Teoctist I of Moldavia

Saint Teoctist I (about 1410 - 18 November 1477) was Metropolitan of Moldavia, with his see at Suceava, the capital of the country, in the reigns of Alexăndrel, Peter Aaron and Stephen the Great. He anointed Stephen the Great as prince in 1457, consecrated Putna Monastery and was among the voivode's most important counsellors. The Romanian Orthodox Church numbered him among the saints.

Beginnings

The sources do not agree on his origin. Dimitrie Cantemir says he was born in Bulgaria; according to some sources he was of Bulgarian stock, and according to Cantemir a deacon of Mark of Ephesus. Nicolae Iorga thought him the son of a boyar, apparently related to the ruling family, given his great involvement in affairs of state. Others call him Wallachian or Bulgarian by birth. He was probably tonsured at Neamț Monastery, then the most important in the country, where he was abbot, and he helped advance Slavonic culture in Moldavia. He was a powerful, respected and learned man; Neamț was a centre of learning and a refuge for the Slavonic milieu driven out of Bulgaria and Serbia by the Ottoman conquest.

Metropolitan of Moldavia

He was elected Metropolitan of Moldavia in 1453 (according to others 1455), in the time of Alexăndrel, and was ordained at Peć by the Serbian Patriarch Nikodim II, in 1451 or in 1453 according to the sources. It is believed that the ordination was not performed at home because at least one other Moldavian see was vacant, so there was no quorum of bishops. Constantinople was then falling, so one could not go there. Moreover, relations with Constantinople were strained because his predecessor, Ioachim, sent by that Church, favoured the Union of Florence and had been forced to flee his see. Moldavia had objected to the union and valued the fact that the Serbian Church had sent no delegates to the council. Metropolitan Damian, who had taken part in the council, had signed the act of union with Rome; Teoctist was among those who opposed the union and who drove out Ioachim, taking his place. The change took place after the fall of Constantinople on 29 May 1453.

In 1457 he anointed Stephen the Great as prince, on the field called Direptate, after his victory over Peter Aaron, and was his faithful counsellor in both worldly and spiritual matters. He was a member of the princely council and is mentioned some sixty times in documents from 1455 to 1475. He took part in building Putna Monastery, Stephen's foundation, later a princely necropolis, and consecrated it on 3 September 1469 (according to other sources 1470), before the whole Moldavian clergy, with Bishop Tarasie of Roman and the first abbot of Putna, Archimandrite Ioasaf. At Putna and at Neamț he led groups of monks who copied manuscripts. Dimitrie Cantemir credited him with throwing out the Latin alphabet and imposing the Cyrillic, which is more than doubtful, but the "protochronists" cite it as an argument for the Romance origin of the Romanians.

His death and remembrance

He died on 18 November 1477 (according to some sources 1478) and was buried in the narthex of the monastery church at Putna, which shows Stephen's great esteem for the metropolitan and perhaps his blood tie with the Mușatin family. On his gravestone, the voivode Stephen, son of Bogdan, called the pious prince of the land of Moldavia, adorned this tomb for our father, the Metropolitan of Suceava, the most holy Kir Teoctist, who died in the year 6986, in the month of November, on the 18th. The slab thus preserves the date of his death.

Over three centuries Teoctist appears in the histories of several authors: the Chronicle of Putna and the works of Grigore Ureche, Nicolae Costin and Vartolomei Măzăreanu. Axinte Uricariul noted in the Chronicle of Moldavia that in a Serbian chronicle by the monk Azarie it is written that in the days of this prince, Alexander Voivode, the metropolitan Kir Teoctist was ordained by Nikodim of the Serbian land. He is one of the characters of the novel "The Jderi Brothers" by Mihail Sadoveanu, which portrays the age of Stephen the Great.