Spyridon of Putna

Spyridon was a calligrapher monk trained at Putna, who wrote the Tetraevangelion begun for Stephen the Great in 1504 and finished in 1506. He lived in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. 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 was a calligrapher in the school of Putna Monastery, with Archimandrite Paisius the abbot, a known stenographer and miniaturist, as his teacher. From him he learned spiritual struggle, in humility, sobriety and love of Christ, and the craft of copying books. The Paterikon describes him as very zealous in prayer and fasting, in silence and obedience, and unsurpassed in calligraphy.

In 1504, in the last year of his reign, the aged Stephen the Great ordered him to write a Tetraevangelion for Putna. The prince died a few months later, and the book was finished in 1506, then bound in silver by his son Bogdan and given to Putna in 1507. At the end of the Gospel of John, Spyridon wrote a note saying that Stephen Voivode, kindled by divine longing and a lover of the words of Christ, joyfully began this Tetraevangelion for his monastery, but death found him before he could finish it; and Bogdan Voivode bound it and completed it for the soul of his father and for his own salvation (5 May 1507).

He was a teacher in the monastery's school, trained disciples and wrote a few other books, which were lost over the years. He passed to the Lord in peace in the first decades of the sixteenth century.