Bartholomew Mazareanu

Bartholomew Măzăreanul, born at Câmpulung Moldovenesc in 1710, was an archimandrite and abbot of Putna Monastery from 1750 to 1763, the most prolific Romanian church writer of the eighteenth century, a teacher and translator. He fell asleep in 1780. He is named in the Romanian Paterikon and venerated by the faithful, without synodal canonization; the sources available to us give no day of commemoration.

He was born into a family with many priests and monks. His grandfather, Ioanichie, had been a monk at Putna, his father came there as a hieromonk with the name Gennadius, at his son's urging, his sister Elena also received the schema, and his brothers Theodore and Nicholas followed the school at Putna and became parish priests. The young Basil was called in childhood to the spiritual life in the Putna community. He knew Slavonic from his family and loved stillness, church and the reading of holy books. He was the disciple of the hieromonk Anthony, a known teacher and guide, who taught him the ascetic struggle, humility, patience, prayer and obedience, and who tonsured him into the monastic schema as a young man, as his sponsor in monasticism. Theology and the teaching of the Fathers he learned in the monastery's small school.

After receiving priesthood, he soon became a learned teacher at Putna. Between 1740 and 1757 he was the soul of the school, training hundreds of young men for monasticism and for village priesthood. In 1750, as protosyncellus, he became abbot, archimandrite and spiritual father of Putna and guided it skilfully until 1763. He increased the number of monks and confessors, ordered the services, wrote and translated church books, enriched the library with manuscripts, adorned the princely church with an iconostasis and new icons and gave new momentum to the Hermitage in the Putna valley.

In 1757 he made a short pilgrimage to monasteries in Russia and became an honorary member of the Theological Academy of Kiev. Between 1774 and 1776 he visited the monastic schools at Moldovița, Voroneț, Humor, Neamț and the Metropolis of Iași. Returning to Putna, he founded, beside the old school, a great school, a kind of Romanian theological academy without equal in Moldavia in those years, where dogma, monastic struggle, psaltic chant, rhetoric and a foreign language were taught. He was named corrector of the princely, episcopal and monastic schools of Moldavia. Confessors, abbots, hierarchs and officials held him as counsellor and confessor.

He translated the Ladder of Saint John Climacus (1766), the Flowering Orchard (1770), the teachings of Saints Dorotheus and Ephrem the Syrian, many lives of saints after Saint Demetrius of Rostov, the Apophthegmata (1755) and more. Among the works he composed are the Chronicle from the Creation of the World, the Chronicle of Moldavia (1769), the registers of the monasteries of Voroneț (1775) and Humor (1776) and others.

He fell asleep in the hope of the resurrection in 1780 and was buried at the monastery of his vows, Putna.