The King and the Hermit

The most celebrated episode of St. John’s life as the Lives tell it: the tradition that Tsar Peter I of Bulgaria, hearing of the holy hermit, sought to visit him in the Rila wilderness; that John declined a face-to-face meeting; that — in the earliest version — they greeted one another only across a distance by signal; and that when the tsar sent a cup of gold, John kept nothing and returned it. The episode is reported as the sources attest it, with its earliest form distinguished from the later devotional elaborations and its chronology weighed.

Tradition: Bulgarian Orthodox

The Tradition

Of all the scenes in John’s hagiography, none is dearer to Bulgarian Orthodoxy than the meeting that did not happen between the hermit and the tsar. Tsar Peter I (reigned 927–969), son of Simeon the Great and ruler of the First Bulgarian Empire in its long middle age, hearing of the renown of the holy man in the Rila mountains, desired to see him — and the hermit, in humility, would not be seen. The episode is present already in the earliest stratum of the tradition, the anonymous Folk Life, and is carried through all the later Lives down to Euthymius of Tarnovo (Mirosław J. Leszka, The Portrayal of Peter in Medieval Sources, University of Łódź, the most rigorous treatment; Repose of Venerable John, Abbot of Rila, Orthodox Church in America [oca.org]; on the Lives, see The Sources). The whole episode is reported here as what the Lives attest, not as documented event (per METHODOLOGY §3.5).

The Earliest Version: The Signal Across the Mountain

The oldest form of the story, in the Folk Life, is the most austere and the most striking. Peter, at Sredec (Sofia), sent men into the Rila mountains to find the saint so that he might come and bow before him, and then resolved to come in person with his retinue. No direct meeting took place. John, declining to be approached, proposed instead a greeting at a distance: the tsar was to pitch his tent on a far peak, and the hermit would make a smoke from his own place; “you will see the smoke, and I will see the tent,” and so each, seeing the other’s sign, “bowed to each other” across the wilderness (Folk Life, quoted in Leszka, Portrayal of Peter, University of Łódź). In this earliest layer the communication is by messengers and a smoke-signal, not by a written letter, and the famous mutual reverence is performed across an unbridgeable distance — the tsar humbling himself before a hermit he is never permitted to meet.

As for the gold: the Folk Life reports that “the tsar sent the latter a cup filled with gold. The saint accepted the cup, and asked for the gold to be returned to the ruler” (Folk Life, quoted in Leszka). The vessel might be received as a courtesy; the gold itself was sent back. That is the kernel.

The Later Elaborations: The Letter and the Kept Food

The devotional retellings most familiar today — drawn from Euthymius’s literary Life and the later popular Lives — develop the kernel in two directions. First, John declines the meeting by letter, sending the tsar a written reply with spiritual counsel (in the Euthymian register, urging Peter to humble himself before the Church and to use his wealth for his army and for the poor) (John of Rila, OrthodoxWiki; Euthymius of Tarnovo, Life of John of Rila; see The Sources). Second, the gift is differentiated: John accepts the food the tsar sends but returns the gold, “not even wanting to touch it,” because gold “greatly harms a monk” (John of Rila, OrthodoxWiki; Repose of Venerable John, OCA). [Disputed: in the earliest Folk Life the greeting is by smoke-signal and messengers and only the cup/gold is mentioned; the letter to the tsar and the motif of accepting the food while returning the gold are later developments of the Euthymian and devotional tradition.]

Notably, the gold-refusal is also narrated in the first person inside the Testament — “the pious king sent to me a lot of gold… I did not accept it, but returned it” — which is one reason the episode is bound up with the Testament’s authenticity debate (see The Counsels and The Zavet).

The Chronology

The episode is sometimes doubted on chronological grounds, but the chronology in fact permits it. Peter reigned 927–969; John died around 946. There is therefore a window of roughly two decades during which a tsar named Peter and a hermit named John were both living, and a contact in the 930s or early 940s is entirely possible (Leszka, Portrayal of Peter, University of Łódź). [Disputed: the Tsar Peter encounter is chronologically feasible — Peter’s reign (927–969) overlaps John’s life (d. c. 946) by about two decades — but it is attested only in hagiography written 150 years or more after the events, and historians treat the specific details (the smoke-signal, the cup of gold, the letter) as legendary rather than securely historical.] The honest position is that the meeting’s general possibility is not in doubt while its particular details belong to the realm of the vita.

The Reign of Tsar Peter I

The tsar of the episode was no minor figure, and the religious tenor of his reign is part of what gives the meeting its meaning. Peter I, who succeeded his father Simeon the Great in 927, inaugurated his reign by reversing Simeon’s long wars with Byzantium: in October 927 he came to the walls of Constantinople, signed a peace treaty with the emperor Romanos I Lakapenos, and on 8 November married Romanos’s granddaughter Maria — pointedly renamed Eirene (“peace”) to mark the new accord — in the church of the Zoödochos Pege (Byzantine–Bulgarian Treaty of 927, Wikipedia; Irene Lekapene, Wikipedia). By the terms of that treaty Byzantium recognized Peter’s imperial title (basileus/tsar) and the autocephalous standing of the Bulgarian patriarchate, and renewed an annual tribute — a settlement that secured for Bulgaria a generation and more of comparative peace (Byzantine–Bulgarian Treaty of 927, Wikipedia). It is precisely this long, settled middle age of the First Empire, rather than Simeon’s age of conquest, that forms the backdrop to the tradition of a tsar with the leisure and the piety to seek out a mountain hermit.

The reign had a darker religious undercurrent that sharpens the contrast the hagiography draws. It was under Peter that the Bogomil heresy — the dualist movement that held the visible world to be the work of Satan and rejected the institutional Church — first emerged and spread in Bulgaria; the earliest notice of it survives in a letter of Patriarch Theophylact of Constantinople addressed to Tsar Peter himself, and its fullest early description is the Sermon Against the Heretics (the Discourse against the Bogomils) of Cosmas the Priest, written in the second half of the tenth century (Cosmas the Priest, Wikipedia; Treatise Against the Bogomils, Wikipedia). Against this background John of Rila stands as the orthodox alternative to the Bogomil ascetic: a renunciation of the world that remained within the Church and its sacraments rather than against them — a point the tradition that paired the hermit with the tsar would not have missed.

The Textual Layers Behind the Scene

The episode reaches us through more than one kind of text, and distinguishing them clarifies what can and cannot be claimed. The Byzantine historical record of Peter’s reign — above all John Skylitzes’s Synopsis Historiarum, compiled at the end of the eleventh century by an official who had served in the Bulgarian theme — knows the tsar and his wars but says nothing of a hermit named John or of any meeting (John Skylitzes: A Synopsis of Byzantine History, 811–1057, trans. John Wortley, Cambridge). The encounter belongs entirely to the hagiographic tradition, and within that tradition to successive layers: the spare anonymous Folk Life (eleventh–twelfth century), with its smoke-signal and its cup of gold; and the polished literary Life of Euthymius of Tarnovo (later fourteenth century), product of the Tarnovo Literary School, which supplies the letter and the elaborated counsel (Leszka, Portrayal of Peter, University of Łódź; on the Tarnovo school, see The Sources). The scene the modern pilgrim knows is thus a composite, and reading it well means hearing the older, starker version underneath the devotional polish.

The Smoke-Signal Scene Considered

The smoke-signal greeting of the earliest version repays a second look, because its strangeness is the point. A more conventional hagiography would have staged a meeting and let the saint shine in the king’s presence; the Folk Life instead refuses the meeting and substitutes a sign exchanged across an unbridgeable distance — the tent on one peak, the smoke on another, and a mutual bow performed by two men who never see each other’s face (Folk Life, quoted in Leszka, Portrayal of Peter, University of Łódź). The device does several things at once. It preserves the absolute character of John’s withdrawal: even for an emperor the hermit will not break his solitude. It renders the reverence wholly reciprocal and wholly disinterested, since neither party can flatter or be flattered. And it casts the relation of throne and cell in spatial terms — the two powers acknowledge one another, but only from their own proper distances, neither absorbing the other. The later substitution of a letter for the smoke makes the exchange more articulate but loses something of this austere geometry, in which the meaning is carried by the distance itself (Leszka, Portrayal of Peter, University of Łódź; the political reading is developed in Holiness and Power).

Why the Episode Endured

The story has held its place at the center of the cult because it dramatizes, in a single image, everything the tradition wants to say about John — and, beyond John, about the relation of holiness to power (the theme is developed in Holiness and Power). The greatest man in the Bulgarian world climbs into the wilderness to bow before a man who owns nothing and will not even let himself be looked upon; the gold of the realm is sent back untouched; and the moral authority in the encounter belongs entirely to the hermit. It is the founding scene of John’s standing as the patron of his people: not a saint made by the state, but a saint before whom the state itself bowed (see Patron of Bulgaria).

References

Leszka, Mirosław J. The Portrayal of Peter in Medieval Sources (and The Reign of the Bulgarian Emperor Peter I). University of Łódź, esp. the section “Peter in the Lives of St. John of Rila.” (The earliest Folk Life version: messengers, the smoke-signal greeting across the mountain, the cup of gold returned; the chronology of Peter’s reign vs. John’s life; the historian’s caution.)
Repose of Venerable John, Abbot of Rila. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), Lives of the Saints, August 18. (The tsar’s desire to meet John; the refusal; the returned gold.)
John of Rila. OrthodoxWiki (orthodoxwiki.org). (The later elaboration: the letter to Peter, accepting the food while returning the gold; gold “greatly harms a monk.”)
Euthymius of Tarnovo, Life of John of Rila, in Emil Kalužniacki, ed., Werke des Patriarchen von Bulgarien Euthymius, Vienna, 1901. (The Euthymian elaboration of the episode.)
Testament of St. John of Rila, trans. Ilija Iliev (Pravoslavieto.com / OrthoChristian.com). (The first-person narration of the gold-refusal within the Testament.)
Byzantine–Bulgarian Treaty of 927; Irene Lekapene. Wikipedia. (Peter’s 927 peace with Byzantium; the marriage to Maria-Eirene Lekapene; Byzantine recognition of the imperial title and the Bulgarian patriarchate.)
Cosmas the Priest; Treatise Against the Bogomils. Wikipedia. (The Bogomil heresy under Peter I; Cosmas’s Sermon Against the Heretics; Patriarch Theophylact’s letter to Peter.)
John Skylitzes: A Synopsis of Byzantine History, 811–1057, trans. John Wortley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. (The Byzantine historical record of Peter’s reign, silent on the hermit and the meeting.)