.