Michael the Soldier

Saint Michael the Soldier was a Byzantine military commander and a Bulgarian saint. The Orthodox Church commemorates him on 22 November. Present-⁠day scholars place his life rather in the eleventh century, although tradition puts it in the middle of the ninth.

The only reports about him are in a few Bulgarian hagiographic texts of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. According to them he was a Bulgarian from Potuka and lived in the middle of the ninth century. The site of Potuka seems to have been north of Plovdiv, though some connect the name with the present town of Batak. According to his hagiographers Michael was of good family and a pious Christian, and as a young man became primicerius of a military unit and distinguished himself with it in war against the Muslims (by some interpretations, in southern Italy). On returning from the war he killed a dragon, freeing from it a settlement it was tormenting, but he was gravely wounded and died after he came back to Potuka.

In 1206, after he had taken Plovdiv, the Bulgarian tsar Kaloyan solemnly carried the relics of Michael the Soldier from Potuka to Tarnovo, where they were placed in the church of the Holy Forty Martyrs, then in the patriarchal cathedral of the Ascension of the Lord. For the next two centuries Tarnovo was the centre of an active cult of the saint. From the thirteenth century a Prologue Life and a Service of him by unknown authors survive, which became the basis for the Encomium of Patriarch Euthymius.

Proceeding from certain details in the primary sources, the philologist Ancho Kaloyanov proposed the hypothesis that Michael the Soldier was a Paulician and an object of veneration among the Paulicians of Thrace. He interprets his cult as an attempt by the Bulgarian rulers to integrate the Paulicians resettled by Kaloyan in northern Bulgaria. Although not among the most popular saints in Bulgaria, the cult of Michael the Soldier was preserved also in the Revival period. Two identical mural icons of the saint, painted by Zahari Zograf, are known, in the Transfiguration monastery and the Troyan monastery.