Paisius of Galich
Our Venerable Father Paisius, Archimandrite of the Dormition Monastery at Galich
Venerable · b. c. 1390 — d. May 23, 1460, at Galich
Commemorated 23 May — Repose at the Dormition monastery by Lake Galich in 1460
Paisius was abbot, and afterwards archimandrite, of the Dormition monastery on the hill above Lake Galich, in the Kostroma country of northern Russia, where by all accounts he lived and laboured for more than seventy years — through the whole of the dynastic war between Vasily II and the princes of Galich, which twice devastated the district. His name is inseparable from the wonderworking Ovinovskaya icon of the Mother of God, the monastery's great treasure, which was given (the tradition says) by two strangers to the boyar Ivan Ovin with the command to build a church of the Dormition, and which, when a grand prince of Moscow carried it off to his capital, returned of itself to Galich. Paisius was sent to Moscow with a copy of the icon, was received with honour by the grand prince and the metropolitan, and brought back a charter of protection for his house. He reposed on the twenty-third of May 1460, an old man, and the fragrance that filled his cell and the monastery at his death is the one miracle the notices record of him personally. His monastery has borne his name ever since: the Paisiev monastery at Galich.
The monastery on the lake
The monastery stood on Krasnaya Gora, the red hill above Lake Galich, outside the town of Galich Mersky — the northern Galich of the Kostroma lands, not the Galicia of the south-west, a distinction worth making because the two are constantly confused. It had been founded in the fourteenth century and dedicated at first to St Nicholas; the dedication to the Dormition of the Mother of God came with the icon and the church built for it.
Paisius entered it young, and the sources are unanimous on the one striking fact of his outward life: he spent more than seventy years in the same house, rising from novice to abbot and at last to archimandrite, a dignity that in fifteenth-century Rus' marked the senior monastery of a district. If he was born about 1390 and died in 1460 the arithmetic is strained; the likelier reconstruction is a birth in the 1370s or 1380s and a tonsure in boyhood, which the round "seventy years" is meant to convey rather than to date.
He governed through the war of the Muscovite succession (1425–1453), in which his own town was the enemy capital: Galich was the seat of Prince Yuri Dmitrievich and then of his sons Vasily Kosoy and Dmitry Shemyaka, who fought Grand Prince Vasily II for the throne of Moscow. Galich was besieged and burnt more than once, and the monastery with it. The notices say that Paisius restored the house after the devastation of the princely quarrels — which is to say that his abbacy was largely spent rebuilding what the war destroyed.
The Ovinovskaya icon
The story of the icon belongs to the generation before him and is the foundation of the monastery's fame. A boyar of Galich named Ivan Ovin, who held the land, resolved to build a new church in the monastery. As he came to the site he was met by two strangers, radiant young men, who put into his hands an icon of the Dormition of the Mother of God and told him to dedicate the church to the Dormition. He turned to show it to the monks; the strangers were gone. The icon, called after him the Ovinovskaya, was set in the new church and became the wonderworking image of the region.
Its fame reached Moscow. About 1433 the grand prince — the notices name Vasily II — carried it away to the capital, as princes did with the great icons of subject cities: a political act as much as a devotional one, since a city's icon was a city's identity. The tradition says that the image returned by itself to its own church at Galich, and the attempt was not repeated.
The embassy to Moscow
Afterwards Dmitry Shemyaka, prince of Galich, asked Paisius to take a copy of the Ovinovskaya icon to Moscow — a copy, not the original, which the monastery would not risk again. Paisius went. He was received with honour by the grand prince, by the Metropolitan Jonah, and by great crowds of people, and the copy was venerated in the capital; and he came home with a charter securing his monastery against attack and molestation — the practical object of the whole exercise, in a district where armies had been marching for twenty years.
Repose
Paisius reposed on the twenty-third of May 1460, very old. The account says that at the hour of his death his cell and the whole monastery were filled with fragrance, and the brethren buried him in the church of the Dormition that the icon had caused to be built.
Veneration
Local veneration began early, at the tomb; his formal canonisation is usually placed in the seventeenth century, the period at which his service was composed and his life written down in the form in which it survives. The monastery on the red hill was renamed for him — the Paisiev-Uspensky (Paisiev Galichsky) monastery — and remained one of the principal houses of the Kostroma diocese until its closure in the Soviet period; it has since been reopened as a convent. He is commemorated with the saints of the Kostroma land.
Feast and commemoration
May 23 (church date; New Calendar civil May 23, Old Calendar civil June 5) — his repose in 1460. The commemoration is Russian, kept also by the Orthodox Church in America; it is not in the Greek or Antiochian books. On the Russian calendars he stands on a day already heavy with northern commemorations — the uncovering of the relics of Leontius and Isaiah of Rostov, the Synaxis of the Saints of Rostov and Yaroslavl, and Euphrosyne of Polotsk — and his own celebration is chiefly local, at Galich and in the Kostroma diocese, together with the feasts of the Ovinovskaya icon.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable one)
By a flood of tears thou didst make the barren desert fruitful, and by thy sighing from the depths thou didst bring forth fruit a hundredfold in labours; thou becamest a beacon, shining upon the world by miracles, O Paisius our father. Intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.
Kontakion — Tone 8
Seventy years thou didst not leave thy monastery, but as the wars of princes laid it waste thou didst build it up again; and bearing the image of the Mother of God to the great city thou broughtest back peace to thy brethren. Wherefore at thy falling asleep the house was filled with fragrance, O venerable father Paisius, intercessor for the land of Galich.
Original translation from the Slavonic
Iconography
Paisius is painted as a Russian venerable father and abbot: full length, in the monastic mantle and koukoulion or with the head bare, a long grey or white beard, one hand raised in blessing or held at the breast and the other holding a scroll — sometimes inscribed with a monastic admonition — or an abbot's staff. His distinguishing attributes, where an iconographer gives him any, are the Ovinovskaya icon of the Dormition held before him or shown in the upper corner of the panel, and the monastery on the hill above the lake, the Paisiev-Uspensky house, set beside his feet in the manner of the Russian founder-saints. He appears in the composition of the Synaxis of the Saints of Kostroma.
No storable image is held for this entry. A search of Wikimedia Commons for both the Latin and the Russian forms of his name returned nothing at all — neither an icon nor a print — and no pre-1900 or otherwise public-domain image of him has been located; the Russian illustrated Lives of the Saints of 1903–1911, which supplies engraved figures for three of the other saints of this day, does not include him.
Disputed questions
The chronology of the embassy. The received account cannot easily be assembled as it stands. Dmitry Shemyaka held Galich from 1433 and died in 1453; Metropolitan Jonah held the see of Moscow from 1448 to 1461; and Shemyaka was for most of that overlap Vasily II's open enemy, deposing and blinding him in 1446. An embassy sent by Shemyaka and received warmly by Vasily II with Metropolitan Jonah therefore fits only a narrow and improbable window — most plausibly the brief reconciliation of 1447–1448, or else the notice has compressed two separate journeys, or has attached the wrong prince's name to a mission actually made after Shemyaka's fall. This entry reports the tradition and flags the difficulty rather than smoothing it.
"More than seventy years in the monastery" is likewise a hagiographical round number that does not sit with the birth-date of about 1390 given in the reference literature; see above.
Not to be confused with Paisius of Uglich (June 6), the abbot of the Protection monastery at Uglich, nor with Paisius Velichkovsky (November 15) — nor with the several other Russian Paisii. Nor should Galich Mersky in the Kostroma lands, where this saint lived, be confused with Galich (Halych) in the south-west, the capital of the Galician principality.