Scholarship and Sources

The modern scholarly foundation for the study of St. John of Rila: the critical editions of the medieval Lives (above all Iordan Ivanov’s), the editions and the long debate over the Testament, the work on Euthymius of Tarnovo and the Tarnovo Literary School, and the historical scholarship on the relics, the cult, and Rila Monastery. A guide to where the secure knowledge comes from and what remains contested.

Tradition: Bulgarian Orthodox

The Editions of the Lives

The scientific study of St. John of Rila rests on the work of Iordan (Yordan) Ivanov (1872–1947), the Bulgarian literary historian and member of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences who established the texts of the Rila corpus. His monograph Свети Иван Рилски и неговият манастир (St. John of Rila and His Monastery, Sofia, 1917) and his critical edition Жития на св. Иван Рилски (Lives of St. John of Rila, in the Annual of Sofia University, vol. 32, 1936) remain foundational: they collected and edited the medieval vitae — the anonymous Folk Life, the Prologue Life, the Greek Life of George Skylitzes (in its Slavonic form), and the literary Life of Patriarch Euthymius — and worked out their dating and interdependence (the corpus itself is surveyed in The Sources). All later work builds on Ivanov’s editions.

The works of Patriarch Euthymius of Tarnovo, including his Life and office of John, were edited by Emil Kalužniacki in Werke des Patriarchen von Bulgarien Euthymius (Vienna, 1901), the standard critical edition of the Tarnovo patriarch’s writings and the basis for study of the most influential of the Lives. The eyewitness account of the 1469 relics-return by Vladislav the Grammarian survives in the Rila Panegyric of 1479 and is studied through the editions of Bulgarian medievalists and projects such as the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences’ Slovo-ASO corpus (see The Journeys of the Relics).

The Testament and Its Debate

The single most contested area of scholarship concerns the Testament (Zavet), and the literature on it is substantial (the debate is set out in full in The Zavet). The standard edition of the text is Ivanov’s (1917). The essential modern review of the authenticity question is Petko Cholakov, “Заветът на св. Йоан Рилски и неговата автентичност” (The Testament of St. John of Rila and Its Authenticity), in Littera et Lingua, 2013, nos. 3–4, with a fuller version in the Ongul yearbook (2014); it surveys the manuscript tradition and the whole scholarly dispute.

The principal positions, in brief: the defenders of authenticity — Ivanov (1917), Ivan Dujchev (1947; and a posthumous 2000 study), Ivan Goshev (1955), and Cholakov (2013) — argue for a genuine early core surviving through late copies; the critics date the surviving text variously to the fourteenth century (Ivan Dobrev, 2007), the seventeenth century or later (Vasil Kiselkov, 1937), or the nineteenth century (Bistra Nikolova, 2004/2006). The governing fact, on which all agree, is that no manuscript of the Testament survives from before the nineteenth century (Cholakov, Littera et Lingua, 2013). [Disputed: there is no scholarly consensus on the Testament’s authenticity or date; the late-dating positions span from the fourteenth century to the nineteenth — see The Zavet for the full enumeration of scholars and positions.]

A note of caution on attributions sometimes circulated: the specific claim that Emil Georgiev dated the Testament to the fifteenth century or attributed it to the circle of Euthymius could not be confirmed in the accessible scholarship and is not asserted here; the documented late-daters are those named above (per METHODOLOGY §3.3, an unlocatable attribution is not presented as fact).

The Tarnovo School and Medieval Hagiography

Study of the most important Life — Euthymius’s — belongs to the broader scholarship on the Tarnovo Literary School and the fourteenth-century Hesychast renewal of Bulgarian letters, a major field of medieval Slavic studies. Euthymius’s orthographic reform, his hagiographical method, and the spread of the Tarnovo school’s influence across the Orthodox Slavic world (the “second South-Slavic influence”) have been studied extensively by Bulgarian and international Slavists, and they form the context for the literary form in which John’s story was transmitted. The general framework of the Slavic Orthodox nations and their founding saints is set by Dimitri Obolensky, The Byzantine Commonwealth: Eastern Europe, 500–1453 (1971), within which John stands alongside the other monastic fathers of the Slavic East (see John of Rila in Bulgarian Identity).

The Relics, the Cult, and the Monastery

The history of the relics’ translations and of Rila Monastery rests on a mix of medieval sources and modern historical and archaeological work. The relic-translation chronology is reconstructed from the Lives, the Vladislav account, and external evidence (Byzantine and Hungarian sources for the 1183 Esztergom episode under Béla III; Bulgarian archaeology for the Tarnovo translation, including the Trapezitsa “Church No. 8”); the disputed datings are set out in The Journeys of the Relics. The Tsar Peter episode has received its most rigorous modern treatment in Mirosław J. Leszka’s study of the portrayal of Peter in the medieval sources (University of Łódź), which sets the Folk Life version against the later elaborations (see The King and the Hermit). The architectural and art-historical study of the monastery — the Hrelyo Tower, the National Revival rebuilding, the Samokov-school frescoes of Zahari Zograf — and its UNESCO inscription provide the firm-dated end of the dossier (see The Heart of Bulgaria and The Revival and UNESCO).

What Is Secure and What Is Not

The honest summary of the state of knowledge: secure are the broad facts of John as a tenth-century Rila hermit who died around 946, the existence and dating of the medieval Lives, the institutional history of Rila Monastery from the fourteenth-century Hrelja rebuilding onward, the 1183 and 1469 relic episodes in their main lines, and the National Revival reconstruction. Contested are the precise dates (birth c. 876, death c. 946), the authenticity and date of the Testament, the historicity of the particular details of the Tsar Peter episode, the exact chronology of the earlier relic-translations (especially the 1195-vs-1238 Tarnovo dating), and much of the personal biography, which survives only as hagiography. This collection has tried throughout to keep the two registers distinct — to report the secure as secure, the contested as contested, and the legendary as the witness of the Lives — in keeping with the repository’s methodology (METHODOLOGY).

See Also

References

  • Ivanov, Iordan (Йордан Иванов). Свети Иван Рилски и неговият манастир. Sofia, 1917 (repr. 1990); and Жития на св. Иван Рилски, Годишник на Софийския университет, vol. 32 (1936). The foundational editions of the Lives and the Testament.
  • Kalužniacki, Emil, ed. Werke des Patriarchen von Bulgarien Euthymius (1375–1393). Vienna, 1901. The critical edition of Euthymius of Tarnovo’s works.
  • Cholakov, Petko (Петко Чолаков). “Заветът на св. Йоан Рилски и неговата автентичност.” Littera et Lingua, 2013, nos. 3–4 (and Годишник на асоциация „Онгъл”, 2014). The essential review of the Testament debate.
  • Dujchev, Ivan. Рилският светец и неговата обител. Sofia, 1947; and Заветът на св. Иван Рилски (posthumous), ed. V. Velinova. Sofia, 2000.
  • Nikolova, Bistra; Kiselkov, Vasil; Dobrev, Ivan; Goshev, Ivan; Snegarov, Ivan; Teodorov-Balan, Aleksandar — the principal scholars of the Testament authenticity debate (cited individually in The Zavet).
  • Leszka, Mirosław J. The Portrayal of Peter in Medieval Sources. University of Łódź. The modern treatment of the Tsar Peter episode.
  • Obolensky, Dimitri. The Byzantine Commonwealth: Eastern Europe, 500–1453. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971.
  • Vladislav the Grammarian. Wikipedia; Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Slovo-ASO project (slovo-aso.cl.bas.bg). The Rila Panegyric of 1479.