Feast and Cult

The liturgical veneration of St. Paisiy Hilendarski. Since his glorification in 1962 his feast has been kept on 19 June; he is commemorated as a saint of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, represented in iconography most often as a monk holding his History, and venerated in connection with the Athonite monasteries of his monastic life and the Bulgarian institutions that bear his name. The cult is comparatively young, and its shape reflects both the Church’s veneration and the wider national memory.

Tradition: Bulgarian Orthodox

The Feast: 19 June

St. Paisiy is commemorated in the calendar of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church on 19 June (Detrez, Historical Dictionary of Bulgaria, 3rd ed., Rowman & Littlefield, 2015, “Paisiy of Hilendar”). The date belongs to the liturgical honoring established with his glorification in 1962 (see Glorification 1962); unlike the feasts of ancient saints, it is not the anniversary of a death whose date is in any case uncertain (see What Is Known of His Life), but a day appointed by the Church for his commemoration. On that day his memory is kept with the customary hymnography of a saint — the troparion and other proper texts composed for his service — in the churches that observe his feast.

Because Paisiy’s canonization is recent and his cult primarily national, the observance of 19 June is most developed within the Bulgarian Orthodox Church and among Bulgarian Orthodox communities; he is not among the saints of the general Orthodox calendar of universal observance, though as a canonized Orthodox saint he may be commemorated wherever his memory is honored (Detrez, Historical Dictionary of Bulgaria, 2015). The feast sits within the wider Bulgarian veneration of the saints of the Revival and of the nation.

Iconography

The iconography of St. Paisiy is, fittingly, the iconography of an author. He is depicted as an Orthodox monk — in monastic habit, bearded, of middle or advanced years — and his defining attribute is the book: he is very often shown holding or writing the Slavo-Bulgarian History, sometimes with the scroll or open volume bearing words from his famous appeal (Daskalov, The Making of a Nation in the Balkans, CEU Press, 2004, ch. 6, on the visual image of Paisiy). The image binds the saint to his deed exactly as the choice of feast-year did: Paisiy is the monk-with-the-book, the awakener caught in the act of awakening. Because no authenticated portrait from life survives (see What Is Known of His Life), his iconographic likeness is not a record of his features but a type — the holy monk-historian — and it has been shaped in part by the powerful literary and civic images of Paisiy in modern Bulgarian culture, above all Ivan Vazov’s ode (see Paisiy in Bulgarian Culture).

Places of the Cult

The veneration of Paisiy attaches to several places and kinds of place.

  • Mount Athos — the monasteries of Hilandar and Zograph, where he lived as a monk and where the History was written, and where the Zograph autograph was preserved until modern times (see Monk of Hilandar and Zograph). Zograph, the Bulgarian house, has a particular association with his memory (Detrez, Historical Dictionary of Bulgaria, 2015, “Zograph Monastery”).
  • Bansko — his most probable birthplace, where local veneration and civic memory honor him as the town’s great son (Detrez, Historical Dictionary of Bulgaria, 2015, “Paisiy of Hilendar”; on the disputed birthplace, see Paisiy of Bansko).
  • Churches and institutions bearing his name — parishes, chapels, and above all the many schools, and the University of Plovdiv “Paisiy Hilendarski,” named in his honor, which carry his name into Bulgarian civic and educational life (Detrez, Historical Dictionary of Bulgaria, 2015). These are treated more fully, as national memory, in the section on Bulgarian culture (see Paisiy in Bulgarian Culture).

A Cult Between Church and Nation

The distinctive feature of Paisiy’s cult, and the one this collection is at pains to keep in view, is that it lives on the border between the veneration of a saint and the commemoration of a national founder. On the ecclesial side stands the feast of 19 June, the liturgical service, the icon of the monk with his book, the honoring of a holy man of the Holy Mountain. On the national side stands a vast civic memory — monuments, place-names, school curricula, the university, the state jubilees — that honors Paisiy as the father of the nation and often abstracts him from his faith (Daskalov, Making of a Nation, 2004, ch. 6). The two overlap and interpenetrate: the icon borrows from the ode, the feast from the jubilee, and vice versa. This collection treats the tension between them at length in the both-sides file that follows (see National Saint and Symbol); here it is enough to mark that St. Paisiy’s cult is, by its nature, a cult of a saint who is also a symbol, and that the liturgical veneration of 19 June is the specifically ecclesial thread within a much wider fabric of national remembrance. The Church, in keeping his feast, holds fast to the monk within the monument.

See Also

References

  • Detrez, Raymond. Historical Dictionary of Bulgaria. 3rd ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. (Entries “Paisiy of Hilendar” and “Zograph Monastery”: the feast on 19 June; the Athonite and Bansko associations; the University of Plovdiv “Paisiy Hilendarski.”)
  • Daskalov, Roumen. The Making of a Nation in the Balkans: Historiography of the Bulgarian Revival. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2004. (The visual image of Paisiy as the monk with his book; the civic memory and its overlap with the ecclesial cult.)
  • Paisiy Hilendarski. Istoriya Slavyanobolgarska. Zograph Monastery, Mount Athos, 1762. (The History held in the iconography; the appeal inscribed on the saint’s book.)