Basil of Moscow

Yelokhovo and the cobbler's bench

He was born in December 1468 in the village of Yelokhovo, then outside Moscow and now swallowed by it, to peasant parents named Jacob and Anna. Tradition holds that his mother was overtaken by her labour on the portico of the village church and bore him there, so that his life began, as it would end, on the threshold of a temple. His parents apprenticed the boy to a shoemaker.

The first sign came in the workshop. A customer — in most tellings a merchant, in some a boyar's servant — came to order boots, insisting they be made stoutly enough to last him a year or more. The apprentice wept, and then laughed. Pressed by his master afterwards for an explanation, he said that the man had ordered boots he would never put on, for he would be dead before they were finished. The customer died within days. The master understood that he had a prophet at his bench, and not long after — at about the age of sixteen — Basil left it.

The naked ascetic of the streets

What he took up in its place was the hardest of all the ascetic paths, the feigned madness (yurodstvo, σαλότης) by which a saint hides his sanctity under public disgrace and buys the freedom to tell the truth. Basil went about without clothing — the epithet Nagoy, "the Naked," attached itself to him — and weighed himself down with iron chains. He had no house and no bed; he slept in porches, in the open, on the ground, and endured the Moscow winter barefoot. He kept a strict fast, prayed by night, and accepted the blows and mockery that his manner invited, thanking God for those who beat him.

His street sanctity worked chiefly by parable in action. He would upset a tray of kalachi at a baker's stall in the market, and the crowd would fall on him, until the baker confessed that he had mixed chalk and lime into his flour. He overturned a vessel of kvass, and the seller admitted that his drink was spoiled. He took the alms and the gifts pressed on him and passed them at once to the poor — and by preference to those, he said, who were in real need but were ashamed to beg, and would not stretch out a hand in the street.

Two stories about the man's shrewdness are told everywhere. Some thieves, coveting a fine fur coat that had been given him, laid one of their number down in the road as though dead, and asked the blessed one for the coat to bury him in. Basil gave it, asking whether their friend was truly dead; they swore he was; and Basil answered that, since deceit was their trade, let deceit be their wages. When they went to rouse the man, he was dead in earnest. And at the Barbarian Gates (Varvarskiye vorota) there hung an icon of the Mother of God famous for miracles and thronged by pilgrims; Basil came, and to the horror of the crowd struck and broke it. They seized and beat him, until, scraping the board where the paint had come away, they found beneath the sacred image the figure of a devil painted first and overlaid — a diabolical counterfeit that had been drawing the veneration of the city.

Prophecies and the fire of 1547

The gift of foreknowledge is the constant of his Life. The Book of Degrees records that he came to the Voznesensky (Ascension) monastery and stood before it weeping bitterly and without explanation; the next day the great fire of 1547 broke out there and consumed a large part of Moscow. The most repeated of all his miracles belongs with this: at the Tsar's table Basil three times took the cup handed him and threw the wine out of the window. Reproached, he answered that he had been putting out a fire in Novgorod; and messengers afterwards brought word that Novgorod had indeed burned that day, and that the flames had been quenched, and that a naked man with a water-pail had been seen among them who vanished when the fire was out. (The account is not found in the earliest redactions of the Life and belongs to the later, seventeenth-century tradition; it is reported here as the tradition reports it.)

Basil and Ivan the Terrible

Alone among the men of his generation, Basil could say anything to Ivan IV, and the Tsar — who feared almost nothing and spared almost no one — feared and revered him. The best known of their meetings is set at Vespers in the Dormition cathedral. Afterwards the Tsar remarked that he had not seen the blessed one in church. Basil replied that he had seen the Tsar, and that the Tsar had not been in the church at all: he had been on the Vorobyovy Hills, walking about the palace he was building there. Ivan, convicted of having spent the whole service in his own imagination, is said to have trembled.

Another time the Tsar sent him gold. Basil took it, and gave it away in the street — by the common version, to a foreign merchant who had lost everything and was standing in decent clothes too ashamed to beg, while the beggars around him were fed. He entered taverns without scandal and spoke gently to the drunkards and the fallen, saying that he found in them the beginnings of good that no one else had troubled to look for; and he was as hard on hypocrites at prayer as he was soft on sinners in the gutter.

Repose, burial, and glorification

He died on 2 August 1557, having lived, by the reckoning of the Life, some eighty-eight years in this labour. (A minority of sources place the repose in 1552; see below.) Metropolitan Macarius of Moscow served the funeral with a great concourse of clergy, and the tradition — recorded in the chronicles and repeated in every later Life — is that Tsar Ivan and the boyars carried the bier themselves. He was buried by the church of the Trinity in the Moat, on the edge of Red Square, in the very ground where the great votive church of the Protection of the Mother of God on the Moat (Pokrovsky sobor) had lately risen in thanksgiving for the taking of Kazan.

Miracles at the grave began at once and were formally investigated. On 2 August 1588, a Council of the Russian Church under Patriarch Job — the first patriarch of Moscow — glorified him; his relics were uncovered and placed in a shrine, and a chapel dedicated to him was added on the north-east of the Pokrov cathedral to house them. Because the people came to the cathedral for Basil, the whole building took his name in ordinary speech, and the ten-domed masterpiece on Red Square is known throughout the world as St Basil's — a naked beggar's name fastened for ever on a tsar's monument of conquest, which is very nearly the summary of his life. His relics rest there still, under a canopy in the chapel that bears his name.