Nicholas Kochanov

Flight from a good reputation

Nicholas was born at Novgorod, in the century when the city was at the height of its wealth and at the worst of its internal violence, into a family described as rich and illustrious. The notices say he was devout from boyhood, constant at the services, a lover of fasting and prayer — and that this was precisely the problem. His neighbours began to praise him, and Nicholas, understanding what praise does to a soul, went looking for a way to make himself despised.

He chose folly for Christ — the yurodstvo of the Russian tradition, in which a sane man takes on the appearance of a madman in order to be free of the world's approval, and pays for it in the coin of ridicule. He gave up his house and his clothes, went about the city in rags in the hard frosts and in the summer heat, endured being beaten and driven off, and let Novgorod think what it liked of him. What was hidden under this was ceaseless prayer; the troparion sung to him fixes on the two halves of it exactly — the burden of the heat by day and the frosts of winter on the outside, and the Trinity on the inside.

The quarrel on the Volkhov

At the same time there was living in Novgorod another fool for Christ, Blessed Theodore, whose memory is kept on January 19. The two men were friends. In public they behaved as irreconcilable enemies, and made the enmity a piece of street theatre: the river Volkhov divides Novgorod into the Sofia side, with the cathedral and the archbishop, and the Trade side, with the market and the merchant quarters, and these were the two standing parties whose feuds and armed brawls on the great bridge were the chronic disease of the Novgorod republic. Nicholas kept the Sofia side and Theodore the Trade side, and each drove the other back across the river with shouts whenever he ventured over — a mockery of the city's own behaviour, performed by the only two men in Novgorod who could not be accused of having anything to gain from it.

The most famous episode belongs to this game. Having got the better of his mock adversary, Nicholas is said to have gone after him along the Volkhov as though on dry ground, and, having nothing else to hand, to have thrown a head of cabbage — kochan — at him. Hence the surname the Church has kept for him. It is a comic story with a hard point: the walking on the water gives away, in the middle of the joke, what kind of man was performing it.

Clairvoyance and miracles

The tradition credits him with the gifts that go with the calling: clairvoyance, and the power of miracles. The story most often told concerns a feast to which he had been invited by one of the leading men of the city; the servants, seeing a ragged madman at the door, turned him away, and Nicholas went off without protest. The wine in the barrels immediately disappeared. Nothing the household could do brought it back, and only when their master went after Nicholas and brought him in, and Nicholas prayed, did the wine reappear — a rebuke aimed not at the insult to himself but at the contempt for the poor which the insult revealed.

Repose and relics

He reposed on 27 July 1392. By his own wish, or by the city's estimate of him at the time, he was buried not in a place of honour but at the far end of the cemetery beside the church of St James on Yakovlev Street, on the Trade side. Veneration began at the grave, and a church was built over it; the relics lie beneath it in a crypt, and Novgorod has never lost the memory. The building is known locally as the church of St Nicholas Kochanov; the Orthodox Church in America's notice describes it as a church of the Great Martyr Panteleimon, which — if it is not simply a confusion with the dedication of a neighbouring house — would be a striking coincidence, since Nicholas reposed on Panteleimon's feast and shares the day with him.