Saint Naum

Saint Naum, also known as Naum of Ohrid or Naum of Preslav, was a medieval Slavic missionary, monk, and teacher, counted among the principal disciples of Saints Cyril and Methodius. Together with Clement of Ohrid and others he is numbered among the Seven Apostles of Bulgaria (the Sedmochislenitsi). Almost nothing certain is known of his family or childhood. Later tradition places his birth in the first half of the ninth century, sometimes in Moesia, but neither a precise year nor a confirmed town of birth can be established from contemporary evidence. He enters the historical record as a follower of the Moravian mission and is treated in Bulgarian and Slavic Orthodox tradition as a figure of Slavic, and specifically Bulgarian, Christian culture.

Naum took part in the mission of Cyril and Methodius among the Slavs of Great Moravia. After Methodius died in 885, the Slavic-speaking clergy trained by the brothers came under intense pressure from the Latin, largely Frankish, hierarchy, which opposed the Slavonic liturgy. Naum was among the disciples who were imprisoned, maltreated, and finally driven out. With Clement of Ohrid, Angelar, and others he reached the First Bulgarian Empire, where Boris I, who had accepted Christianity in the 860s and wanted a Slavic liturgy and literature not wholly dependent on either Rome or the Greek clergy of Constantinople, received them. From about 886 Naum worked in the northeastern centres of Pliska and then Preslav, teaching, translating, and helping to organize what became the Preslav Literary School. In that milieu the disciples of Cyril and Methodius developed Old Church Slavonic letters, used the Glagolitic script, and contributed to the rise of the Cyrillic alphabet that later spread through the Orthodox Slavic world. Surviving medieval sources do not preserve a large body of works that can be attributed to Naum by name; his importance is that of a teacher and organizer of the mission rather than that of a well-documented author.

When Clement was made a bishop and sent to the southwestern region of Kutmichevitsa around 893, Naum remained for a time as a leading instructor in the capital region. Toward the end of the ninth century or at the opening of the tenth he too went west to the Ohrid area. On the southeastern shore of Lake Ohrid he founded a monastery dedicated to the Holy Archangels, later known as the Monastery of Saint Naum. The house became a spiritual and educational centre complementary to Clement’s work in Ohrid and helped root the Slavonic Christian tradition in the western lands of the Bulgarian Empire under Tsar Simeon I. Naum spent his last years there as a monk. According to the Slavonic hagiographical tradition he died on 23 December 910 and was buried in the monastery church.

He was venerated as a saint soon after his death in the Bulgarian Church and thereafter throughout the Eastern Orthodox world, especially in the lands of present-day Bulgaria and North Macedonia. His principal feast is 23 December, the day of his repose; he is also commemorated on 27 July with Cyril, Methodius, Clement, and the other disciples as one of the Seven Saints. His tomb at the monastery on Lake Ohrid has remained a pilgrimage site. Later legend associated him with miracles and healings, and popular devotion in the region long treated the monastery as a place sought by those suffering from mental illness. No separate medieval act of papal or patriarchal canonization in the later Western sense is recorded; his cult grew by local ecclesiastical and popular recognition, as was usual for missionary saints of this period. His lasting historical role is that of a co-founder, with Clement, of the Ohrid monastic and literary tradition that preserved the work of Cyril and Methodius after the collapse of the Moravian mission.