Serapion of Kozheozero
Our Venerable Father Serapion, Founder of the Monastery of the Theophany on Lake Kozhe
Venerable · b. a Kazan Tatar prince, before 1540 — d. 27 June 1611, at Kozheozero
Commemorated 27 June — Repose at the monastery of Kozheozero
Serapion was a Tatar prince of Kazan, born Turtas Gravirovich, who was taken to Moscow after the campaigns of the 1550s, was baptised there with the name Sergius, and became — in one of the more remarkable conversions in the Russian record — a monk of the far northern forests. About 1560 he found the hermit Niphon living alone on a peninsula in Lake Kozhe, in the Kargopol country beyond the Onega, joined him, was tonsured Serapion, and after Niphon's death in Moscow held the little community together through famine, obtained from Tsar Theodore Ioannovich in 1584 the charter that gave it land, and from Patriarch Job the antimensia for its two churches. He governed nearly thirty years, resigned in 1608, and reposed on 27 June 1611, leaving forty monks where he had found one hermit.
Turtas Gravirovich, prince of Kazan
He was born a murza — a prince of the Tatar nobility — of the khanate of Kazan, and bore the name Turtas Gravirovich. He came into Russian hands as a captive: the received account places this in 1551, in the fighting that preceded the fall of Kazan to Ivan IV, and has him carried to Moscow and given into the household of the boyar Zachariah Plescheev.
Captives of his rank were commonly baptised and married into the Muscovite service nobility, and a formal, politic conversion would have been the ordinary outcome. His was not that. He received holy baptism with the name Sergius, and the sources are unanimous that he took it in earnest: he lived in the boyar's house as a Christian in fact, and after some years asked to be released from the world altogether.
Lake Kozhe and the hermit Niphon
About 1560 he went north — to the immense forest and lake country between the Onega and the White Sea, then the great school of Russian solitaries. On a wooded peninsula running into Lake Kozhe (Kozheozero) he found a hermit named Niphon living alone, and asked to stay. Niphon received him.
The two lived as strict anchorites, and the account of their diet — grass and berries — is neither rhetoric nor exaggeration in that country, where nothing is grown and everything must be carried in. When his novitiate was finished Sergius was tonsured by Niphon with the name Serapion.
The gathering of a brotherhood
Word of them travelled, as it always did, and men came to share the life. What had been two hermits became a settlement with a rule, and then a monastery in need of the things monasteries need: land, a legal title, and a church.
After something like eighteen years of the solitary life, Niphon set out for Moscow to petition for a grant of land — and died there, without having obtained it. The community, left without their elder and without provision, came near to starving; and it was Serapion who went out, procured grain and a millstone, and brought them back to the lake, so that there was bread.
The charter, the patriarch, and the two churches
When the news of Niphon's death reached him, Serapion himself travelled to Moscow. He obtained from Tsar Theodore Ioannovich a charter dated 30 September 1584, granting the monastery the land for four versts in every direction from the settlement; the metropolitan gave his blessing for the foundation; and the Patriarch Job — the first patriarch of Moscow — gave two antimensia, that is, authority to consecrate two altars.
With these Serapion built the monastery proper: a church of the Holy Theophany, which gave the house its name, and a church of Saint Nicholas, the patron of every northern water. He cleared forest for arable, fenced the ground against the beasts, and set the community on the footing it kept for the next two centuries.
Resignation and repose
In 1608, being old, he laid down the government and appointed Abramius igumen in his place, remaining in the house as a simple monk. He reposed on 27 June 1611, at a great age, leaving forty brethren. In 1613 the monk Bogolep of the same monastery wrote the account of the foundation and of Serapion's life on which everything above depends.
His relics rested in the monastery church. The Kozheozersky Theophany monastery afterwards became one of the notable houses of the Russian north — the future Patriarch Nikon lived in it as a hermit in the 1640s before his rise — and though it was suppressed and refounded more than once, and reduced to ruin in the twentieth century, the memory of its founder has been kept continuously in the northern calendars and is now general in the Russian Church.
Feast and commemoration
June 27 (church date; New Calendar civil June 27, Old Calendar civil July 10), the day of his repose, kept in the Russian Church and by the Orthodox Church in America; he is also numbered among the saints of Novgorod and among the northern founders commemorated in the local synaxes of the Arkhangelsk country. The day is dominated in the general calendar by Sampson the Hospitable; Serapion is kept with the common of a venerable father. June 27 falls in most years within the window of the Apostles' Fast, whose beginning is movable; no seasonal note is asserted here.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable father)
In thee, O Father, that which is according to the image was preserved exactly: for taking up the cross, thou didst follow Christ, and by thy deeds didst teach us to despise the flesh, for it passeth away, but to care for the soul, a thing immortal; wherefore thy spirit rejoiceth with the angels, O venerable Serapion.
Original translation from the Slavonic
Iconography
Serapion takes the northern Russian founder's type: an aged monk, long grey beard, in the schema and mantle, hands raised in prayer or holding a scroll, often shown standing beside or holding a model of the Theophany church of Kozheozero with the lake and its dark forest behind. In composite icons of the saints of the Russian north he stands among the Kargopol and Onega founders. Some later Russian images give him with Niphon, the two hermits together before the first cell.
No pre-1900 icon of Serapion has been located for this collection; searches of Wikimedia Commons under his Russian name returned nothing at all, and the surviving images from the monastery, which was ruined in the Soviet period, are not accessible in a form whose licensing can be established. His feast being in June, the Menologion of Basil II (September–February) contains nothing for him, and as a seventeenth-century Russian saint he would not appear in it in any case.
Disputed questions
- His Tatar name. It is transmitted as Turtas Gravirovich in the English sources and in various Russian spellings (Туртас, Турсас); the patronymic form is a Russian scribe's accommodation of a Tatar name, and no independent record of the man before his baptism has been identified.
- The year of his capture. The received date is 1551, a year before the fall of Kazan; some accounts put him among the captives of 1552 itself. The Life gives no date, and the figure comes from later compilers.
- How long with Niphon? The account gives "nearly eighteen years" of the two-man hermitage before Niphon's journey to Moscow, which sits awkwardly with an arrival about 1560 and a charter in 1584 sought after Niphon was already dead. The chronology of the Life is approximate throughout and is not forced into consistency here.
- Not to be confused with Serapion of Novgorod (archbishop, †1516), Serapion the Sindonite, or Serapion of Thmuis — nor with the several other northern Russian founders of the same name.