Serapion of David Gareji
Our Venerable Father Serapion the Wonderworker, Abbot of the Monastery of Saint John the Baptist in the David Gareji Wilderness
Venerable · Wonderworker · d. 1774, in the David Gareji wilderness
Commemorated 24 August — Repose in seclusion at the Monastery of St John the Baptist
Serapion was abbot of the monastery of St John the Baptist in the David Gareji wilderness of Kakheti, in the eighteenth century — the last age of that ancient cave-monastic federation before the Persian and Lezgian raids and the Russian annexation broke it. He is remembered as a wonderworker, and specifically as a protector of his brotherhood against the raiders and brigands who were the ordinary hazard of monastic life in the Gareji desert: once he put an armed band to flight when a flame issued from his staff, and once he knew by revelation of an attack on the monastery's servants and brought them through it by prayer. In old age he resigned the abbacy, received the great schema, and went into seclusion; and having been shown the hour of his death, he asked to be buried beneath the gates of the church, so that everyone who came in should walk over him. He reposed in 1774.
The Gareji wilderness in its last century
The David Gareji complex — a dozen monasteries cut into the semi-desert ridges on the border of Kakheti, founded in the sixth century by David, one of the Thirteen Syrian Fathers, and by his disciple Dodo — was for twelve hundred years the chief centre of Georgian eremitic monasticism and of Georgian manuscript-copying and fresco-painting. By the eighteenth century it was also one of the most exposed places in the Caucasus. The Gareji fathers had been slaughtered wholesale more than once — the six thousand monks killed on Bright Tuesday in 1615 by Shah Abbas are kept in the calendar — and the lezginka raids from the mountains were an annual expectation.
It is in this setting that Serapion governed the monastery of St John the Baptist (Natlismcemeli), the second of the Gareji houses, founded by David's disciple Lucian and standing a little way from the lavra of David himself. What the tradition preserves of him is therefore, and naturally, a set of stories about protection: the abbot's task in that place and century was to keep his monks and his monastery's goods alive.
The flame from the staff
The first of the two miracles transmitted concerns a journey to the city. A party of monks was travelling ahead of Serapion, carrying the vessels of the church, when brigands set upon them and took the plate. Serapion, coming behind and learning what had happened, went after the robbers alone and unarmed. What the account describes is not a rescue but an apparition: a terrible flame came out of the elder's staff, and the robbers, seeing it, threw down what they had taken and fled. The monastery's vessels were recovered without a blow struck.
The mules that came home
The second story is of the same kind, with the emphasis moved from the visible to the hidden. Serapion, in the monastery, announced suddenly that robbers had fallen upon the monastery's servants on the road. He gave himself to prayer. The servants arrived safe at the gate a while afterwards; and the pack-mules, which had been driven off in the attack and were still loaded with the monastery's property, came back unaccompanied, of themselves.
Both stories belong to a recognisable Georgian type, in which the ascetic's authority is exercised over violence and over animals in the same breath, and both are told without elaboration.
The schema, the seclusion, and the grave under the gate
In his last years Serapion laid down the abbacy, received the tonsure of the great schema — the highest degree of the monastic life, taken by Orthodox monks who withdraw from administration to pure prayer — and went into seclusion.
God revealed to him the approach of his death. He dug his own grave, and asked that it be made beneath the gates of the church, in the passage where everyone entering must tread; his stated reason was that he wished those who came to pray to walk over him. The request is a formula of monastic self-abasement with a long history in the East — the same instinct that produced the abbots who asked to be buried outside the walls or in the refuse of the monastery — but it is also, in a monastery under constant threat, an unpretentious way of saying that he had finished defending things and wished to be trodden on.
He reposed in 1774.
Feast and commemoration
August 24 (church date; Old Calendar civil September 6). His commemoration is Georgian and local, kept in the Church of Georgia and reproduced in the Orthodox Church in America's calendar; he does not appear in the Greek or Slavonic Menaia for the day. In the Georgian usage he is remembered above all at Gareji itself, where his grave under the church gate is shown.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable father)
In thee, O father, was preserved unfailingly that which is according to the image; for taking up the cross thou didst follow Christ, and by thy deeds didst teach us to despise the flesh, for it passeth away, but to care for the soul, a thing immortal. Wherefore, O venerable Serapion, thy spirit rejoiceth with the angels.
Kontakion — Tone 4
Fire went out of thy staff against the robbers, and thy prayer brought the beasts of burden home; and having guarded thy brethren, thou didst ask to be laid beneath the gate, that all who enter might tread upon thee. O Serapion, wonderworker of the wilderness, pray for us who honour thee.
Iconography
Serapion is written according to the Georgian monastic type: an aged father of the great schema, in the black analavos embroidered with the cross, the skull and the instruments of the Passion, and the pointed koukoulion drawn over the head; the beard long and white, the right hand raised in blessing or holding the abbot's staff which is his particular attribute — the staff from which the flame came. In fuller compositions the cave-cells of the Gareji ridge are drawn behind him, the honeycombed rock face which identifies the wilderness as surely as a monastery's walls identify a Russian founder.
He is most often seen not alone but in the composite icon of the Fathers of David Gareji, ranged with David and Dodo and Lucian and the martyred brotherhoods.
No pre-1900 depiction of him has been located for this collection. Georgian icons of the Gareji fathers in circulation are modern works under copyright, and the medieval frescoes of the Gareji caves — which are public domain — predate him by centuries and therefore cannot represent him.
Disputed questions
- The record is short and late. Serapion's memory is preserved in the Georgian monastic tradition of Gareji and reaches the wider Orthodox calendars only through the modern Georgian synaxaria and the calendars derived from them. Neither his birthplace, nor his family, nor the years of his abbacy is transmitted, and none is supplied here.
- Not to be confused with the other saints of the name: Serapion of Thmuis, the fourth-century Egyptian bishop and friend of St Athanasius; Serapion the Sindonite; Serapion of Novgorod (†1516); and Serapion of Kozheozero.
- Gareji's other saints. He stands in the Georgian calendar with the earlier fathers of the same wilderness — Dodo of Gareji, Shio the New and the martyrs of Gareji, and Gerontius and the martyrs of David Gareji — and is the latest of them to be commemorated by name.