Therapon of Serdica

Holy Hieromartyr Therapon of Serdica (Therapon of Sofia, also called Therapon of Tran) is a Bulgarian saint, commemorated on 27 May together with Holy Hieromartyr Therapon of Sardis, and he is one of the nine saints of Sofia. His veneration appeared in the year 1555. The record does not say by what act, if any, he was canonized, and he appears to be a locally honoured saint.

Sources and veneration

Matthew the Grammarian writes about him in the sixteenth century. According to him, the saint was an inhabitant of the place and a priest of the holy church in Serdica (Sofia). He lived with many virtues and, in the time of persecutions against Christians, was held under guard by the lawless for his confession of Christ. After many tortures, loaded with heavy iron chains, he was taken out a day's journey from the city, and there his head was cut off, and so he received a martyr's death for Christ. It is said that in the place where his blood was shed a great oak grew up in time, which can be seen to this day, and there various healings take place when one comes with faith. A trunk of this oak, with the saint's martyric blood, is kept as a holy relic in the old church of Saint Petka (Sveta Petka Stara) in Sofia, where every year on 27 May the memory of the hieromartyr is celebrated.

Paisius of Hilandar writes in his Slavonic-⁠Bulgarian History that in the city of Sofia there are three holy martyrs: George, Nicholas and Therapon. This saint is said to have been a priest at Tran, where many people now go for healing. Where the Turks cut him down an oak grew, and through his prayers many healings are given beside this oak. Saints George and Nicholas also suffered at the hands of the unbelieving Turks, in the reign of Sultan Selim, and their relics give healing in the city of Sofia.

Images and customs

Images of Saint Therapon are known from the nineteenth century: icons in the church of Saint Paraskeva in Sofia, in Pernik, in the church of Saint Petka in Tran, and a wall painting in the church of Saint Demetrius in the village of Yarlovtsi, in the Tran region, where there was also an icon. In the Tran and Godech regions there were folk customs connected with the saint. He is honoured as a healer and protector of the harvest. In Tran there is a cave pointed out as the saint's refuge. In the town there was also a chapel in his name, burned by the Turks in the 1830s. During the Second World War and until 1957 the church dedicated to Therapon in Sofia was the one built in 1872, of the Holy Trinity, today of the Great Martyr Menas, in the Slatina district of Sofia, built on the ruins of the monastery of the Holy Trinity destroyed by the Turks. According to tradition, the saint was beheaded here, which leads some to think that Saint Therapon was one of the spiritual fathers of the monastery of that time.

Views of scholars

In the scholarly literature there are views that a saint named Therapon probably did not exist as a historical person, but that the figure of Saint Therapon of Sardis has been mixed and superimposed on Therapon of Serdica. Researchers such as M. Lachev, G. Valchinova and M. Stoyanov have written on the appearance of the cult of Saint Therapon in Bulgaria. It may be supposed that Therapon of Sofia is a composite figure of Bulgarian martyrdom in western Bulgaria in the first years after the Ottoman conquest, whom Matthew the Grammarian clothed in a concrete composite image.