Paul the Hermit

Paul was a hieroschemamonk and hermit in the second half of the seventeenth century, confessor of Saint Theodora of Sihla. He is named in the Romanian Paterikon and venerated by the faithful, without synodal canonization; the sources available to us give no day of commemoration.

He first struggled in the community of Sihăstria Skete and was counsellor and spiritual father to all the hermits. When Theodora came to the skete desiring the hermit life, Paul led her, by the abbot's order, into the Sihla Mountains and placed her in an abandoned hut. There he communed her in secret with the Body and Blood of the Lord and brought her rusks for food.

Later he too yearned for the life of the great fathers and withdrew into the forests between Sihla and Coroi's Ravine, to a secluded, blessed place where great hermits of the Sihla Mountains had struggled and where no one could find them except those chosen by the Spirit. He stayed there more than ten years, in hidden labours. Dozens of hermits lived around him and held him as spiritual father. The Paterikon says he was full of the gift of the Spirit, wise in speech and clairvoyant.

He gave up his soul into the Lord's hands while standing in prayer under a rock. For more than two centuries his bones lay there, found by no one. According to the account in the Paterikon, in the summer of 1930, on 20 July, the hierodeacon Christopher, of the vows of Frăsinei, who was living in stillness in the forests of Sihla Skete, dozed briefly on the road and Paul appeared to him in a dream, dressed in a coarse wool cassock, with a white beard and a radiant face. He told him where his unburied body lay and asked him to bury it there and to carry the head with a blessing. Christopher found the bones yellow and fragrant, buried them and took the head to his cell, then brought it to Sihăstria Monastery, where he laid it on the Holy Table and the Liturgy was served for three days. Then he returned to the wilderness and no one saw him again.