St. pious Theophana Basarab is the new saint who will be inscribed in the calendar of the Romanian Patriarchate, decided Holy Synod of the Romanian Church at its meeting on Thursday, February 17th. Her memory will be honored on October 28. She will be celebrated as “the first Romanian nun” to remain known by her name, according to a church decision.
Theophanes is the monastic name of the Bulgarian queen Theodora, the first wife of Tsar Ivan Alexander, whom he married while still a despot in Lovech in 1323. She was the daughter of the Wallachian voivode Ivanko I Basarab, and her birth name was Braida. The educated princess adopted the ruler’s name Theodora, associated in the Middle Ages with the two famous Byzantine empresses – Theodora, the wife of the emperor. Justinian the Great, and Imp. Theodora, who restored icon-worship in 843. In Lovech, Theodora patronized culture, established a center for copying Mount Athos manuscripts in Old Bulgarian, and many of them spread throughout Eastern Europe.
When Ivan Alexander became Bulgarian king in 1331, she moved to the capital Tarnovo and ruled with him for nearly fifteen years. There he continued to encourage and support the development of literature – among the remarkable manuscripts from this period is the Bulgarian translation of the Byzantine chronicle of Constantine Manasseh, now stored in the Vatican Museum and many more. etc. In The Praise of Tsar Ivan Alexander, contained in the Sofia Psalter (Sofia Songwriter, 1337), Theodora is described as a “pious woman”: “Rejoice, pious woman, Queen Theodora!” From her marriage to the Bulgarian king Theodora she has four children – Mikhail Asen, Ivan Sratsimir, Ivan Asen IV and Vasilisa. The queen became a patron of many churches and monasteries, including the Basarbovo rock monastery near Ruse.
In 1345, Ivan Alexander divorced her and married the Jewish Sarah, who adopted the same name at her baptism – Theodora. The former queen did not return to Wallachia, but retired to an unnamed nunnery near Tarnovo and became a monk named after another Byzantine empress – Theophanes (865-897). It can be assumed that he experienced the spiritual influence of the hesychast St. Theodosius of Tarnovo, with whom Ivan Alexander was close, especially since the famous ascetic was among those who did not approve of the increase of Jewish influence in the court.
He experienced the death of two of his sons – on one of the miniatures in the Bulgarian Manasiev Chronicle she is depicted on the deathbed of her son Ivan Asen, who died in the battle with the Ottomans near Sofia in 1349.
After her son Ivan Sratsimir became the ruler of the Vidin kingdom, his mother, the nun Teofania (Teofania, Teofana) moved there with him – according to legend in the Albotin Rock Monastery. Here, too, Vidin became a cultural center of the Bulgarian lands, continuing the literary activity of Lovech and Tarnovo. One of the most valuable manuscripts is the Vidin Collection, which contains the lives of sixteen women saints.
It is not known exactly when the nun Theophanes died. According to one version, she died at the age of 90 and was buried in front of the altar of the church in the rocky Albotin Monastery. According to another version, she died earlier, soon after moving to Vidin.
She remains in the local church memory as a holy and pious woman.
There are different hypotheses about the fate of her relics, as their history is intertwined with that of the relics of the Byzantine Empress Theophanes, who is widely revered in medieval Bulgaria. Their fate is unknown today.
