From Kotel to Vratsa and Wallachia
Ordained a priest in Kotel in 1762, Sophronius met Paisius of Hilendar in 1765 and copied his Slav-Bulgarian History. He became Bishop of Vratsa on 17 September 1794. Fighting between the forces of the rebellious Vidin governor Osman Pazvantoglu and the Ottoman central government devastated his diocese.[1]
After three years of detention in Vidin, he was released in May 1803 and crossed into Wallachia. He lived first in Craiova and then in Bucharest, where he continued writing and worked on behalf of Bulgarian refugees. His final decade brought literary achievement during exile rather than a return to settled ministry in Vratsa.[1]
The Nedelnik: printing, preaching, and language
The 1806 Nedelnik, or Sunday Book, also bears the title Kyriakodromion. The National Electronic Library of Russia records its publication at the episcopal printing house in Râmnic, also rendered Rimnik or Rymnik. The title-page statement reproduced in the catalog describes a rendering from Slavonic and Greek into simple Bulgarian for ordinary people. This gives the collection an explicit pastoral purpose: inherited teaching made more understandable to its hearers.[3]
Sophronius compiled and adapted material for Sunday and feast-day preaching and for reading at home. As Igor Kaliganov explains, the book approaches living Bulgarian speech while retaining much Church Slavonic vocabulary. Its importance in modern Bulgarian literary history should therefore not be mistaken for a complete break with earlier church language. Readers knew it affectionately as Sophronie; handwritten copies circulated even after it appeared in print.[2]
Life and Sufferings of Sinful Sophronius
Sophronius also wrote an autobiography in Bucharest, Life and Sufferings of Sinful Sophronius. It brings personal recollection into a form still shaped by the older tradition of the saint’s life. The account offers a view of difficult Bulgarian life through the experiences of one participant, making it a different kind of reading from his collected sermons.[2]
The autobiography remained unpublished during his lifetime. Georgi Sava Rakovsky brought it into print in 1861 in the newspaper Dunavski Lebed (The Danube Swan). His literary reputation consequently broadened after his death beyond the widely used Nedelnik. The Bulgarian Orthodox Church canonized him in 1964.[2]
The seventeen homilies in the English edition
The volume in this catalog is a seasonal selection from the Nedelnik, translated from the 1806 edition. Its seventeen homilies begin with the Sunday of the Holy Forefathers and end with Palm Sunday. The first group covers the Sundays surrounding the Nativity and Theophany. The second moves through the Canaanite woman, Zacchaeus, the Publican and the Pharisee, the Prodigal Son, the Last Judgment, and Forgiveness Sunday. The third contains the five Sundays of Great Lent and Palm Sunday.[4]
This arrangement follows a spiritual passage toward repentance and the Passion. The interval between Theophany and Lent changes with the date of Pascha, so the sequence is not a calendar for one particular year. Nor does the selection contain the entire historical homiliary: its endpoint is Christ’s entrance into Jerusalem.[4]
The sermons repeatedly move from Gospel events to the obligations of daily life. Zacchaeus brings restitution into view; the publican directs attention to humility in prayer; the prodigal son makes return and forgiveness immediate. The edition’s introduction also draws attention to the preacher’s concern with property, mercy, attentive worship, and amendment of life. Reading the Gospel passage beside each homily helps the reader follow this movement from narrative to practical exhortation.[4]
Books and where to begin
Begin with Sunday Homilies from Nativity through Lent for the seasonal cycle represented here. Read a complete homily at a time, with its Gospel passage nearby. For biographical study, the church biography below provides a wider account than can be inferred from the sermons alone.
Related authors and places
Metropolitan Varlaam of Moldavia and Saint Anthim the Iberian offer comparisons in Orthodox preaching and printing in the Romanian lands. Each worked in a different political and linguistic setting.