medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
On 10/19/11, Terri Morgan sent (reprising a notice from 2002 by Phyllis Jestice):
> John of Rila (d. 946) John was one of the earliest native monks of Bulgaria. He lived for sixty years in the mountains south of Sofia, where he founded the great monastery of Rila (which by the way survived until 1947, when the Communist government of Bulgaria converted it to a meteorological station).
>
Dealing with nationalistically influenced characterizations of a national saint can be tricky, especially when there are sharp differences of opinion about the date and reliability of the available biographical material (in this case including John's spiritual _Testament_, whose authenticity is disputed). Nonetheless, it ought to be obvious that Bulgaria has a past that antedates the First Bulgarian Empire and that people born in e.g. late antique Philippopolis (today's Plovdiv) or late antique Serdica (today's Sofia), though they may not have been Bulgars or Slavs, were certainly natives. Evidence for late antique monasticism in what now is Bulgaria is apparently scanty but given the abundant evidence for the spread of monasticism throughout the Roman world of the fifth and sixth centuries, it would be rash to suggest either that there was none there prior to John of Rila's time or that there was but that none of its practitioners was of local birth.
Again, and for whatever this is worth, John's late fourteenth-century Life by patriarch St. Euthymius of Trnovo presents him as having been monastically trained in the vicinity of his birthplace at today's Skrino before he became an hermit. If one accepts that tradition, then there may have been native monks in John's homeland for some generations before him.
The site of the great monastery at Rila, most of whose buildings are of the earlier nineteenth century, is again home to a monastic community. As to the date of its suppression, Father Gerhard Podskalsky, S.J., s.v. "Bulgaria" in William M. Johnston, ed., _Encyclopedia of Monasticism_ (NY: Taylor and Francis, 2000), vol. 1., pp. 226-228, says (at p. 227), "... in communist times the monastery was suppressed from 1961 to 1969, and then a few monks returned, living marginalized in the court of the monastery, which served as a tourist center. In 1990 they became autonomous again from ideological (state) interference."
J. as depicted in the fourteenth-century frescoes of the monastery of St. John the Theologian (Sv. Ioan Bogoslov) at Zemen in western Bulgaria:
http://tinyurl.com/39emn6p
Best,
John Dillon
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