Los Angeles, August 18, 2025
Photo: stgeorgepress.com A new publication from St. George Press presents a daily collection of brief sayings from one of Romania’s great 20th-century elders.
Daily Readings In the Tradition of the Philokalia presents in English the inspiring words of St. Sofian (Boghiu) of Antim Monastery, who was one of the 16 martyrs, confessors, and ascetics canonized by the Romanian Orthodox Church in 2024.
St. Sofian spent six years in communist prisons, after which he spent the last four decades of his life as abbot of Antim Monastery in Bucharest.
The press describes the book:
This volume gathers 366 brief yet profound sayings from Saint Sofian of Antim Monastery, newly canonized by the Romanian Orthodox Church. Steeped in the Philokalic tradition, these daily readings shine with the quiet light of a life wholly given to Christ—a life marked by humility, repentance, unceasing prayer, and hidden holiness.
St. Sofian, the "Urban Hesychast", bore the stillness of the desert into the heart of Bucharest. In the midst of the city’s restlessness and noise, he taught that the Prayer of the Heart—“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner”—could be prayed anywhere, anytime, as a sure path to union with God. “In modern life—with its hurry, with its speed, with our restlessness,” he said, “we can nourish ourselves with this prayer in a truly blessed way.” His words call us to guard the heart, to unite mind and heart in prayer, and to let this unceasing invocation become the breath of the soul, transforming even the most fragmented life into one of peace and unity.
Whether opened at the dawn of the day or in the quiet of the night, this book is a faithful companion for the journey toward the Kingdom—guiding the reader, one day at a time, into the stillness where God is found, even in the middle of the world’s noise.
Daily Readings In the Tradition of the Philokalia can be ordered from St. George Press. Another St. Sofian collection, Repentance and Resurrection: Homilies During the Triodion and Pentecostarion, was published in May.
The Press also offers several other publications representing the Romanian Orthodox tradition, including the akathist to St. John Jacob of Hozeva by St. Cleopa.
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Fr. Sofian was born on October 7, 1912 in Cuconeștii Vechi. He became a brother of Rughi Monastery in Soroca County in 1926. He studied at the school for singers at Dobrușa Monastery, at the monastic seminary in Cernica Monastery (1932-1940), at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bucharest (1940-1945), and at the Department of Theology in Bucharest (1942-1946).
He was tonsured as a monk with the name Sofian at Dobrușa Monastery in 1937. He was ordained as a hierodeacon in 1939 and as a hieromonk in 1945 for the Antim Monastery in Bucharest. He served as abbot of the monastery from 1950 to 1955 and again in the last years of his life.
He was arrested in 1958 and sentenced to 15 years in prison, though he was released in 1964. He spent the rest of his life at Antim Monastery, where he reposed on September 14, 2002. He was buried at Căldărușani Monastery in Gruiu in Ilfov County.
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