Monastic Beginnings
Ephraim was born around 1312 into a priestly family of Bulgarian origin. By tradition he turned to the monastic life rather than marriage, becoming a monk around 1335 at the age of twenty-three. He went to Mount Athos, where he is recorded as having lived at the monasteries of Hilandar and Zograf before withdrawing to live as a hesychast ascetic in the mountains of the Holy Mountain.
Around 1347 he left Athos and settled on a river island of the Maritsa near Plovdiv, where he became a hegumen (abbot). Accounts of his ascetic years also associate him with the Ibar gorge and the monastery of Decani in Kosovo.
Patriarch of Serbia
The Synod of the Serbian Church chose Ephraim as patriarch on 3 October 1375, following the death of his predecessor. He held the office for several years before renouncing the throne; aspiring to silence, he withdrew to monastic seclusion, and the succession passed to Spyridon. Sources record his withdrawal as lasting roughly nine years, spent in part at the Archangel-Dushanov monastery.
After the death of Spyridon in 1389 and the upheaval surrounding the Battle of Kosovo, Ephraim was asked to resume the patriarchate, which he did for a second term before once more relinquishing the office. The Wikipedia account dates his two tenures to 1375-1379 and 1389-1392.
Repose and Glorification
Ephraim died in the year 1400, at the age of eighty-eight, and was buried at the Patriarchate of Pec. According to the Wikipedia account he reposed on the evening of 14 June 1400 and was buried the following day.
He was proclaimed a saint not long afterward, the sources placing his glorification in 1406 or 1407, some years after his repose. His feast is kept on 15 June, observed together with Saint Lazar and Saint Spyridon.
Literary Legacy
Beyond his role as a hierarch, Ephraim is remembered as a poet. He left a substantial body of original poetry, preserved in a fourteenth-century manuscript from the Hilandar monastery on Mount Athos.
