Nicholas of Pskov

The fool of Pskov

Of the origins of Nicholas almost nothing is recorded: he belongs to that class of Russian saints, the holy fools (yurodivye, "fools for Christ's sake"), whose whole life was a deliberate hiding of themselves under the appearance of madness, and who left no account of their own. He lived at Pskov — the proud frontier republic of the Russian northwest, city of the Holy Trinity, long a sister and rival of Novgorod — in the first three quarters of the sixteenth century, and by the tradition he took up the ascetic feigning of folly (the Greek salos, σαλός, from which his by-name "Salos" derives) for more than thirty years. Beneath the rags, the wandering, and the seeming senselessness the people came to discern a man of prayer and clairvoyance; and long before his great confrontation with the Tsar he was known and loved in Pskov as "Mikula" (the folk form of Nicholas) — Mikula the Holy — a wonderworker and a seer whose strange words carried warning and grace. The feigned madness of such a saint is not idiocy but a chosen self-abasement: by making himself a spectacle and a laughing-stock he trampled on the world's esteem, kept the virtue of humility unspotted, and won the freedom to speak the naked truth to the powerful, which no sane and prudent man would dare to speak.

Ivan the Terrible and the sack of Novgorod

The event that fixed Nicholas forever in the memory of the Russian Church took place in the winter of 1570. In the preceding weeks Tsar Ivan IV, called the Terrible (Grozny), had fallen upon Novgorod the Great with his oprichniki — the black-clad instrument of his terror — on the strength of a denunciation that the city meant to defect to Lithuania. The massacre of Novgorod was one of the blackest deeds of his reign: for weeks the city was given over to pillage, torture, and slaughter, thousands were drowned beneath the ice of the Volkhov, and the wealth of its churches and monasteries was carried off. From the ruin of Novgorod the Tsar turned his host toward Pskov, intending, it was universally believed, to visit upon it the same destruction.

Terror ran before him. The tradition, echoed in the Pskov chronicles, tells that the governor Prince Yuri Tokmakov counselled the townsfolk not to flee or resist but to throw themselves on the Tsar's mercy: at his word every household set out before its door a small table with bread and salt, and as Ivan rode in the people knelt in the streets with their wives and children, bowing to the ground and offering the ancient sign of submission and welcome. The city lay open and unarmed beneath the sword.

The rebuke that saved the city

Into this scene stepped the holy fool. The accounts — including the testimony of two Englishmen then in Russia, the envoy Jerome Horsey and the diplomat Giles Fletcher, who set the story down within a generation — agree in substance, with the colour that a much-told tale gathers. By one strand Nicholas came out to meet the Tsar careering astride a stick, as a child rides a hobby-horse, and cried out to him to be gone and to shed no more Christian blood. By the strand the tradition loves best, the Tsar came to the fool's poor cell (or Nicholas came before him), and Nicholas set before him a piece of raw meat, bidding him eat. It was the season of the Great Fast; Ivan drew back — "I am a Christian, and I do not eat flesh in Lent." Then came the answer that has never been forgotten: "You do worse — you drink the blood of men," — you devour the flesh and blood of Christian men, and forget your God. To the rebuke Nicholas is said to have joined a prophecy: if the Tsar or his men laid a hand on Pskov or its churches, a sudden and terrible chastisement would fall upon him.

The sign followed. When Ivan's men began — by the common account — to strip the bell from the Trinity Cathedral, at that very hour the Tsar's finest horse fell dead beneath him (or his horses began to die), exactly as the fool had foretold. Seized with dread at the seer's word made good, and unmanned before the one man in Russia who had dared to curse him to his face and live, Ivan the Terrible broke off his purpose and fled the city. Pskov was spared the fate of Novgorod — its people, its clergy, and its shrines delivered, the tradition holds, by the boldness of a single fool for Christ. That a man whom the Tsar could have killed with a word instead turned him from massacre is the marrow of the story and the reason the Church keeps his memory: the parrhesia, the God-given freedom of speech, of the holy fool set against the most fearful autocrat of the age.

Repose and burial

Nicholas outlived the deliverance of his city by six years, continuing his hidden labour, and reposed on February 28, 1576. He was buried — a mark of honour almost unheard-of for a homeless fool, and reserved in Russia for bishops and ruling princes — within the cathedral church of the Holy Trinity at Pskov, beneath its very floor, where his relics have rested ever since and where they were venerated as those of a wonderworker and heavenly guardian of the city. The burial-place itself is the surest witness to the awe in which Pskov held him: the people laid the fool who had saved them among their princes.

Veneration

Nicholas was venerated as a saint at Pskov from soon after his death; his memory is kept on the day of his repose, and he is honoured in the Russian Church as one of the great holy fools, in the succession of Procopius of Ustyug, Basil the Blessed of Moscow, and the others who took madness upon themselves for Christ. In Pskov he is a civic patron as much as a saint — the intercessor whose prayers turned away the sword, "unto the city of Pskov and to all Christ-loving people a praise and a confirmation," as his kontakion sings. His story passed early beyond Russia's borders through the reports of the English travellers, and it has been retold ever since as one of the most vivid instances of the holy fool's vocation: to be counted a madman by the world, and to be the one sane voice before a mad throne.