Sava Sedmochislenik

Saint Sava, known in Bulgarian as Sava Sedmochislenik (Sava of the Seven Saints) and in Greek as Sabbas, was a ninth-century Slavic cleric of the Cyrillo-Methodian mission. He is numbered among the Sedmochislenitsi, the Seven Apostles of Bulgaria: Cyril, Methodius, Clement of Ohrid, Naum, Gorazd, Sava, and Angelar. Orthodox tradition credits this group with transplanting Slavic liturgy and letters from Great Moravia into the First Bulgarian Empire after the collapse of the Moravian mission. Sava himself left no independent vita; he is known almost entirely as a named member of that circle.

He belonged to the clergy trained by Saints Cyril and Methodius for the mission in Great Moravia, where a Slavic liturgy based on the Glagolitic script had been introduced in the 860s and 870s. After Methodius died in 885, the Moravian church came under Latin clergy associated with Bishop Wiching of Nitra and Prince Svatopluk. The Slavic disciples were imprisoned, expelled, or sold into slavery. Some were later ransomed and sent toward Constantinople; others fled south. Sava is counted among those who reached Bulgaria during the reign of Boris I, who had accepted Christianity from Byzantium in the 860s and was seeking a Slavic clergy that would lessen dependence on Greek hierarchs.

Boris received the refugees and used them to organize Slavic worship and schooling. The better-documented careers of Clement, sent to Kutmichevitsa in the southwest around Ohrid, and of Naum, associated first with Pliska and the Preslav literary milieu and later with Ohrid, illustrate that policy. Angelar is reported in the tradition surrounding Clement to have died soon after arriving in Bulgaria. Gorazd, whom Methodius had designated as his successor in Moravia, and Sava are named with the group but are not given separate itineraries, foundations, or death notices in the surviving Greek and Slavic sources, including the Life of Clement attributed to Theophylact of Ohrid.

Because of that silence, Sava's later years, place of death, and burial are unknown. He is venerated jointly with the other Sedmochislenitsi rather than through an independent hagiographic cycle. The Bulgarian Orthodox Church commemorates the Seven Saints on 27 July; the cult is also observed in other Eastern Orthodox churches of the Slavic world. Sava held neither the papacy nor a patriarchal see. Like the other Moravian disciples he is understood to have lived as a monk or celibate cleric; no reliable source records a spouse or children. Modern historical writing treats him as a historically attested member of the Cyrillo-Methodian school whose personal biography cannot be reconstructed in detail.