Sophronius of Vratsa

Sophronius of Vratsa, known in the world as Stoyko Vladislavov, was born in 1739 in Kotel, a Balkan mountain town then under Ottoman rule and notable among Bulgarian communities for its artisans and relatively strong local culture. He received his schooling in Kotel, where he learned to read Church Slavonic and became familiar with liturgical books. In 1762 he was ordained a priest and for many years served the parish of his native town as a married clergyman, following the Eastern Orthodox practice that allows parish priests to marry before ordination. Kotel’s connections with other Bulgarian centers and with Mount Athos helped shape his outlook. In 1765 he copied Paisius of Hilendar’s Slavonic-Bulgarian History, one of the earliest and most influential manuscript copies of that work; through such copies Paisius’s call to remember the Bulgarian past spread among priests, teachers, and townspeople.

The later decades of the eighteenth century brought growing insecurity to the Bulgarian lands. After the death of his wife, Stoyko received the monastic tonsure in 1794 and took the name Sophronius; in the same year he was consecrated Bishop of Vratsa. The diocese lay in a region exposed to the violence of kirdzhali irregulars and to the disruptions that accompanied Russo-Turkish conflict. Unable to remain safely at his see, he left Vratsa and for a time resided in Vidin, where he faced further pressure from local Ottoman authorities and from the general lawlessness of the period. His own later account describes flight, material want, and the difficulty of exercising episcopal care under such conditions. Eventually he crossed the Danube into Wallachia and settled in Bucharest, which already hosted a substantial Bulgarian merchant and artisan colony.

In Bucharest, during the first years of the nineteenth century, Sophronius turned more fully to writing in a form of Bulgarian closer to the spoken language than the traditional Church Slavonic of the liturgy. About 1804 or 1805 he composed The Life and Sufferings of Sinful Sophronius, an autobiographical narrative that is generally considered the first original autobiography in modern Bulgarian literature and an important witness to daily life, clerical experience, and political disorder in the late Ottoman Balkans. In 1806 his Nedelnik, a collection of Sunday sermons and explanations of Gospel pericopes, was printed at Râmnicu Vâlcea in Wallachia; it is widely described as the first printed book in the modern Bulgarian vernacular and was intended for parish use. He produced other homiletic and didactic texts as well. He also sought political relief for Christians under Ottoman rule, including by addressing appeals to Russian representatives during the years of Russo-Turkish warfare.

Sophronius died in Bucharest in 1813. He did not see the later phases of the Bulgarian National Revival, including the struggle for a national church hierarchy that culminated in the Bulgarian Exarchate later in the nineteenth century, yet his combination of pastoral work, historical consciousness inherited from Paisius, and writing in a language accessible to ordinary Bulgarians made him a foundational figure of that revival. The Holy Synod of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church canonized him in 1964. He is commemorated on 23 September. In Bulgarian ecclesiastical and cultural memory he is honored as a bishop, a witness to the sufferings of his flock, and a pioneer of modern Bulgarian letters.