The Relics and the Translation to Studenica

After Simeon’s death at Hilandar, the tradition reports that myrrh — a fragrant oil, the Orthodox sign of sanctity — began to flow from his tomb, giving him the epithet by which the Church knows him: Simeon the Myrrh-streaming (Mirotočivi). Some years later his son St. Sava carried the relics home to Serbia, laying them in the marble mausoleum at Studenica; there, over their father’s tomb, Sava reconciled his warring brothers Stefan and Vukan. This file pins the miraculous claims to their earliest attestations and traces the translation that turned a dead founder into a living cult.

Tradition: Serbian Orthodox

The Myrrh from the Tomb

The Orthodox Church has long read the flowing of fragrant oil from a tomb — myrrh (miro) — as a sign that the departed has been glorified by God, the body which housed a holy soul made a vessel of grace and healing. The tradition reports that such myrrh began to flow from Simeon’s tomb at Hilandar after his death, and from this he acquired his epithet: Simeon the Myrrh-streaming or Myrrh-Gusher (Serbian Simeon Mirotočivi; also “the Myroblyte”) (Simeon the Myrrh-flowing, OrthodoxWiki; and St. Sava: The Cult of Symeon). The Athonite tradition holds that the myrrh appeared about a year after his death, and that the community of the Holy Mountain recognized him as a saint on this basis — the phenomenon described as unprecedented in living Athonite memory (Simeon the Myrrh-flowing, OrthodoxWiki).

Per the repository’s method (see METHODOLOGY §3.5), the myrrh-streaming is a hagiographical claim and is reported here as such, pinned to its source. The earliest written witness is St. Sava himself, who in the Life of St. Symeon prefaced to the Studenica Typikon (c. 1208) set down his father’s holiness and the wonders reported of his tomb; the cult is elaborated in the later Lives of Stefan the First-Crowned, Domentijan, and Teodosije (Sava, Life of St. Symeon, c. 1208; see The Four Lives). The myrrh is what these named sources attest; it is not certified here as adjudicated historical fact. What is historically clear is its function: the relics of the dynasty’s founder were now held to be wonder-working, and a wonder-working relic was an instrument of immense spiritual and political weight (Obolensky, Six Byzantine Portraits, ch. 4).

The Translation to Studenica (1206/07)

Simeon was first buried at Hilandar, where he died; but he did not remain there. Some years later his son Sava carried the relics home to Serbia, in the winter of 1205/06 or 1206/07, and laid them in Studenica, the marble mausoleum Simeon himself had built for his own burial (see Studenica, the Marble Mausoleum; and, from the son’s side, St. Sava: Bringing Back Symeon). The translation of the relics from Hilandar to Studenica is usually placed in 1207 (Simeon the Myrrh-flowing, OrthodoxWiki; and St. Sava: Bringing Back Symeon).

[Disputed: The year of Sava’s return with the relics is given as the winter of either 1205/06 or 1206/07, and the translation to Studenica is usually dated 1207; the sources do not allow a firmer date, and both are current in the scholarship (Saint Sava, English Wikipedia; Obolensky, Six Byzantine Portraits, ch. 4; and consistently in St. Sava: Bringing Back Symeon).]

The Lives report that when the tomb was prepared at Studenica, the body was found incorrupt, fragrant, and myrrh-streaming — “warm and aglow, looking very much alive, as if he were only restfully sleeping” — a description that belongs to the genre of relic-translation narrative and is reported here as the tradition’s account, not as adjudicated history (Teodosije and Domentijan, Lives; per METHODOLOGY §3.5; and St. Sava: Bringing Back Symeon). That the mausoleum Simeon built to hold his bones in glory received them, in the end, as the relics of a saint is the quiet fulfilment of the whole story of Studenica.

Reconciliation Over the Tomb

The translation was not a private act of filial piety but a deliberate political and spiritual strategy, and it accomplished at Studenica what arms and treaties had failed to do. In Sava’s absence Serbia had fallen into civil war: the eldest brother Vukan, dissatisfied with his lesser inheritance of Zeta, had seized the throne from the designated heir Stefan with Hungarian backing, and the realm was split (see The Abdication Council of 1196, on the division that caused it; and St. Sava: Reconciling the Brothers). Sava judged — and the Lives present it as his conscious plan — that the relics of their saintly father, placed at the sacred heart of the realm, could reconcile the brothers on a basis no faction could repudiate: the holy founder himself, whose cult bound them both and whose mediator was the third brother (Obolensky, Six Byzantine Portraits, ch. 4; Teodosije, Life of Saint Sava; per METHODOLOGY §3.5).

Over Simeon’s tomb at Studenica, the Lives report, Sava brought the warring brothers together, and the veneration of their myrrh-streaming father became “the first step in healing the fraternal schism”; the settlement restored Stefan as Grand Prince of a reunified Serbia while leaving Vukan secure in his own lands (Teodosije, Life of Saint Sava; Sava of Serbia, OrthodoxWiki; and St. Sava: Reconciling the Brothers). The episode closes a circle the collection has traced from the beginning: the dynasty founded in fraternal war (Nemanja against Tihomir at Pantino, see The Path to Grand Župan) was preserved from fraternal war in the next generation by the relics of that same founder, now a saint. The reconciling of the brothers over Simeon’s tomb is the moment his sanctity became the cement of the Serbian state.

The Making of a Saint

The translation produced not only a reconciliation but a cult and a text. Around the relics at Studenica, Sava built the full apparatus by which the medieval Orthodox Church recognized a saint: the wonder-working relics; the Life of St. Symeon he wrote and prefaced to the Studenica Typikon (c. 1208), the first work of Serbian royal hagiography; the liturgical service by which the saint was addressed in the Church’s prayer; and the feast, fixed at 13 February, the day of his repose (see St. Sava: The Cult of Symeon, which analyzes this “canonization without a process”). There was no separate juridical procedure in the medieval Serbian Church; a saint was recognized through relics, Life, service, and feast — and Sava supplied every one of them for his father within a few years of the repose. The father whom the prince had once sent men to drag back from Athos became, by the son’s hand, the founding saint of the Serbian Church (Obolensky, Six Byzantine Portraits, ch. 4).

That the chief promoter of the cult was also the founder’s own son and first biographer is a fact the collection marks rather than hides: the sanctity of St. Simeon reaches us, at its origin, through the devoted hand of St. Sava (see Hagiography Weighed). This does not dissolve the cult — the myrrh and the popular veneration belong to the tradition as it was received — but it is essential to reading it honestly, as a cult built with speed, coherence, and conscious purpose by the one man who most needed his father to be a saint (Obolensky, Six Byzantine Portraits, ch. 4; and St. Sava: The Cult of Symeon).

See Also

References

  • Sava (Rastko Nemanjić). Life of St. Symeon (prefaced to the Studenica Typikon, c. 1208). The earliest written witness to the myrrh-streaming and the holiness of the tomb.
  • Obolensky, Dimitri. Six Byzantine Portraits. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988, chapter 4. On the myrrh, the translation, the reconciliation, and the making of the cult.
  • Teodosije and Domentijan. Lives of Saint Sava and of Saint Symeon, thirteenth–fourteenth centuries. The elaborated narratives of the incorrupt, myrrh-streaming relics and the reconciliation.
  • Simeon the Myrrh-flowing and Sava of Serbia and Saint Sava. OrthodoxWiki and English Wikipedia (used to locate the epithet, the myrrh “a year after death,” and the 1207 translation; pinned as tradition under METHODOLOGY §3.5).
  • METHODOLOGY.md §3.5 (attestation-pinning), this repository.