Hilandar and the Death Before the Hodegetria

Secured by the emperor’s chrysobull, Simeon and Sava rebuilt the ruined monastery of Hilandar as the Serbian house of Athos, endowed by Grand Prince Stefan’s founding charter of 1198/99 — among the oldest documents of the Serbian state and language. Simeon lived only briefly to see it: he died at Hilandar on 13 February 1199, an old monk in the house he had helped raise, breathing his last (as his son Sava’s own account tells it) before the icon of the Theotokos “Hodegetria.” His death is the seed from which the whole cult of the Myrrh-Gusher would grow.

Tradition: Serbian Orthodox

Rebuilding the Ruin

Hilandar was not a new foundation but a derelict and abandoned monastery on the southwestern slopes of the Athonite peninsula, which the emperor’s chrysobull granted to Simeon and Sava to restore (see Vatopedi and the Chrysobull; and St. Sava: Founding Hilandar). Father and son set about raising the ruin: the katholikon (main church), the refectory, the cells, and the defensive walls that every Athonite house required against pirates and raiders (Hilandar, English Wikipedia; Obolensky, Six Byzantine Portraits, ch. 4). The aged Simeon threw the last labor of his life into this rebuilding — the founder of a state ending his days as the co-restorer of a monastery — and the choice of a ruin to be raised again carried its own fittingness: a dead house restored to life by a prince who had died to the world (see St. Sava: Founding Hilandar).

The Founding Charter (1198/99)

The imperial grant was reinforced from Serbia. Simeon’s son and heir, Grand Prince Stefan, sent money and provisions from the homeland and issued his own founding charter for Hilandar — the Charter of Hilandar, conventionally dated 1198/99 — endowing the monastery with villages, men, and revenues in Serbia and fixing its legal character as a zadužbina, a foundation held in perpetuity for the salvation of its founders (Charter of Hilandar, English Wikipedia; and St. Sava: Founding Hilandar). Hilandar was thus doubly secured: canonically within the Athonite order by the emperor’s chrysobull, and materially by the Serbian crown’s endowment (Obolensky, Six Byzantine Portraits, ch. 4).

The founding charter is not only an act of endowment but a monument of the Serbian language and state: it ranks among the oldest surviving documents of medieval Serbia, a foundational text of Serbian diplomatics and literacy, and it stands beside Sava’s own Karyes and Hilandar typika (1199–c. 1200) at the very headwaters of Serbian written culture (Charter of Hilandar, English Wikipedia; see St. Sava: The Sources, on the typika as the oldest Serbian literary documents). That the Serbian nation’s oldest charters cluster around the founding of Hilandar is itself a measure of what the monastery meant: the birthplace of Serbian letters as well as of Serbian monasticism.

[Disputed: The founding documents are dated across 1198–1199 — the imperial chrysobull to June/July 1198, Grand Prince Stefan’s founding charter to 1198 or 1199 depending on the edition; the substance (imperial grant in 1198, Serbian charter immediately following) is uncontested (Hilandar and Charter of Hilandar, English Wikipedia; and St. Sava: Founding Hilandar).]

The Death of Simeon, 13 February 1199

Simeon did not long survive the founding. He died at Hilandar on 13 February 1199, having lived only a short time as a monk on the Holy Mountain, and was buried there in the monastery he had helped to raise (Simeon the Myrrh-flowing, OrthodoxWiki; Stefan Nemanja, English Wikipedia; and consistently in St. Sava: Founding Hilandar, “His father died on 13 February 1199”). He was, by the reckoning of the tradition, about eighty-five or eighty-six years old — a man who had ruled the Serbs for three decades and then, for barely two years, had been a monk (Obolensky, Six Byzantine Portraits, ch. 4).

Death Before the Icon of the Hodegetria

The tradition preserves a particular and moving detail of the death, and it reaches us from the best possible witness: St. Sava, Simeon’s own son, who was present. According to Sava’s account — set down in his Life of St. Symeon and elaborated in the later Lives — the dying Simeon asked to be laid on a rush mat on the ground, in monastic poverty, and breathed his last before the icon of the Theotokos “Hodegetria” (“She who shows the Way”), commending his soul to the Mother of God as he died (Simeon the Myrrh-flowing, OrthodoxWiki, “Simeon died in front of the icon of the Theotokos ‘Hodegetria’”; Sava, Life of St. Symeon, c. 1208; and the later Lives of Domentijan and Teodosije). The scene is among the most cherished in Serbian hagiography: the founder of the dynasty, stripped of every earthly thing, dying on the bare ground under the gaze of the Mother of God, with his monk-son at his side. Per the repository’s method (see METHODOLOGY §3.5), the detail is pinned to its source — St. Sava’s eyewitness account — and reported as that source’s testimony; but it is testimony of the strongest kind the tradition affords, an eyewitness son writing within a decade of the death (see The Four Lives).

The Hodegetria — the icon-type showing the Virgin holding the Christ-child and gesturing toward Him as the Way — was among the most venerated images of the Byzantine world, and to die before it was to die commending oneself to the Theotokos as guide to the heavenly kingdom. That Simeon chose this image for his deathbed vigil is of a piece with his whole renunciation: the prince who had shown his people an earthly way now looked, at the end, only to the One who shows the true Way (Sava, Life of St. Symeon, c. 1208).

The Seed of the Cult

Simeon’s death was not the end of his story but its turning-point. He was buried at Hilandar, in the monastery he had refounded, and it was around his tomb there that the first reports of myrrh — a fragrant oil flowing from the grave, the traditional Orthodox sign of sanctity — soon arose, the beginning of the cult that would give him his name and make him the first saint of the Serbian dynasty (see The Relics and the Translation to Studenica; The Vine and the Myrrh). His son Sava remained on Athos to complete and govern Hilandar, to write its typikon, and to compose the Life of St. Symeon that would fix his father’s holiness in words; and in time Sava would carry the myrrh-streaming relics home to Serbia, to the marble mausoleum at Studenica that Simeon had built for exactly this homecoming (see St. Sava: Bringing Back Symeon). The death before the Hodegetria at Hilandar is where the ruler-monk became the saint.

See Also

References

  • Sava (Rastko Nemanjić). Life of St. Symeon (prefaced to the Studenica Typikon, c. 1208). The eyewitness account of Symeon’s death before the Hodegetria; cited via the located references below and the sibling collection.
  • Obolensky, Dimitri. Six Byzantine Portraits. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988, chapter 4. On the refounding of Hilandar and Symeon’s death.
  • Hilandar, Charter of Hilandar, Simeon the Myrrh-flowing, and Stefan Nemanja. English Wikipedia and OrthodoxWiki (used to locate the founding charter of 1198/99, the death on 13 February 1199, and the death before the Hodegetria; pinned as tradition under METHODOLOGY §3.5).
  • METHODOLOGY.md §3.5 (attestation-pinning), this repository.