The life of St Theophylact of Ochrid
Around 1090 he was sent, by his own account reluctantly, to govern the archbishopric of Ochrid in Bulgaria, an assignment that placed a man of refined Constantinopolitan taste in a provincial see he seems to have found something of an exile. He held that post for roughly twenty-five years, and it was there, at the request of the boy he had once tutored, now grown and the mother of an abbess, that he composed his commentaries on the Gospels and much of the rest of the New Testament, drawing heavily on the earlier work of John Chrysostom but shaping it into a clear and lasting exposition of his own that is still read today. He also wrote widely on other subjects, including a life of his distant predecessor at Ochrid, Clement, one of the two disciples who had brought Slavonic letters to Bulgaria two centuries before him. In his later years he withdrew from Ochrid to Thessalonica, where the exact date of his death is not recorded, though his own letters place it no earlier than 1108.
