Sabbas of Benephali
Our Venerable Father Sabbas, Monk, of Benephali
Venerable
Commemorated 27 August — Commemoration of the monk of Benephali
Sabbas of Benephali is a monastic saint who survives in the calendars as a name and a place and nothing else. He stands in the Greek synaxaria and in the Slavic and OCA calendars for August 27 as "the venerable Sabbas, monk, of Benephali"; no life, no century, no country and no act is transmitted, and the place-name itself is not securely identified.
The extent of the record
The whole of the tradition is a synaxarion line. The OCA calendar prints his name for August 27 with the explicit note that no information is available; the Greek enumerations of the day give him as Ὅσιος Σάββας ὁ ἐν Βενεφάλοις, "the venerable Sabbas in Benephali," which is the standard Byzantine formula for a monk identified by his monastery or his locality. Nothing further has been located in any source consulted for this collection.
This is not a defect to be padded over. A substantial number of the Church's commemorations are of exactly this kind: a name preserved because a community once kept the memory, entered in the great synaxaria of Constantinople, and carried forward in the calendars long after the community and its records perished. The Church continues to name him; the historian can say no more than the calendar does.
Feast and commemoration
August 27 (church date; New Calendar civil August 27, Old Calendar civil September 9), a bare commemoration on a day whose principal saint is Poemen the Great. No proper office exists; the common of a venerable father is used where he is commemorated at all.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable father)
By the streams of thy tears thou didst make the barren desert fruitful, and by thy sighing from the depths thou didst bring thy labours to a hundredfold harvest; thou wast made a beacon for the whole world, shining with miracles, O Sabbas our father: intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.
Iconography
No iconographic type exists for this Sabbas, and none can be expected: an unlocalised synaxarion name does not generate images. Where he would be painted — in the rank of a menaion icon for August 27 — he would take the general form of a venerable father: a bearded monk in the dark habit and koukoulion, holding a scroll or with the right hand raised in blessing, distinguished from his neighbours only by the inscription. Any surviving icon inscribed Ο ΑΓΙΟΣ ΣΑΒΒΑΣ belongs, on the overwhelming balance of probability, to Sabbas the Sanctified.
No image has been stored, and none is sought.
Disputed questions
- Where is Benephali? The form Βενεφάλοις is a dative plural, so the underlying name is something like Benephala or Benephaloi, presumably a monastery or a district. It has been read as a locality in Asia Minor and as a Latinate name (from bene-) belonging to the Italo-Greek or Sicilian sphere; neither identification rests on anything more than the shape of the word. It is transliterated variously in English calendars as Benephali, Venephali and Benephalia.
- Century. Not transmitted. No century is asserted in this entry, and he is indexed among the saints whose era the sources do not fix.
- Not to be confused with any of the well-attested monastic Sabbases — Sabbas the Sanctified (December 5), the founder of the Great Lavra in Palestine; Sabbas of Serbia (January 14); Sabbas of Storozhevsk (December 3); Sabbas of Stagira; Sabbas of Moscow — nor with the martyrs Sabbas the Goth (April 12) and Sabbas Stratelates (April 24). The name is one of the commonest in the eastern monastic calendar, and an unqualified "St Sabbas" in a source is almost never this one.