Gabriel of Lesnovo

Saint Gabriel of Lesnovo was a hermit of the Balkans, a disciple in the spirit of Saint John of Rila and a companion of Saint Joachim of Osogovo and Saint Prochorus of Pčinja. All four are venerated as saints in Bulgaria, North Macedonia and Serbia. His feast is on 15 January (28 January in the new style).

The sources about him are few and do not agree on every point. According to the Short (Prologue) Life, written in the twelfth century, he was born in the later part of the eleventh century in the village of Osiče, near Kriva Palanka, then part of the Byzantine province called Bulgaria. Other sources place him in the early eleventh century or even the tenth. His parents were of noble rank, his father being a royal counsellor, and the young man received a good education and spent much time in prayer.

His parents had him married, but his wife soon died. With his parents' money he built the church of the Nativity of the Mother of God in his native village, and then he entered monastic life. According to the older Life, he founded the Lesnovo Monastery and was its first founder. According to the later Life, the monastery already existed and the abbot allowed him to live as a hermit in the woods of Zletovo. He then sought a more secluded place and lived near Kratovo on Mount Osogovo, where he built a church of the Holy Archangel Michael, and later in the village of Lukovo and on Eagle Mountain, in dense forest, where he spent thirty years in fasting and prayer. Even in his lifetime he was believed to have the gift of healing. He reposed in the eleventh or twelfth century.

His veneration revived soon after his death. His relics were found, and in his honour the sanctuary at Lesnovo was built or enlarged. They were moved to Tarnovo, the capital of Bulgaria, by Tsar Ivan Asen II (1218-1241), according to some sources by Kaloyan, and according to the Serbian ones by John Shishman (1371-1391), and were laid in the church of the Holy Apostles on Trapezitsa hill, near the church of Saint John of Rila. After the Ottoman conquest at the end of the fourteenth century, their trace was lost.

The present church of the monastery was built by Despot Jovan Oliver, a nobleman of Emperor Stefan Dušan (1331-1355). The Short Life survives in a single manuscript, copied at Lesnovo in 1330 by the monk Stanislav. Two further Lives, from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, give more details. The saint is regarded as protector of the Lesnovo Monastery, and his image is preserved in frescoes at Lesnovo, the Patriarchate of Peć, Gračanica, Orahovica and Žurče near Bitola. There is no church dedicated to him in Bulgaria, but a street in the Simeonovo district of Sofia bears his name.