Everyday Religion

Religious observance in medieval Bulgaria connected the household with its local church, the calendar of Christian feasts and distant places associated with saints. The adoption of Christianity under Boris I in the mid-ninth century brought new expectations about worship and conduct. Over the First and Second Bulgarian Empires, churches, books and monasteries gave those expectations practical settings in towns and villages.

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Worship and the changing church

A Bulgarian archbishopric was established in 870. Teachers arriving from the mission of Cyril and Methodius in 886 helped prepare clergy and religious books in Slavonic. Royal patronage at Preslav and Ohrid expanded this work. A worshipper could hear prayers, readings and hymns through a church culture increasingly equipped with Slavic texts and trained clergy.

Political change reshaped church institutions without ending all local religious traditions. After the Byzantine conquest of 1018, the church was reorganized as the Ohrid archbishopric. Its senior clergy were often Byzantine, but its monks and lower clergy remained largely Bulgarian, and it continued to use Slavonic in worship. Following the uprising that began the Second Bulgarian Empire in 1185, a Bulgarian archbishopric was established at Tarnovo; its patriarchal status was recognized in 1235. The fall of Tarnovo to the Ottomans in 1393 ended that independent church organization.

Prayer at home and in church

Household worship did not always require a cleric’s presence. Boris’s questions of 866 included whether Christians could place a cross over a meal without a priest or deacon; Nicholas permitted it. Prayer and the cross thus entered the setting of eating as well as the church building.

In church, readings, sung prayers and the Eucharist brought worshippers into a shared sequence of words and actions. The Eucharist commemorated Christ’s Last Supper through consecrated bread and wine. Baptism admitted a person to the Christian community, while a sponsor established a spiritual relationship with the baptised child or adult. Clergy and lay families therefore met through repeated services and major changes in a person’s life.

Feasts and fasts organised the year. A feast commemorated an event in Christian history or a saint; fasting changed eating and encouraged prayer and restraint before major celebrations. The calendar connected household decisions about food and work with the church’s public observances.

Saints and the search for spiritual help

Accounts of John of Rila show how the reputation of a holy person could draw people beyond the immediate circle of monks. John, traditionally dated to the late ninth and tenth centuries, is remembered as a hermit who lived in the Rila Mountains in prayer and solitude. Hagiographies, or religious lives of saints, describe visitors coming to him for advice and healing. They also tell of followers settling near his retreat and forming a monastic community.

John’s prayer, fasting and rejection of wealth made him a model of ascetic life, the deliberate restriction of bodily comfort for religious purposes. A later saint’s life recounts that Tsar Peter I sought to meet him and offered gold, which John refused. The story contrasts the ruler’s material resources with the hermit’s spiritual authority and teaches humility through their encounter.

Relics, travel, and pilgrimage

After John’s death, his remains became objects of veneration. Medieval accounts associate them with miracles and healing, claims that helped make his resting place and later shrines centres of devotion. The relics were transferred from the Rila region to Sofia, though the precise early chronology is uncertain. In 1183, after the Hungarian king Béla III captured Sofia, the relics were taken to Esztergom. They were returned to Sofia in 1187.

In the 1190s, Ivan Asen I arranged for John’s relics to be moved to Tarnovo. A procession carrying a saint’s remains linked the royal capital with an established holy figure. Worshippers approached the relics in prayer and sought intercession: the saint’s assistance before God. The shrine gave devotion a physical destination where people could gather and offer gifts.

Monasteries, followers, and patronage

Rila Monastery developed from the community associated with John’s mountain retreat. Its monks maintained worship while donations and estates supported their community. Ivan Shishman’s charter of 1378 confirmed extensive property and privileges. The support of landholders and cultivators linked a remote religious centre with the surrounding economy.

The local lord Hrelja sponsored rebuilding in the fourteenth century. His tower, completed in 1335, survives with an upper chapel dedicated to the Transfiguration and medieval paintings. The small medieval church was replaced in the nineteenth century, when the present main church was built. The tower preserves a particularly direct connection with the monastery’s medieval patrons and worship.

Feast days and the memory of a saint

Religious memory also took shape through annual commemorations. John of Rila is traditionally commemorated on 18 August, associated with his death, and on 19 October, associated in later tradition with the transfer of his relics to Tarnovo. These observances joined the story of an individual holy person to a shared calendar of worship. His cult, preserved in hagiographies and connected to places where his relics were held, carried devotion across the political and geographical changes of medieval Bulgaria.