Romylos of Ravanica

Romylos of Ravanica

Romylos of Ravanica (also known as Romylos of Vidin; Vidin, Bulgaria c. 1320-Belgrade, Serbia, c. before 1385) was a disciple of Gregory of Sinai, who is noted for writing his autobiography in the Ravanica monastery.

He was born in the first quarter of the fourteenth century in Vidin, northwestern Bulgaria, and given the Slavic name of Rusko. He must have died in 1380s since he spent the last years of his life in the Ravanica monastery, the cloister which Prince Lazar of Serbia founded in 1377.

In the last quarter of the fourteenth century, a new hesychast colony of monks of Serbian, Greek and Bulgarian descent formed in the Kucaj mountains in central Serbia. One of those monks, Romylos of mixed origin, both Greek and Bulgarian, joined the exodus of monks who fled Turkish raids on Mount Athos.

Both the Greek and the Slavic version of his Vita refer to the period he spent on Athos interlacing popular hagiographical clichés with patristic sermons on the eternal value of the monastic virtues, yielding no essential data about his participation in the cultural and philological life of the monastic peninsula. The commonly accepted opinion on the chronological sequence of the Slavic and Greek variant of his Life has been established only in the last two decades of the twentieth century. P. A. Syrku (1855-1905), the scholar who first discovered and published the Slavic text in 1900, based on a Serbian manuscript belonging to the Alexander Hilferding collection, was inclined to accept that it was not a translation but an original text composed directly in Slavic.

St. Romylos was definitely a specific, but neither very popular nor widely venerated saint. According to K. Ivanova, his cult is well attested only on Athos and in the region adjacent to the Monastery of Ravanica in Serbia, where he passed away.

Being a follower of Gregory of Sinai and one of the founders of the well-known monastic centre at Paroria, in eastern Thrace, he was one of the most eminent and fervent supporters of the hesychast theological doctrine, as it was developed in the middle of the 14th century. However, he was compelled to escape to Athos shortly after the first Turkish depredations struck the monastic desert at Paroria in the early 1350s.

The hagiographical tradition connected with St. Romylos makes it clear that his lay name, Raiko in the Greek and Rusko in the Slavic version of his Life, was purely Bulgarian, and emphasizes that he was half Greek half Bulgarian.

He died at Ravanica monastery on the 16th of January of 1385. His remains are kept in the monastery and were, at least until the recent upheavals, venerated by both Orthodox and Catholics. His feast day is January 16 according to the Slavic version; the Greek version has November 1.

References

• The Slavic version by P.A. Syrku: "Monacha Grigorija Žitije prepodobriago Romila," Saint Petersburg, 1909
• The Greek version by Frederik Halkin: "Un ermite des Balkans au XIV siècle: La Vie grecque inédite de Saint Romylos," Byzantion (1961), pages 111-147