Saint Serapion of Kozheozersk
The twenty-seventh of June is the Orthodox feast-day of Saint Serapion, a sixteenth-century Tatar convert from Islâm, holy man and abbot who co-founded the Kozheozersk Monastery in Arkhangelsk Oblast in the very far north of Russia. The Kozheozersk Monastery was for many years a place of political exile on the Russian frontier, but it was also home to the reforming Patriarch Nikon, who served as abbot there early in his career.
Saint Serapion was born to the name Tursas. Like Saints Peter and Stephen, he was born in the Khanate of Kazan. His parents were of the Tatar nobility of that Khanate, and he himself was raised to hunt and fight. He was still a very young man in 1552, when he took part in the defence of his native city of Kazan from the Russians. Tursas was captured when Kazan fell that year. He was placed under the protection of the new governor of Kazan, a boyar named Zaharii Ivanovich Pleshcheev-Ochin, who married a Tatar woman of Astrakhan named El’yakşe and who was subsequently baptised Iuliana. Like many of his fellow Tatars under Russian rule, including Princes Utemysh-Girei (baptised Alexander) and Yadegar Mohammad (who took the baptismal name of Simeon), Tursas began to inquire into Orthodoxy. Under the patronage of ZI Pleshcheev’s Tatar wife Iuliana, who was his kinswoman and who had been Orthodox for some time, Tursas was baptised into the Orthodox Church with the name of Sergei.
The newly-illumined Sergei went to the Orthodox Church during the time when Metropolitan Saint Makarii shepherded the Russian Church, and when Saint Basil of Moscow prayed in the Dormition Cathedral. It is likely that Sergei attended the Divine Liturgy where Saint Makarii and Saint Basil were, and was inspired by their devotion to a newfound zeal for the True Faith. So sincerely, so deeply and so purely did he grow to love Christ our God, that he decided to quit the world in order to observe the highest rules of his new faith. This course of life was not unknown for converts to the Orthodox faith from Islâm: Saint Nikolai of Optina, who had once been a paşa in the Turkish government but who secretly converted to Orthodoxy during the war between Turkey and Russia, would later become a schemamonk at the Optina Pustyn’.
The Trinity Lavra of Saint Sergius, the same which had been established by Saint Sergei of Radonezh in 1337, was at that time patronised by the Tsars and boyars of Russia, and it is entirely likely that young Sergei frequented it for prayers together with his patron Zaharii Ivanovich. It is also entirely likely that Sergei was named in the faith for Saint Sergei of Radonezh. In any event, having made the acquaintance and discoursed with some of the monks in Trinity Lavra, it was here that Sergei made up his mind to become a monk, to follow that Christ whom he dearly loved, and to partake in the ascetic labours.
However, he was not too eager to become a monk in a place as well-known and as often-visited as the Trinity Lavra of Saint Sergius. No – like the Desert Fathers and the Fathers of the Northern Thebaïd, Sergei went out from Moscow and journeyed into the far north of the country, into those places which were sparsely inhabited, in search of a spiritual father who could guide him in the battle against the passions. As he was visiting the Oshevensky Monastery in Kargopol in Arkhangelsk, he began to hear of a hermit named Nifont who lived alone on an island in Lake Kozhe, which was at that time hidden among uncharted forests and trackless swamps. At length he came upon Lake Kozhe in Arkhangelsk, just three degrees south of the Arctic Circle, and met the hermit Nifont.
After spending some time with Nifont, the latter agreed to become Sergei’s spiritual father and teacher, and Sergei carried out all of Nifont’s instructions, seeking to perfect himself in holy obedience. The two of them lived together, eating nothing but roots and berries for their sustenance. At length and after ascetic trials which proved to him Sergei’s humility and obedience, Nifont agreed to tonsure Sergei, and he gave Sergei the monastic name of Serapion.
‘But,’ says the hagiography, ‘they did not stay long in solitude; others the same as themselves came unto them, seeking salvation and asking to be received. Love did not allow them to refuse.’ Indeed, the word of Saints Nifont and Serapion and the life they lived began to attract more young men unto them, who desired the same sort of fasting and purification that Saint Serapion had. At length, their numbers grew so many that Saint Nifont was obliged to travel to Moscow to ask the Tsar for a grant of land on which to build a monastery. The trip was taxing upon the elderly ascetic, and Saint Nifont reposed in the Lord in Moscow in 1575. His request had been granted, but he was not to see in this life the work begun.
While Nifont was in Moscow, the brethren around Saint Serapion began to feel the want of food. The way of life sufficient to two ascetics, foraging for roots and berries, was insufficient to support a large community of brothers. There were also as yet no pilgrims or other benefactors that the brethren might rely on for their daily bread. A hard season in 1575 therefore meant famine for them. Saint Serapion was compelled to visit the nearby village of Priluki and other settlements in the vicinity of Onega to beg alms for the brothers. It is true that, on account of the elderly Tatar monk’s kind and gentle ways and his speech, that the villagers in Priluki grew to love him, and they gave him grain. Yet even so there was nothing on Lake Kozhe with which to grind it into meal to make bread. Having learned of this, the villagers of Priluki gave Serapion a pair of millstones and a large sack of grain, as well as moss and brushwood with which to start an oven. In an extraordinary feat of endurance, Saint Serapion went alone, on foot, through the forests and the swamps lugging the millstones and the grain, the moss and the brushwood, all the way from Priluki back to Lake Kozhe. This would have been impossible even for a healthy man – for an ascetic, how much more unthinkable! And yet God preserved both him and his brethren, and he made it safely back to his monastery with all the gifts from Priluki in tow.
The millstones from Priluki were used to construct the first mill at Lake Kozhe. Additional gifts from the villagers included a cow and two calves, on Theophany of 1577, so that the monks could have milk and butter on feast days. It was some time after this that Saint Serapion learned of his spiritual father’s decease in Moscow, as well as of the agreement that would found Kozheozersk Monastery. It was at the late Nifont’s behest that Saint Serapion undertook a walking pilgrimage to Moscow, and he came unto the city. Tsar Fyodor I, in a letter dated 30 September 1584, granted to Saint Serapion a gift of land in a radius of four versts (about 4.4 km) in every direction from the lake, as well as the remainder of the nearby Lopsky Peninsula. At the time, all of that land was forest and swamp. Upon his return to Kozhe, Saint Serapion along with his monastic brothers began the long work of clearing the forests and using the lumber to construct an oratory and a refectory and an enclosure for themselves. The first temple they built, in 1589, was dedicated to the Lord’s Theophany. Two years later they built a warm (winter) church dedicated to Saint Nicholas. They also cleared ground to till and sow grain.
By this time the monastery had grown in importance and pilgrims often made contributions to its upkeep. A monastic wayhouse was opened in the town of Turchasov, and the monastery also built a saltworks for their own needs. Even so, the means were not sufficient, and moreover the monastery had to pay duties to the Tsar, as well as perform military tasks. The monastery had to provide logistical and probably financial support to the campaign against the Swedes in 1592, for example. There is another letter addressed to Tsar Fyodor from Saint Serapion, dated to 1595, in which the holy abbot asks that his monastery be released from the obligations of supporting exiled people and prisoners, because they did not have enough food to feed them all. However, this letter went unanswered, and Tsar Fyodor’s successor Boris Godunov sent several political prisoners and exiles to Kozheozersk Monastery during the Time of Troubles.
Saint Serapion, who had spent much of his own early life in captivity, took pity upon the prisoners and exiles who came under his care, looked after them, saw to their needs, listened to their stories and counselled them with wisdom. One of these was Prince Ioann Sitskii, who was deeply touched by Saint Serapion’s advice to him, and himself became a monk much beloved by the brethren of Kozheozersk.
Saint Serapion, together with his disciple Abraham, travelled to Moscow to visit the tsar Boris Godunov. They received from him a grant of land in four villages surrounding Onega. Also, Saint Iov the Patriarch of Moscow ordained the monk Abraham as a priest, and also gifted Kozheozersk Monastery with an altar-cloth (antimension) on which the Divine Liturgy could be served. Saint Iov also gave Saint Serapion the title of Builder in his monastery, although the meek and humble Serapion would, though already doing the work, give the honours to his successor-abbots. Under Serapion’s wise stewardship, the monastery lands expanded, and he bought using two hundred rubles certain lands in the villages of Kernesha, Kleshchevo, Kandopelse and Piyala near Onega, and also some land on the White Sea for use in the saltworks. The brethren cultivated rye and turnips, and also built a fishery – the last of which became the main source of the monastery’s income. In this way the monastic community of Kozheozersk became self-sustaining.
Saint Serapion was much beloved among the monks as well as among the exilic community that arose at Kozheozersk, but he was not without his detractors. Several of the monks, jealous of Saint Serapion’s successes and desirous of glory for themselves, ended up driving their elder out of the monastery for a time and causing him to seek refuge in Moscow; but where they threw curses, he blessed them in return. He came back to the monastery in 1605, and handed the abbatial rule over Kozheozersk to his disciple Fr Abraham in 1608. He lived out the rest of his life at Kozheozersk as a simple porter, and he reposed in the Lord on the twenty-seventh of June, 1611. He had pursued the monastic life for forty-six years, and at the end of his life there were forty brethren living at the monastery. There were several saints following Serapion who were associated with the Kozheozersk Monastery: Fr Abraham who was his disciple later became the schemamonk Saint Antony of Kozheozersk; Saint Longin of Kozheozersk; Saint Leonid of Ustnedumsk; Saint Kornilius of Kozheozersk; Saints Herman and Bogolep of Kozheozersk and Saint Nikodemos of Khuziug. Holy father Serapion, gentle hermit and anchorite of the northern wilderness, pray unto Christ our God for the salvation of our souls!
Apolytikion for Saint Serapion, Tone 5:
The way to salvation in Christ was indicated by you,
Who rejected the Hagarene ungodliness of his birth,
With all your heart you loved Christ God!
Putting aside all your noble honours,
You sought the struggles of the secluded life.
With the desert-dwelling Nifont you served the Lord
And with prayer and labour in the wastelands praised the Holy Trinity.
Through your diligence you put forth good roots
And rich harvests brought unto the Lord.
To Him, O Father Serapion,
Pray without cease on behalf of us all.
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