Joseph of Astrakhan

Astrakhan

Joseph was born at Astrakhan in 1579 — a city then barely a generation into Russian hands, taken from the Tatar khanate in 1556, standing at the head of the Caspian on the delta of the Volga, and inhabited by Russians, Tatars, Nogais, Persians, Armenians and Central Asian merchants. It was a frontier of the empire and of the Church at once, a garrison town, a customs post and a mission field. Joseph belonged to it by birth and never really left it: he was tonsured a monk there, and there he spent his whole life.

His advance was slow and late. He was fifty-two before he was made archimandrite of the Trinity monastery in Astrakhan, the principal house of the city. In 1656 he was at Moscow — the years of Patriarch Nikon's reforms and of the church council that reviewed them — and it was there, or in consequence of that visit, that he was chosen for the newly erected metropolitan see. The archbishopric of Astrakhan and Terki was raised to a metropolitanate in 1667 by the Great Moscow Council, and Joseph became its first metropolitan, being consecrated in Moscow with the metropolitans of the other new sees. He was by then in his late seventies.

The Razin rising

In 1670 the Don Cossack Stepan Razin brought the whole lower Volga into revolt against the Muscovite state. Astrakhan fell to the insurgents in June 1670 after the killing of its governor, and was held by them for more than a year under Razin's lieutenants Vasily Us and Fyodor Sheludyak while Razin himself moved upriver — to defeat at Simbirsk, capture, and execution at Moscow in June 1671.

Joseph's position was as difficult as a bishop's can be. He was a pastor to a city in the hands of men who had murdered its governor and were now conducting their own executions, and he was at the same time a hierarch of a Church that anathematised rebellion against the tsar. He did what could be done: he continued to serve, he buried the dead of both parties, he interceded for prisoners, and he declined to give the rising the Church's blessing. When, in the spring of 1671, the insurgent leaders determined on a new expedition upriver and required the metropolitan's public sanction — and, in the tradition, the surrender of letters that had come to him from Moscow — he refused.

Martyrdom

On 11 May 1671, the traditional account relates, Joseph served the Divine Liturgy in the Cathedral of the Dormition and was seized by the insurgents afterwards. He was taken to the prikaz chamber, questioned, beaten and put to torture — the accounts speak of burning and of the strappado — and, when he would neither curse the tsar nor bless the rising, was carried to the wall of the Astrakhan kremlin and thrown down from the tower, dying of the fall. He was ninety-two years old.

His body lay where it fell. The rebels forbade its burial, and for nine days it remained unburied, until the cathedral clergy were at last permitted to take it up; they vested it in the metropolitan's vestments and laid it in a grave prepared in the cathedral. Veneration began at once, and healings were reported at the tomb.

Veneration and glorification

Joseph was honoured locally at Astrakhan from the year of his death, and his memory was carried in the diocesan calendars and in the cathedral's own commemoration. His relics rest in the Cathedral of the Dormition of the Astrakhan kremlin. Formal glorification came only with the Local Council of the Russian Orthodox Church of 1917–1918, which in April 1918 canonised him — the same council that was then beginning to reckon with the murder of its own members, and which glorified in Joseph a hierarch killed in an earlier civil disorder for refusing to sanctify violence.