Righteous Admiral Feodor (Ushakov) of Sanaksar

Admiral Saint Feodor (Ushakov)

EDIT (5 Oct): Troparion below is given in original Russian rather than English translation. Thank you, JJ Kotalik!

Feodor Ushakov is one of the most celebrated naval heroes of Russian history, elder contemporary and equivalent (if not superior) in honour to his one-time ally, Britain’s Lord Nelson. Commander of the Russian Black Sea Fleet. Hero of the Russo-Turkish Wars. Liberator of Krym and Novorossiya, and of the Ionian Islands. Founder of the naval base at Sevastopol. Brilliant tactical innovator. Generous patron of naval veterans and their families, as well as of the homeless. Saint.

Born near the town of Rybinsk on the Volga in the Yaroslavl Oblast’, Feodor Ushakov enlisted in the Russian navy at the age of 15, and serving as a midshipman in the Russian fleet in the Baltic. His first battle experience was during the Russo-Turkish War in 1768 as the captain of a small vessel in the fleet of the Azov. After the first of the Russo-Turkish Wars of the eighteenth century ended, he took command of the battleship Viktor, which toured the Mediterranean and defended merchant ships from piracy by the English Navy. His experiences in the Azov and in the Mediterranean helped to shape his tactical character as an innovator and improviser.

The line tactics which were then favoured by the nations of Western Europe served, for Saint Feodor, as a template to be improved upon (or abandoned, as the situation warranted) rather than as a dogma to be blindly followed. Saint Feodor’s unmatched success in naval battles – his career was distinguished by never having suffered a defeat in battle against the French or against the Turks – was owing to his flexibility and adaptation to the demands of the moment. He came up with dynamic battle tactics for situations involving anchored ships, battles on open water, enemy formations involving columns and so forth, and depended as much on manoeuvre and reformation as on line tactics.

For this, the young naval commander roused significant opposition among the conservative members of the nobility who were wont to adopt Western naval doctrines wholesale. But his adoption of these tactics was as much owing to the closeness to the men under his charge as it was to any abstract doctrine. As any good watcher of Star Trek knows, the heaviest responsibility of a ship’s captain is for the souls that he carries aboard the craft he commands, and Ushakov carried this responsibility deeply and in a heartfelt way. He was a strict father to his men: he forbade drunkenness, fighting and idle chatter aboard his timber. And more so than any other commander in the Russian fleet, he was attentive to his sailors’ diet, physical and emotional health – and even funded their board (along with the local hospitals) out of his own pocket when military funding grew scarce in 1792. The reason he studied tactics so intensely was because he loved his sailors like brothers, and did all he could do to ensure a swift victory with few casualties.

His next term of service was in the second war between the Turks and the Russians, starting in 1787. During that time, Ushakov had taken charge of the port of Sevastopol from its founder and his predecessor, Rear Admiral Thomas MacKenzie, who had taken ill and died there the previous year. Ushakov turned Sevastopol from a mere winter warm-water port for Russian ships, into an actual city: he oversaw the construction of the fort, the barracks, hospitals, roads, a market district. And he defended Sevastopol during his command of the Black Sea Fleet in spite of the Turks and Tatars attempting to take back the entire Peninsula of Krym. Ushakov, tenacious as always, won a string of brilliant naval victories over the Turks, and protected the fledgling naval port he had helped to found, as well as of the entirety of the New Russian Territories it gated, free from harm during that war.

Ushakov thereafter fought against Revolutionary France, and in particular oversaw the liberation of the Greek Orthodox Ionian Islands from tyrannical misrule by the French regicides – a liberation in which the Greeks themselves took part. Ushakov was welcomed at Corfu, and indeed celebrated Holy Pascha with the islanders, taking part in a procession with the relics of Saint Spyrídōn the Wonderworker of Cyprus. He invited an Orthodox bishop to the island – which the islanders had not seen in over two hundred years. He aided in the establishment of the Eptansos Polity, the first time any of the Greeks had governed themselves since the fall of Constantinople to the Turks. When he had to leave Corfu, the Ionian Greeks, sorry to see him leave, saw him off with tears in their eyes. Saint Feodor is still remembered with particular fondness on Corfu for his actions against the French.

Sadly, in 1800 he was all but forced to retire from the naval service by Tsar Aleksandr I, who did not understand the importance of the Navy to Russia’s grand strategy and did not know how to make use of Ushakov’s formidable talents. He devoted the rest of his life to prayer and works of mercy at his estate in Mordoviya and at the nearby Monastery of the Nativity of the Holy Theotokos at Sanaksar, where his uncle – an immensely holy man in his own right – was the abbot. He was notable here for his generosity to the poor, and to naval veterans of the war against Napoleon in particular, to the point where his adjutant complained that if they continued giving so much away they’d have nothing left for themselves. When he died, the papers in Mordoviya paid the saintly admiral this tribute: ‘You knew him as a great naval commander. We knew him for his outstanding charity to others.’

Saint Feodor was ultimately glorified by the Church of Russia, not for his feats in battle, but precisely for this generosity of spirit, his brotherly affection for even the least of his fellows. Military saints like Saint Feodor are glorified, not for any acts of violence, but for those Christian habits and virtue that a life of discipline and self-restraint seems apt to encourage, for the protection of the weak and for the propensity to ‘lay one’s life down for one’s brothers’. And – for all his zeal for tactical innovation and lack of respect for precedent in other areas of his career – Saint Feodor’s life seems entirely given to these humane and Christ-like habits. He was glorified not only for his protection of the Russians of Krym and Novorossiya; not only for his help to the Greeks of Corfu; not only for his devotion to the well-being of the sailors under his command; but also for his later deeds of selfless gift and mercy.

Holy and Righteous Admiral Feodor of Sanaksar, please offer your prayers to Our Lord Jesus Christ for us sinners!

Державе Российстей архистратиг непобедимый явился еси,
Агаринскую злобу нивочтоже вменив и разорив:
Не славы мирския, ниже в богатства взыскуя, но Богу и ближнему послужил еси,
Моли, святе Феодоре, воинству нашему даровати на враги одоление,
Отечеству во благочестии непоколебиму пребыти,
И сыновом Российским спастися.

Bust of Admiral Saint Feodor, Sevastopol, Republic of Krym, Russia