Skrino and the Call

The early life of St. John of Rila as the Lives transmit it: his birth around 876 at the village of Skrino in the Sredec region of the First Bulgarian Empire, in the generation after the baptism of Bulgaria under Tsar Boris I; his poor and orphaned youth as a herdsman; his tonsure at the monastery of St. Demetrius; and his flight into the Rila wilderness — the passage from the village herdboy to the hermit, all of it reaching us through hagiography composed long after the fact.

Tradition: Bulgarian Orthodox

The World Into Which He Was Born

St. John of Rila — Ivan Rilski to the Bulgarians — was born, by the reckoning the tradition has settled on, around the year 876, in the village of Skrino, in the valley of the Struma river (John of Rila, OrthodoxWiki; Repose of Venerable John, Abbot of Rila, Orthodox Church in America [oca.org]). The date is not given in any contemporary document; it is an inference back from his death, placed around 946 at roughly seventy years of age, and it should be held as approximate (see The Sources for why the chronology is soft).

The First Bulgarian Empire of John’s childhood was a state in the first generation of its Christian life. Tsar Boris I had received baptism and brought Bulgaria into the Church around 864, and it was Boris who, in 886, welcomed the disciples of Saints Cyril and Methodius — Clement, Naum, and their companions — expelled from Moravia, and set them to build a Slavonic-language Christian culture in his realm (on the wider frame, see Greece, Bulgaria, and the Other Autocephalous Churches). John’s life thus runs alongside the very making of Slavonic Orthodoxy: he was a boy while the Ohrid and Preslav literary schools were being founded, and he reached his maturity under Tsar Simeon I (reigned 893–927), in the “Golden Age” of Bulgarian letters (John of Rila, Wikipedia; John of Rila, OrthodoxWiki). The hermit who fled all of that brilliance into the mountains is, in part, its counter-witness.

The Christianization of Bulgaria and the Cyrillo-Methodian Mission

To grasp how new John’s Christian world was, it helps to measure it against the calendar. Bulgaria’s official conversion is conventionally dated to 864–865, when Boris I accepted baptism, taking the Christian name Michael after his Byzantine godfather, the Emperor Michael III, and bound his pagan realm — at no small political cost — to the Church (John of Rila, Wikipedia; Boris I of Bulgaria, Wikipedia). When John was born around 876, then, the Bulgarian Church was scarcely a decade old as an institution, still feeling its way between Rome and Constantinople, still substituting a Greek-speaking clergy for the old Slavic and Bulgar paganism. The decisive turn toward a Slavonic Christianity came in 886, when Boris received into his realm the disciples of Saints Cyril and Methodius — chief among them Clement and Naum — driven out of Great Moravia after Methodius’s death, and set them to translating, teaching, and forming a native clergy in the Slavic tongue (Ohrid Literary School, Wikipedia; Clement of Ohrid, Wikipedia). John would have been a boy of about ten in that year. The Slavonic liturgical and scriptural culture that he would later embody as a Bulgarian saint, rather than a Greek one, was being assembled in real time across his childhood.

The Preslav and Ohrid Schools

The disciples’ work crystallized into the two great literary centers of the First Bulgarian Empire. The Ohrid Literary School was founded by Clement of Ohrid in 886 in the southwest of the realm, and the Preslav Literary School in or near the capital (Pliska, then the new capital Preslav) around the same time, with Naum among its early figures before he moved south to Ohrid; after Clement was consecrated bishop around 893, Naum took up the leadership of the southern school (Ohrid Literary School, Wikipedia; Preslav Literary School, Wikipedia; Saint Naum, Wikipedia). It was in this milieu — and very likely at Preslav — that the Cyrillic script as later known took shape, supplanting the older Glagolitic of Cyril and Methodius (Preslav Literary School, Wikipedia). The flowering reached its height under Tsar Simeon I (reigned 893–927), whose court patronized translation and original composition on a scale that earned the period its name as the “Golden Age” of Old Bulgarian letters. John of Rila reached manhood inside this golden age and turned his back on it; the contrast between the lettered brilliance of Preslav and the wordless asceticism of the Rila cave is one the tradition itself feels keenly. He is the empire’s hidden counter-current — sanctity sought not in the scriptorium or the court but in the silence of the high mountains.

Skrino and Its Region

The village of Skrino survives; it lies in the upper Struma valley, in what is today Kyustendil Province in western Bulgaria, on the slopes of the Vlahina range near the Osogovo mountains (John of Rila; Skrino, Wikipedia). The Orthodox Lives and the devotional sources, however, regularly place Skrino “near Sredec” or “near Serdica” — that is, in the orbit of Sofia, the old Serdica (Repose of Venerable John, OCA; John of Rila, OrthodoxWiki). [Disputed: the village of Skrino lies geographically in the Osogovo/Kyustendil district of the upper Struma (Wikipedia, Skrino; John of Rila), while the hagiographic and Orthodox-devotional tradition locates John’s birthplace in the Sredec/Serdica (Sofia) region of the First Bulgarian Empire (OCA; OrthodoxWiki) — a difference of administrative-ecclesiastical framing rather than of the village itself.] What is not in doubt is that he was a child of the Bulgarian-Slavic countryside, not of the court or the cathedral cities.

The Herdsman

The Lives are unanimous that John came from poverty and was orphaned young. He spent his boyhood as a herdsman — a cowherd or shepherd in the hire of others — a detail the tradition preserves with evident care, because it sets the whole shape of his sanctity: the patron of the Bulgarian people began at the bottom of its society, tending the cattle of richer men (Repose of Venerable John, OCA; John of Rila, OrthodoxWiki).

To this herdsman’s youth the Lives attach the first of his miracles, a story that already carries the marks of hagiographical shaping and must be received as the vita’s account rather than as documented history (per METHODOLOGY §3.5). A cow and her calf in John’s keeping were lost, and the rich man who employed him beat the boy. John prayed; finding the animals again, he came to the river Struma, swollen and uncrossable, and — in the vita’s telling — laid his ragged garment on the water and crossed over as on dry land, carrying the calf. The master, witnessing it, was seized with fear, released John from his service, and sent him away rewarded (Repose of Venerable John, OCA; John of Rila, OrthodoxWiki). The episode is the hinge between the two halves of his early life: the herdboy is freed, and the monk can begin.

The Shepherd Who Becomes a Father: A Hagiographical Topos

That John should begin as a herdsman is not, in the hagiographical grammar, an embarrassing detail to be explained away but a meaningful one to be displayed. The Lives place him in one of the deepest patterns of biblical and patristic biography: the keeper of flocks called from the pastures to lead the people of God. Moses kept the flock of Jethro before the burning bush; David was taken “from following the sheep” to be anointed shepherd of Israel (1 Kingdoms [1 Samuel] 16:11–13); the patriarchs were herdsmen, and the Lord himself is the Good Shepherd. The Bulgarian cowherd who would become the shepherd of a nation’s faith stands consciously in that line, and his vita exploits the resonance: the literal tending of cattle prefigures the spiritual tending of souls (on the framing of the Lives, see The Sources). The lost-ox miracle works the same vein. The boy charged with animals loses them, is beaten, prays, recovers them, and crosses an impassable water — a sequence that reads less as reportage than as a compressed icon of providence vindicating the humble and the wronged. Read in the discipline of this collection, it is reported as what the vita attests, a constructed sign of holiness rather than a documented event (per METHODOLOGY §3.5); read in the tradition’s own terms, it announces from the first that this herdboy is marked.

The Monastic Beginning

Released from his hire, John gave away what little he had and entered the monastic life. The tradition names the house of his tonsure as the monastery of St. Demetrius (Sv. Dimitar), a small foundation set in the mountains not far from his native region; some retellings locate it under the peak of Ruen (John of Rila, OrthodoxWiki; John of Rila, Wikipedia). [Disputed: the Lives and devotional sources agree on the monastery of St. Demetrius as the place of John’s tonsure but differ on its exact siting — “near his village/Skrino” in some retellings, “under peak Ruen” in others (OrthodoxWiki; John of Rila, Wikipedia); the precise location is not securely fixed in the surviving sources.] There he was tonsured and, the sources add, trained in the rudiments of the monastic life before the deeper pull of solitude drew him out.

For monasticism did not, for John, mean the cenobitic house. Almost at once the eremitic vocation declared itself: he left the monastery for the wilderness, beginning the pattern of withdrawal that would define him. He first built himself a crude cell of brushwood on a barren mountain and lived on wild plants — and there, the Lives report, robbers fell on him by night, beat him, and drove him off (Repose of Venerable John, OCA; John of Rila, OrthodoxWiki). The attack pushed him deeper still. He moved on, by stages, into the great massif of Rila, the highest mountains of the Balkans, and there, in a remote cave and the surrounding solitude, he settled for the decades of asceticism that made him the hermit of Rila (the wilderness years are treated in their own place; see The Wilderness Years).

The Name and the Dates

The saint is Ivan Rilski to Bulgarians — Ivan being the Slavic form of the Greek Ioannes and the Hebrew Yohanan, “the Lord is gracious,” anglicized as John. The byname Rilski, “of Rila,” is toponymic: it is not a family name (peasant Bulgaria of the tenth century had none in the modern sense) but the mark of the place that made him, the Rila massif into which he withdrew (John of Rila, Wikipedia; John of Rila, OrthodoxWiki). He is thus, in the older Orthodox manner, named for his sanctity’s geography rather than his lineage — like Antony the Great of the Egyptian desert or Sava of Serbia. The name “John” he presumably received at baptism or, perhaps, at his monastic tonsure; the sources do not say, and a birth-name distinct from the monastic one, if there was one, is not preserved.

The dates are softer still, and they are all inference. No source contemporary with John records the year of his birth or even, securely, of his death; the figure most often given, c. 876–946, is reconstructed backward from the tradition that he died around 946 at about seventy years of age (Repose of Venerable John, OCA; John of Rila, Wikipedia). Even the death-year of 946 rests on the chronology that ties his life to the reign of Tsar Peter (927–969) — the one synchronism the Lives supply (see The King and the Hermit) — and on counting back a roughly seventy-year span. The “c.” that this collection attaches to every date is therefore not editorial caution alone but a faithful representation of what the sources can and cannot bear: the broad placement of John’s life in the first half of the tenth century is secure on the consistent witness of the tradition; the precise years are scholarly reconstruction (see The Sources for the texts and their distance from the events).

How Much of This Is Knowable

None of this comes from John’s own pen or from a contemporary chronicle. Every detail of the youth — the orphaning, the herding, the river crossing, the monastery of St. Demetrius, the brushwood cell — reaches us through Lives composed from roughly a century and a half to four and a half centuries after his death (see The Sources). The earliest, the anonymous “Folk Life,” is itself a hagiography in the full sense, organized around the demonstration of holiness, not around biographical archive. The honest statement, then, is this: that John was a Bulgarian of poor and rural origins from the Skrino region, that he became a monk and then a hermit in the Rila mountains in the first half of the tenth century, and that he died there around 946 — these stand on the consistent witness of the tradition. The miracle of the river and the particular furniture of the youth are pinned to that tradition and named as such, in keeping with the discipline that hagiographical claims are reported as what the sources attest, never certified as fact (METHODOLOGY §3.5).

References

Repose of Venerable John, Abbot of Rila. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), Lives of the Saints, August 18. (Birth c. 876 at Skrino; orphaned herdsman; the lost cow/calf and the Struma crossing; tonsure; the brushwood cell and the robbers; flight to Rila.)
John of Rila. OrthodoxWiki (orthodoxwiki.org). (Skrino near Serdica/Sofia; herdsman youth; the monastery of St. Demetrius; the progression into the Rila wilderness.)
John of Rila. Wikipedia. (Skrino in Kyustendil Province / upper Struma; birth c. 876; reigns of Boris I and Simeon I; tonsure at a monastery of St. Demetrius.)
Skrino. Wikipedia. (The village’s location in the Osogovo/Vlahina region of Kyustendil Province.)
Boris I of Bulgaria; Clement of Ohrid; Saint Naum. Wikipedia. (The conversion of Bulgaria c. 864–865 under Boris I; the reception of the Cyrillo-Methodian disciples in 886 — used to locate the standard accounts of the Christianization.)
Ohrid Literary School; Preslav Literary School. Wikipedia. (The founding of the two literary schools in 886; the development of the Cyrillic script and the Golden Age of Old Bulgarian letters under Simeon I — used to locate the primary scholarship.)
Ivanov, Iordan (Йордан Иванов). Свети Иван Рилски и неговият манастир [St. John of Rila and His Monastery]. Sofia, 1917; and Жития на св. Иван Рилски [Lives of St. John of Rila], in Годишник на Софийския университет, ИФФ, vol. 32 (1936). The foundational modern critical study of the Lives, underlying the biographical outline (cited from the print editions).