Sophronius of Saint Anne's Skete
Our Venerable Father Sophronius of the Skete of Saint Anne on the Holy Mountain
Venerable · d. 18th century, on Mount Athos
Commemorated 18 August — Repose after fifty years on the Holy Mountain
Sophronius was an Athonite of the eighteenth century whose whole recorded biography is two sentences and one extraordinary act: on the night of his wedding he left his house, went to the Holy Mountain, and was tonsured at the Skete of Saint Anne, where he lived fifty years and reposed in peace. Nothing is transmitted of his birthplace, his family, his bride, his name in the world, or the year of his death. The Athonite calendar keeps him on August 18.
The wedding night
The single act by which Sophronius is remembered is his flight from his own marriage feast. The notice is bald: he left home on his wedding night and became a monk on Mount Athos.
It should be said plainly what the tradition is and is not doing with this. The Church has never presented such a flight as a pattern to be copied — betrothal is a bond, and the canonical tradition treats the abandonment of a spouse with severity. The story belongs to a recognisable and much older hagiographic family, that of Alexis the Man of God, who by his Life left his bride on the wedding night and returned unrecognised to live as a beggar at his father's gate; the type recurs in the Byzantine and post-Byzantine synaxaria and carries a specific meaning — the absolute and unnegotiable claim of the call of God, dramatised at the exact moment when a man's life has been most completely arranged by others.
Whether the notice preserves a real event of the eighteenth century or has attached the Alexis motif to a genuine Athonite elder, the record does not allow us to say. What it does attest is the sequel, and the sequel is the substance of the man: fifty years on the Holy Mountain, and a peaceful death.
Saint Anne's Skete
The Skete of Saint Anne (Σκήτη τῆς Ἁγίας Ἄννης) lies on the steep south-western flank of Athos above the sea, below the peak, and is the oldest and largest of the sketes of the Holy Mountain, a dependency of the Great Lavra. It is not a single monastery but a village of some fifty kalyves — small houses each with its chapel and its two or three monks — grouped about the kyriakon, the common church, where the whole skete assembles for the vigil. Its foundation is ascribed to Gerontios in the fourteenth century, and by the eighteenth it had become one of the intellectual and spiritual centres of the Greek world under Ottoman rule — the place where the Kollyvades current was strong, where new-martyrs were prepared for their confession, and where a very large part of the printed hagiography of that century was written.
The skete's own synodikon carries a number of holy elders of whom little more than the name and the length of the struggle is remembered, and Sophronius is one of these. Among his better-documented brethren of the same house are Macarius of Kios, tonsured there before returning to Prousa to be martyred in 1590, and the new-martyr David, hanged at Thessalonica in 1813.
Fifty years
The number is worth pausing on, because it is the only quantity the notice gives. Fifty years in a kalyve of Saint Anne's means a life spent almost entirely within a few hundred yards of ground: the daily cycle of services in the kalyve, the all-night vigils at the kyriakon, the manual work — at Saint Anne's, characteristically, the carving of wooden crosses, the making of incense, and the terracing of the impossibly steep hillside for vines and olives. It is the deliberate and unremarkable form of Athonite sanctity, and the tradition's judgement on Sophronius is that he completed it: he died in peace, which in the vocabulary of the synaxaria is not a throwaway phrase but the counterpart of the martyr's crown.
Feast and commemoration
August 18 (church date; Old Calendar civil August 31), within the afterfeast of the Dormition of the Theotokos. His commemoration is Athonite and Greek rather than universal, kept at the Skete of Saint Anne and carried by the Greek synaxaristic tradition and by the OCA's calendar; the printed Menaion has no service for him. He is also numbered among the Saints of the Holy Mountain, whose collective synaxis the Athonite calendar keeps on the Second Sunday after Pentecost.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable father)
In thee, O father, was the divine image preserved with exactness: for taking up the cross thou didst follow after Christ, and by thy deeds thou didst teach us to despise the flesh, which passes away, and to care for the soul, which is immortal. Wherefore thy spirit, O venerable Sophronius, rejoices with the angels.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Sophronius has no individual type and no attribute. He would be painted, as the elders of the sketes are, in the monastic schema and mantle with the koukoulion laid back, bearded and grey, holding a scroll — indistinguishable but for the inscription. His place in the iconography is corporate: he belongs to the composite Synaxis of the Saints of the Holy Mountain, in which the ranks of Athonite fathers are ranged in tiers below the Theotokos and the peak of Athos, and to any composition of the fathers of Saint Anne's Skete. No pre-1900 image of him has been located for this collection, and given the anonymity of his notice none is likely to be identifiable.
Disputed questions
- Everything but the outline. No year of birth, no year of death, no place of origin and no secular name is transmitted. Even the century rests on the notice's own "eighteenth."
- Which Sophronius. He is not to be confused with Sophronius of Jerusalem (March 11), nor with Barnabas and Sophronius of Mela, the founders of Soumela, who are commemorated on this same day — a coincidence that has more than once caused the two notices to be merged in popular calendars. He is likewise distinct from Sophronius of Vratsa and Sophronius of Irkutsk.
- The wedding-night motif. Recorded above as what it is: a hagiographic type of long standing, which may here be reporting a fact and may be interpreting one.