01 — Foundations
The early life of St. John of Rila and the documentary basis on which all knowledge of him rests: his birth, youth, and call, and the layered corpus of medieval Lives through which his story reaches us.
Tradition: Bulgarian Orthodox
This section establishes the two foundations of the whole collection — the life as the tradition tells it, and the sources through which that tradition comes down to us. Because there is no contemporary record of John, the source-critical file is not an appendix but a prerequisite: it explains why the dates carry “c.” and why biographical claims are pinned to “what the Lives attest.”
Files
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| skrino-and-the-call.md | Birth c. 876 at Skrino in the Sredec region of the First Bulgarian Empire; the orphaned herdsman; the tonsure at the monastery of St. Demetrius; the flight into the Rila wilderness — and how much of this is knowable. |
| the-sources.md | The Lives: the anonymous Folk Life, the Prologue Life, the Greek Life of George Skylitzes (c. 1180), the literary Life of Patriarch Euthymius of Tarnovo (late 14th c.), and the relic-translation accounts of Vladislav the Grammarian and Cantacuzenus; their dates, dependencies, and the modern critical editions. |
See Also
- 02 — The Hermit of Rila — the wilderness years into which the call led
- 04 — The Testament of St. John — the one text claiming to be John’s own words
- 09 — Legacy and Reception — the modern scholarship on the Lives and the Testament
- Master README — the full collection