Joachim of Osogovo

Saint Joachim of Osogovo, also called Joachim of Sarandapor, was a hermit of Mount Osogovo, in present-⁠day North Macedonia, living in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, one of the four great Bulgarian hermits, with Gabriel of Lesnovo and Prochorus of Pčinja, followers of the spirit of Saint John of Rila. He is commemorated on 16 August (Old Style). The Bulgarian Orthodox Church places his death on 16 August 1105; other sources give 1110 to 1115.

Life

The place and date of his birth are not known. From his depictions it is judged that he was born around the middle of the eleventh century. According to his Life he came to Mount Osogovo from the west; Ivan Snegarov thinks from Zeta, while the Serbian source says he was a Slav from the western lands, somewhere near Vranje. Seeking a monastic refuge, he attached himself to a boyar of the village of Gradets, near Kriva Palanka, who gave him a cave on the river Sarandapor, today the Kriva Reka, where he spent his life as a hermit, in fasting and prayer, honoured by the people as a saint. He was unknown until a chance meeting with two hunters, whom he blessed for the hunt, which was crowned with a great catch. From the second half of the eleventh century his life was accompanied by miracles. In a vision after his death he revealed that his death came "before the great darkness" (that is, an eclipse) "eight years earlier", from which his death in 1115 is presumed; according to other data he died in 1105.

Veneration

The saint appeared to the widowed priest Theodore of Ovche Pole, who settled in his hermitage, took the monastic name Theophan and found the wonderworking relics, which were placed in the church built in his memory. In the twelfth century his veneration became so widespread in north-⁠western Macedonia that a monastery was raised around the church, probably in the time of Manuel I Komnenos, known as the Osogovo monastery, sacred to Bulgarians and Macedonians. A Life of him was composed, known from later copies, on the model of the Life of Saint John of Rila, and a service. In the middle of the fourteenth century the veneration spread to the eastern Bulgarian lands, and at the end of the same century it reached Russia. The incorrupt relics, according to the Serbian source, were kept in the monastery until the Turks destroyed it; they were then carried to Moldavia and placed in an Orthodox church in Iași. His likeness was on a fresco in the church of the Holy Archangel at Zavoj near Pirot, before it was covered by Lake Zavoj in 1964. In Bulgaria the only monastery dedicated to him is that at Kutugertsi near Kyustendil, found by Rosen Donchev after years of abandonment, where the first Liturgy was served on his feast in 2009.