Sophronius the Bulgarian
Our Venerable Father Sophronius the Bulgarian, Hieromonk of Penkovo and of Rusensk
Venerable · Priest · d. 28 May 1510, in Wallachia
Commemorated 28 May — Repose in the monastic community of Rusensk on the lower Danube
Sophronius — Stephen before his tonsure — was a Bulgarian hieromonk of the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, from the village of Penkovtsi in the Sofia region, who served in the monastery of Penkovo near Sofia until word came that the Ottoman troops were about to fall on it. He fled north across the Danube into Wallachia, settled in a monastery on the river, and gave the rest of his life to fasting, vigil and prayer in the monastic community of Rusensk — a house associated in the tradition with St Joachim, Patriarch of Trnovo. He was known for almsgiving and for care of the poor, and reposed on 28 May 1510; some accounts say he was murdered by a servant, and that his relics were found incorrupt three years afterwards. He belongs to the small company of Bulgarian monastic saints of the first Ottoman century, whose lives were lived out largely in exile north of the Danube.
Bulgaria under the Ottomans
To understand Sophronius one has to see what had happened to his country. The Second Bulgarian Empire had been extinguished in 1393–1396; the Patriarchate of Trnovo was suppressed and its dioceses absorbed into the Ecumenical Patriarchate; the monasteries, which had carried Bulgarian letters and the hesychast tradition, were burned, plundered or reduced to a few monks living in the hills. From the fifteenth century onward the Bulgarian monastic tradition survived in three places: in the mountain houses of the interior, on Mount Athos, and — for those who could get across the river — in the Romanian principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, whose princes were tributary but Christian and who became the patrons of Balkan Orthodoxy in exile. Sophronius's life is a small instance of that third pattern.
Penkovtsi and the monastery of Penkovo
He was born at Penkovtsi (Пенкьовци), a village in the Sofia district of western Bulgaria, and was called Stephen in the world. He was tonsured and ordained, and served as a hieromonk at the Penkovsky monastery near Sofia — one of the numerous small houses of the Sofiyska Mala Sveta Gora, the "Little Holy Mountain" of monasteries ringing Sofia, which kept Bulgarian monasticism alive in the fifteenth century.
Flight across the Danube
Learning that a body of Turkish troops was coming against the monastery, Sophronius left Bulgaria and crossed into Wallachia — Vlahia, in what is now Romania — and settled in a monastery near the Danube. The notice does not present the flight as cowardice and the tradition has never taken it so: a priest-monk of a house about to be destroyed had the choice of dying in it or of carrying the monastic life somewhere it could continue, and the second is what the Bulgarian and Romanian churches of the sixteenth century were largely built out of.
Rusensk and the ascetic life
He afterwards attached himself to the monastic community of Rusensk on the lower Danube, where he gave himself to what the notice calls continual labours of fasting, vigil and prayer. The house is associated in the tradition with St Joachim, Patriarch of Trnovo (commemorated January 18), who is said to have founded or refounded it — a link that places Sophronius, at least in the memory of his community, in the line of the last Bulgarian patriarchate.
Alongside the ascetic discipline the notice records the works for which he was best known locally: philanthropy and almsgiving, the relief of the poor of the district. He reposed on 28 May 1510.
Repose and relics
There are two versions of the end, and the sources do not choose between them. The first says simply that he reposed in peace after a long ascetic life. The second says that he was murdered by a servant — the word in the notices is ambiguous between a household servant and a lay brother of the monastery — and adds that after three years his relics were found incorrupt, which is the ordinary sign by which a violent and unexpected death was recognised in the Balkans as a holy one. If the second version is right, Sophronius belongs with the numerous passion-bearers of the Ottoman centuries rather than with the venerable fathers alone; the Church has classified him as a venerable and left the manner of his death an open question.
Feast and commemoration
May 28 (church date; New Calendar civil May 28, Old Calendar civil June 10), always within the Pentecostarion. The commemoration is Bulgarian in origin and is carried in Romanian usage (the country of his repose) and in the OCA calendar, which added him to its day-list from the Bulgarian sources; it is not in the Greek Great Synaxaristes for the day except in the fuller modern lists, and not in Antiochian usage. He is served from the common of a venerable father. His is one of the very few commemorations on this day of a saint of the Ottoman period, and the only Slavic one besides Ignatius of Rostov.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable father)
Driven from thy monastery by the sword of the ungodly, thou didst carry the monastic rule across the river and there didst labour the more in fasting and in vigil, giving to the poor what thine own hands had earned. O venerable father Sophronius, glory of the Bulgarian land, intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.
Iconography
No pre-1900 image of Sophronius has been identified, and it is doubtful that one exists: he is a local Bulgarian commemoration of the Ottoman period whose cultus never spread beyond the lower Danube, and Wikimedia Commons returns no icon of him under either the Bulgarian or the Russian form of his name. Modern Bulgarian iconography, where it exists, gives him the standard venerable hieromonk type: an elderly monk in the mandyas and koukoulion or bare-headed, with the priest's cross or a blessing hand, and an unrolled scroll in the left hand bearing a monastic sentence. Where the tradition of his violent death is followed he may be given the martyr's cross instead. A distinguishing narrative subject would be the flight across the Danube — the monk leaving a burning monastery and crossing the river — but no example is known.
Disputed questions
- Peaceful repose or murder? Both are transmitted, in the same notices, without any attempt at reconciliation. The uncovering of incorrupt relics after three years belongs to the second version and is its principal support.
- Which Rusensk? The community is placed "on the Danube" in Wallachia. It is most naturally connected with the rock-hewn monasteries of the Rusenski Lom, near Ruse on the Bulgarian bank, or with a Wallachian house opposite them; the notices are not precise enough to fix it, and the attribution to St Joachim of Trnovo is itself qualified in the sources by "may have been founded by."
- Dating. He is said to have lived "in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries" and to have reposed in 1510; no birth date is transmitted, and the century of repose is therefore the sixteenth.
- Not to be confused with Sophronius of Vratsa (1739–1813), the far better known Bulgarian bishop, writer and copyist of the National Revival — a hierarch of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, of whom the bare title "Sophronius the Bulgarian" is also sometimes used. Nor with Sophronius of Jerusalem (March 11, †638), the patriarch of the Arab conquest; Sophronius of Cyprus; or Sophronius of the Kiev Caves. The name is common among monks and the Bulgarian epithet is the only thing that fixes this saint.