Bessarion of Smolyan

Holy New Martyr Bessarion of Smolyan is a Bulgarian saint who died in 1670. According to tradition, he was bishop of the Krastogorie region in the Rhodopes in the seventeenth century, in the time of Sultan Mehmed IV, and was cruelly killed by the Turks. The Orthodox Church commemorates him as a hieromartyr on 29 July.

The only reports of his life come from a writing known as the "Historical Notebook", dictated by Rada Kazaliyska (1821 to 1907) to her son Hristo and published in 1931. Several historians and scholars of the Rhodopes dispute its authenticity; for this reason the deeds attributed to the saint cannot be verified.