Gurias of Kazan

Origins, slander and imprisonment

The saint was born about the turn of the sixteenth century in the town of Radonezh, near Moscow, and was given the name Gregory, with the family surname Rugotin. His parents were of modest means, and in his youth he entered the service of Prince Ivan Penkov as a household steward. He served faithfully and was trusted, but fellow servants, envious of his standing, slandered him to his master, accusing him of an illicit relationship with the prince's wife. The prince, believing the charge, had the young man shut up in an underground dungeon.

Gurias bore the injustice without bitterness, turning his imprisonment into a cell. He gave himself to prayer, and — the tradition relates — spent his confinement copying out little primers and alphabet-books for children, which were sold outside for a few coins that he gave in alms. After about two years he was released, his health broken but his soul refined, and he understood his sufferings as a call to the monastic life.

Monk and abbot of Volokolamsk

Gurias took the monastic tonsure at the Joseph-Volokolamsk monastery, one of the great Russian houses of the age, founded by Joseph of Volokolamsk. There his gifts of prayer, learning and administration were soon recognised, and in time he was chosen abbot (igumen), governing the community for some nine years. He was afterwards briefly at the Selizharov monastery. His reputation for holiness and capable rule reached the court, and prepared him for the work of his last years.

First Archbishop of Kazan

In 1552 the army of Tsar Ivan IV took Kazan, the capital of the Muslim khanate on the middle Volga, and vast territories peopled by Tatars, Chuvash, Mari and other nations passed under Christian rule. To organise the Church there a new diocese of Kazan was founded in 1555, and Gurias was chosen its first archbishop — selected, the sources say, by lot, as one worthy above the other candidates. He was consecrated at Moscow and sent to his see with detailed instructions from the Tsar and the Metropolitan Macarius that the conversion of the peoples was to proceed by persuasion, kindness and the relief of the poor, never by compulsion.

Gurias took this charge to heart. He built and adorned churches, ransomed captives, fed and sheltered the needy, and founded monasteries that were to be centres of mission and learning: the Dormition monastery at Sviyazhsk, set under his companion Herman, and the Transfiguration monastery at Kazan under Barsanuphius (Varsonofy), the former captive who knew the Tatar tongue. Under his gentle governance many of the region's peoples received baptism willingly. In his last years he was worn down by illness and could no longer walk; the tradition tells that he was carried into church on feast days to hear the Liturgy. He died on 5 December 1563, having received the great schema, and was buried within the Transfiguration monastery at Kazan.

Relics and glorification

In 1595, during the building of a new church at the Transfiguration monastery, the graves of Gurias and of Barsanuphius (who had died as bishop of Tver) were opened in the presence of Hermogenes, then Metropolitan of Kazan and afterwards Patriarch of Moscow and himself a hieromartyr. The body of Gurias was found incorrupt, and the discovery — described by Hermogenes in an account that survives — established the veneration of the Kazan hierarchs. The relics were later translated to the cathedral of the city. Gurias, Herman and Barsanuphius are honoured together as the first enlighteners of Kazan and are commemorated in the synaxis of the saints of that land.