Betwixt and Between: The Cult of Living Saints in Contemporary Bulgaria

Abstract

The exemplary persona of Christianity known as the saint is a junction of antinomies: "hereness" and "thereness", immanence and transcendence, familiarity and incomprehensibility.In social terms, however, the saint is above all the figure of a religious virtuoso emerging at the interface of official and popular religion.(2)Various hagiolatric communities, from loosely defined local groups to well organized religious societies and sects, constantly cultivate their religious specialists who are often dubbed "saints" and treated as saints while still alive.Such holy persons, aspiring for saintly status in their lifetime who have not been canonized by the official Church, are usually designated in the scholarly tradition as 'folk,' 'near-,' 'would-be,' 'living' [see, e.g., Macklin and Margolies 1988], or in general not-quite-saints, to differentiate them from their canonized, "otherworldly" colleagues.The majority of cases of modern folk saints (19th-20 th c.) within Bulgarian hagiolatric communities are healers and clairvoyants sometimes called "living saints," who only rarely enjoy popularity beyond the narrow scope of their initial local cults.Against this background of ephemeral and amorphous saints a few cases stand out as epitomizing the general tendencies of popular religious saint-making in Bulgaria: the miracle-maker of Silistra Angelush Trifonov (1827-after 1904), the Holy Virgin Korteza Khadzhiiska from Sliven (c.1873-after 1920), the prophet Bona Velinova from Grigorevo (1885Grigorevo ( -1960)), the Venerable Stoina Dimitrova from the district of Melnik (1883Melnik ( -1933)), and the most celebrated near-saint of present-day Bulgaria, the oracle from the town of Petrich Vanga Dimitrova .This study is based primarily on ethnographic data about them,(3) as well as on wide-ranging narrative material reflecting Bulgarian folk cosmological concepts.Saints are analyzed here as cosmological agents of the communities that worship them and their status is compared and contrasted with the communal status of other cosmological figures, such as vampires or witches.Our approach is centered on the folk term "living saint" in an attempt to outline a structural profile of the saintly figure in Bulgarian popular religion from the viewpoint of the ethnography of speaking, that is, the study of speech episodes in their social context.The paper is built upon our trust in the capacity of folk terminology to manifest an insider's understanding of folk phenomena.Its first, descriptive part, presents a case-study of the unofficial cult of the Venerable Stoina, as seen through the term "living saint" used in the cult.The second, analytical, part is an attempt to reconstruct the Bulgarian folk concept of living holiness that underlies the ostensibly divergent and often contradictory discourses about different living saints.

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