Herman of Alaska

Origins and monastic beginnings

Herman came from a merchant family of Serpukhov, in the Moscow diocese; his baptismal and family names are not recorded with certainty, though a tradition gives his baptismal name as Gerasimus. Drawn to piety from childhood, he entered monastic life about the age of sixteen — around 1772 — at the Trinity–Sergius Hermitage near St Petersburg, on the Gulf of Finland. There, gravely ill with a disfiguring abscess of the throat and awaiting death, he prayed all night before an icon of the Mother of God and was healed without surgery, a wonder the physicians could not explain. After some years he transferred to the celebrated monastery of Valaam on Lake Ladoga, whose elder and superior, Nazarius, became his spiritual father. Herman loved Valaam above all places, dwelt for a time as a hermit in the forest at a spot still called "Herman's," and would return to the monastery on feasts to sing in the choir, the tears running from his eyes.

The mission to America

In the later eighteenth century Russian merchants opened the Aleutian Islands and the coasts of Alaska, and the need arose to bring the Gospel to the native peoples now under Russian sway. With the blessing of the Holy Synod, Metropolitan Gabriel of St Petersburg charged the elder Nazarius to choose capable monks from Valaam, and in 1793 a mission of ten set out under the archimandrite Joseph (Bolotov); the monk Herman was among them. The mission at first bore rich fruit, several thousand natives being baptised and a church and school raised on Kodiak. But it was soon broken by disaster: the newly consecrated bishop Joasaph (Bolotov) was drowned with his party when the ship Phoenix went down; the hieromonk Juvenal was martyred in the interior; and one after another the rest died, until Herman alone remained.

New Valaam on Spruce Island

Herman withdrew to Spruce Island, a small forested island a mile and a quarter across the strait from Kodiak, which he named New Valaam after his beloved monastery. He dug a cave with his own hands and lived his first summer in it, afterwards in a small cell beside it, with a wooden chapel, a guesthouse and schoolhouse, and a garden he tended himself, planting potatoes and vegetables and gathering seaweed for manure. His asceticism was extreme — he wore chains and a few poor garments, slept little on a bench with a brick for a pillow, fasted severely, and kept unceasing prayer — yet his manner was full of warmth and disarming simplicity. He was never ordained, remaining a simple monk to the end.

Father and protector of the Aleuts

Herman became the father of the native people of the region. He taught the children their letters and the faith, established an orphanage and a school on the island, nursed the sick through an epidemic when others fled, and drew the Aleuts and Kodiak islanders to himself by his love. He did not hesitate to defend them against the cruelty and greed of the officials of the Russian-American Company, writing in their behalf and enduring the enmity of powerful men for it; he was, in a famous phrase of his own, a servant appointed to their care. When asked once by visiting naval officers how a man could live alone in such a place, he answered that he was never alone, for God was present and the angels near, and put to them the question whether they loved God above all — a conversation long remembered.

Repose and glorification

Herman foretold the manner and circumstances of his death, that he would die without a priest present and that the island would afterwards be neglected for a time. He reposed on Spruce Island on December 13, 1837, and was buried by his disciples in the cave that had been his first dwelling; the tradition relates that a pillar of light was seen over the island on the night of his death and that his face shone. His memory was kept by the native people through the following century. On August 9, 1970, he was solemnly glorified — the first saint canonised on the American continent — jointly proclaimed by the Orthodox Church in America and honoured by the Russian Church and the wider Orthodox world, and hailed as the "North Star of Christ's Church" and wonderworker of all America. His relics rest on Kodiak.