Venerable Zosimas of Tuman

Life and Asceticism

According to tradition, Zosimas was a Sinaite monk who came from or by way of Mount Sinai and headed a group of monks who settled in caves in the area of present-day Tuman, in the wooded hill country near Golubac in eastern Serbia. He devoted himself to extreme fasting and prayer in his rocky hermit's cave, living as a recluse until his death.

Serbian tradition links his death to the knight Miloš Obilić. As the legend relates, Obilić while hunting accidentally wounded the hermit and brought him to his court's healer; Zosimas refused treatment and asked to be left to die. In repentance, Obilić began to build a church at the site of the hermitage.

The Monastery of Tuman

The monastery that grew around Zosimas's hermitage lies in the Tumanska reka valley, in a forested depression several miles southeast of Golubac, near the village of Snegotin; its principal church is dedicated to the Archangel Gabriel. Construction is dated to the second half of the 14th century and, by tradition, was finished just before the Battle of Kosovo in 1389.

The synaxarial account relates that when the building of the church reached the roof, Prince Lazar summoned Obilić to the Battle of Kosovo (1389); after Obilić fell in that battle, the local Vlach population completed the church, and a monastic community developed around it. The monastery is reckoned among the most visited pilgrimage sites of the Serbian Orthodox Church.

Relics & Shrines

The relics of Zosimas were discovered at Tuman in 1936, the same year a community of Russian monks settled at the monastery, and they became its central relic and the focus of its veneration as a pilgrimage shrine.