Damian and Joseph of Basarabi

Damian and Joseph were two priests and spiritual fathers of the rock-⁠cut monastic settlement at Basarabi, near Murfatlar in Constanța county, probably in the ninth and tenth centuries. They are named in the Romanian Paterikon and venerated by the faithful, without synodal canonization; the sources available to us give no day of commemoration.

In 1957 a complex of six churches carved in rock was discovered in a chalk hill near Basarabi, which once sheltered a community of hermits. The other five chapels are small and rectangular, their walls covered with crosses, ancient signs and inscriptions, some still undeciphered. The Paterikon links the complex to the old monastic centre of Scythia Minor, the homeland of Saint John Cassian, and supposes that the hermitages were guided by priest-⁠confessors, as in the Nile valley.

The names of the two stand on the walls of the chapel called B4, in inscriptions in Old Slavonic and in Greek. One preserves the words of a Damian the priest, who says he walks along the road and lights candles for his sins. Another, in Greek, asks God's help for the servant Joseph the priest. One inscription bears the date 982, another the year 992.

The Paterikon, relying on art-⁠historical research, holds that Damian came first and Joseph after him, and that both served the holy mysteries, heard confessions, communed the monks and visited them in their caves and cells. Nothing more is known of their lives. Their role is deduced from the inscriptions, not from written accounts.