Sophronius of Irkutsk

Stephen Kristalevsky

He was born Stephen (Stepan) Nazarievich Kristalevsky on 25 December 1703 in the Poltava country of Left-Bank Ukraine, into a family of the service gentry; a brother of his likewise became a monk, and the household is remembered for a piety that pushed both sons the same way. He was schooled at the Pereyaslav seminary, at that time one of the better Ukrainian schools, and it is from the Kievan academic world that he brought the training in Latin, rhetoric and theology which marked the whole generation of Ukrainian churchmen whom the imperial Synod deployed across Great Russia and Siberia through the eighteenth century.

In 1730 he was tonsured at the Protection monastery of the Red Mountain (Krasnogorsky, near Zolotonosha) with the name Sophronius, and in 1732 he was ordained deacon and then priest in the cathedral of Holy Wisdom at Kiev. He served in the administration of his monastery, and in 1742 was transferred to the Alexander Nevsky Lavra at St Petersburg, the empire's chief monastic house and the antechamber of every episcopal appointment; by 1746 he was its treasurer and then its namestnik — its resident superior under the absentee archimandrite. There he came to the notice of the Synod, and in 1753, on 18 April, the Empress Elizabeth's decree named him Bishop of Irkutsk and Nerchinsk.

The Siberian diocese

He was consecrated at St Petersburg and set out across Russia; he reached Irkutsk on 20 March 1754, nearly a year on the road. What he found was a diocese in the strict sense unmanageable: it ran from the Yenisei to the Pacific and from the Mongolian frontier to the Arctic, with a few dozen churches, a clergy largely untaught, exiled populations, native peoples — Buryats, Tungus, Yakuts — only partly evangelised, and the perpetual eighteenth-century Siberian problems of drink, absenteeism and the sale of offices.

His policy was schooling and visitation. He gave the Irkutsk seminary the shape it kept for a century, insisting that candidates for ordination be taught before they were ordained, and drawing teachers from Kiev; he ordained sparingly and deposed where he had to; he built and consecrated churches; and he travelled — to Nerchinsk on the Chinese frontier, to Kirensk on the Lena, and as far as Yakutsk. He encouraged the missions among the Buryats and the northern peoples, continuing the work of his predecessor Innocent of Irkutsk, and pressed the Synod repeatedly (and without success) for a suffragan and for the resources such a territory required. Contemporaries describe an ascetic private life kept up inside a bishop's palace: a short sleep, long prayer, and a table that gave nothing away.

Repose, and six months unburied

He asked more than once to be released from the see, and was not. He died on 30 March 1771, in the Paschal season — the sources place his repose on the second day of Pascha — and here the peculiar circumstance arose that made him a saint of the Russian calendar. The Holy Synod, consulted about the funeral and the succession, did not answer; and by the custom of the time the body of a bishop could not be interred until the direction came. It lay in the cathedral for six months, through the Siberian summer, and did not corrupt. The people of Irkutsk drew their own conclusion, and the veneration began at once, without any encouragement from the authorities and, for a century and a half, without their approval.

Relics, examinations, and the fire of 1917

The Synod's chronic suspicion of unauthorised cults meant that the shrine at the Theophany Cathedral in Irkutsk was inspected repeatedly. Formal examinations of the relics in 1833, 1854, 1870 and 1909 each reported them incorrupt, and each was accompanied by depositions of healings; the file grew, and the diocese petitioned for glorification through the reigns of three emperors.

On 18 April 1917, between the February revolution and the October one, the cathedral caught fire. The shrine was destroyed and of the saint's body only the bones remained. The effect on the veneration was the opposite of what might have been expected: what had rested on the physical incorruption now rested on the testimony of a century and a half of miracles, and the petitions redoubled.

Glorification, 1918

The Local Council of the Russian Orthodox Church of 1917–1918 — the council that restored the patriarchate — took up the case and in April 1918 decreed his canonisation. The glorification was celebrated at Irkutsk on 30 June 1918, in the first summer of the civil war, and the proper troparion was composed for it by Archbishop John (Smirnov) of Irkutsk with the blessing of Patriarch Tikhon. It was one of the last acts of the free Russian Church for seventy years. The relics themselves disappeared into the museum collections of the Soviet period; the anniversaries were nevertheless kept, in 1958 for the fortieth year of the glorification and in 1971 for the second centenary of the repose, for which Metropolitan Nestor (Anisimov), himself an old Siberian missionary, composed additional prayers.