The birthplace of the venerable Romil was the city of Bdin (Vidin). His mother was Bulgarian, and his father - Greek.
At St. Baptism he was named Rusko. The wealth of his parents and his talent gave him the opportunity to receive a good education, with which he admired everyone around him.
When he grew up, his parents wanted to adopt him, but he secretly fled from them to the capital Tarnovo and in the monastery "St. Mother of God the Guide" he was tonsured a monk with the name Roman. His unquestioning obedience and his reverence for God, his wise humility and love for everyone and especially for the sick were known to all the brothers in the Tarnovo "Holy Mountain" and in the area of "Ustie", inhabited by many monks, so that everyone began to call him "Kaloroman" in Greek or "The Good Roman" in Bulgarian.
He heard that the great ascetic of blessed silence (hesychasm) and contemplation of God, St. Gregory of Sinai, had come to live on Bulgarian soil in the area of "Paroria" ("border" – on the border between Bulgaria and Byzantium). Roman left everything and came here, where he was well received and trained in the high virtues of true spiritual life: he received the gift of constant prayer, of constant inspiration, of constant penitential tears, of divinely inspired teaching.
The Turkish invasions, the robber attacks, the death of St. Gregory of Sinai forced him to return to the interior of Bulgaria, but the thirst for the solitude and silence of the Paroria brought him back to Paroria, where he accepted a great monastic schema with the name Romil. Then he went with his disciple Gregory (who wrote his life) to Mount Athos, where in the area of Melania he spent a long time asceticizing and gathering a monastic brotherhood.
After the unfortunate battle for Christians with the Turks at the Maritsa River on September 26, 1371, St. Romil - like many others - was forced to leave Mount Athos, to move with his disciples to Avlona (near Durrës), and from there - to Ravanitsa (Serbia), to the monastery of "St. Ascension", where he soon died on January 16, 1375.