Today is 138 years since the birth of Boris of Nevrokop (Vangel Simov Razumov), one of the best-educated bishops of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, who was killed in 1948. He was born on 26 October 1888 in the village of Gyavato, near Bitola, then part of the Ottoman Empire.

He left the village as a boy. In 1899 he went to Constantinople with his father and grandfather. He studied at the Bulgarian high school in Edirne, and from 1904 to 1910 he was at the Bulgarian Theological Seminary in Constantinople on a scholarship from Exarch Joseph I. In autumn 1911, by then a hierodeacon named Boris, he joined the University of Czernowitz in Bukovina. In 1915, in the thick of the war, he earned a doctorate in theology.

He went on to head the Bulgarian church community in Hungary, and in 1922 he returned to Sofia. He was rector of the Sofia Theological Seminary and, as a bishop, held the title Bishop of Stobi. In 1928 he published the pamphlet "The Crisis in Our School". He also wrote about the crisis in spiritual life, as he saw the school as the place where a person takes shape.

On 24 March 1935 he was confirmed as Metropolitan of Nevrokop. The diocese was on the border, in the mountains, and its people followed different faiths. In October that year he called on teachers to set up Orthodox Christian societies and church school choirs. He held the see for more than 13 years and built more than 20 churches.

The communist authorities soon singled him out. From 1946 State Security watched him constantly, and his file called him and his protosyncellus "hardened fascists and reactionaries". The metropolitan kept visiting villages and consecrating churches.

On 8 November 1948 he consecrated a new church in Kolarovo, in the Petrich area, and was shot dead on its threshold. The Bulgarian Orthodox Church has now begun the process of making him a saint.