Romylos of Vidin

In the wake of the Ottoman conquest of Bulgaria Romylos was among the many Bulgarian intellectuals who emigrated to neighbouring Orthodox countries and brought their talents and texts.

He was born in the first quarter of the fourteenth century in the "valiant and glorious city Vidin",[2] northwestern Bulgaria, and given the Bulgarian name of Rusko or Rayko.

[3] The young monk became a follower of Hesychasm (from Greek "stillness, rest, quiet, silence") – an eremitic tradition of prayer in the Eastern Orthodox Church that flourished in the Balkans during the 14th century and was patronized by the Bulgarian emperor Ivan Alexander (r.

[4] In 1335, Ivan Alexander gave refuge to the renowned hesychast Gregory of Sinai and provided funds for the construction of a monastery near Paroria in the Strandzha Mountains in the southeast of the country, which attracted monks from Bulgaria, Byzantium, and Serbia.

[3][6] Following the Christian defeat at the hands of the Ottoman Turks in the Battle of Maritsa in 1371 Romylos fled to Valona on the Adriatic Sea in modern-day Albania.

[3] He could not find peace in Valona because the governors of the region were unjust and the priests were unworthy and eventually moved to the Serbian Despotate.

The commonly accepted opinion on the chronological sequence of the Slavic and Greek variant of his Life has been established only in the last two decades of the twentieth century.