Siluan the Elder

Siluan was a Serbian monk and poet of the fourteenth century, who lived and worked at the Hilandar monastery on the Holy Mountain. Very little is known of his life. Our sources show no canonization of him and no day of commemoration.

The mystical tradition of prayer called hesychasm left a strong mark on medieval Serbian literature and art. This is seen already in the writings of Domentijan and Theodosius the Hilandarian, but most of all in those of Archbishop Danilo II, of Patriarch Ephraim, of the monk Isaiah and of Siluan. Siluan is the author of hymns to Saint Sava and to Saint Simeon (Stefan Nemanja).

History knows two Serbian monks named Siluan who worked on Athos, two centuries apart, but researchers have been inclined to credit the fourteenth-⁠century one with the writings "Verses for Saint Simeon" and "Verses for Sava". The analysis of two Old Serbian verbal ornaments attributed to the fourteenth-⁠century Siluan appears in the work of Roman Jakobson; Siluan is presented as one of the most enlightened poets of his time, with an astonishing power to condense a contemplative philosophy into few words. His hymn to Saint Sava was printed in Venice in 1538.