Anthim the Iberian

Anthim the Iberian (Romanian: Antim Ivireanul; Georgian: Antimoz Iverieli) was a Georgian-born Orthodox monk, hierarch, printer, and writer who served as Metropolitan of Ungro-Wallachia in the early eighteenth century. He was born in the Kingdom of Kartli, the Georgian realm that Greek and Romanian sources of the period called Iberia; no reliable source preserves an exact birth year or town. As a young man he was captured during Ottoman operations in the Caucasus and sold as a slave in Constantinople. Later tradition holds that Orthodox clergy in the city—often identified as Patriarch Dositheos II of Jerusalem—ransomed him. In the imperial capital he received a broad linguistic education; contemporaries and later biographers credit him with Georgian, Greek, Turkish, Arabic, and, after his move north, Romanian and Church Slavonic. He was tonsured a monk and trained as a calligrapher, woodcarver, engraver, and typographer, skills that defined his public career.

By the last decade of the seventeenth century Anthim had been brought to Wallachia, then ruled by Prince Constantin Brâncoveanu, whose court recruited learned clergy and artisans for church building and printing. He worked first at the princely press in Bucharest and in the mid-1690s was made hegumen of Snagov Monastery, where he established a press that issued liturgical and didactic books in Romanian, Greek, and Slavonic. In 1705 he was consecrated Bishop of Râmnic in Oltenia and again directed a press; the Râmnic editions of his time are noted for engraved ornament and for care in rendering Romanian. He also produced books in Arabic type for the Patriarchate of Antioch, intended for Arabic-speaking Orthodox Christians under Ottoman rule, an unusual commission that shows how far his typographic reputation had spread. The pastoral aim of this work was consistent: to put liturgy and Christian teaching into languages people could actually read.

In 1708 Anthim was elected Metropolitan of Ungro-Wallachia, the highest see in the principality, still canonically dependent on the Patriarchate of Constantinople. As metropolitan he continued to print and to write. His Didahii, a collection of sermons in Romanian, is counted among the important monuments of early modern Romanian prose, marked by moral exhortation, rhetorical force, and a relatively supple literary language. He founded in Bucharest the monastery of All Saints that still bears his name (Mănăstirea Antim), built in the 1710s in the Brâncovenesc style and intended as both a monastic house and a cultural centre. He promoted Romanian in church services, advancing the replacement of Slavonic by the spoken language of the principality. His circle included engravers, translators, and clergy who shared that aesthetic and a concern for Orthodox education.

His last years coincided with a violent change in Wallachian politics. After the Ottomans executed Constantin Brâncoveanu and his sons in 1714, and after the brief reign of Ștefan Cantacuzino, the Porte imposed Nicholas Mavrocordatos as prince, opening the Phanariote period. Anthim came into conflict with the new regime. Contemporary and later accounts accuse him of involvement in plots against Mavrocordatos and of looking to Habsburg or other outside support, though the exact scope of his political activity remains debated. In 1716 he was deposed by a synod acting under Constantinopolitan authority, arrested, and condemned to exile at Saint Catherine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai. While being escorted through Ottoman Rumelia he was killed by the soldiers guarding him. Wallachian chronicles, notably that associated with Radu Popescu, report that his body was thrown into the Tundzha River. The murder is generally dated to September 1716. No grave is known.

The Holy Synod of the Romanian Orthodox Church canonized him in 1992 and assigned the feast of 27 September; he is venerated as a hieromartyr. The Georgian Orthodox Church likewise honours him as a saint. His historical reputation rests on that martyrdom, on the Didahii, on the introduction and refinement of Romanian ecclesiastical printing, and on the Bucharest monastery that preserves his name. Modern scholarship treats him as a central figure of the Brâncovenesc cultural moment and as a Georgian who became one of the formative hierarchs of the Romanian church, without claiming more for his inner life or early years than the sparse sources allow.