Tikhon of Krestogorsk
Our Venerable Father Tikhon of Krestogorsk, founder of the hermitage on the Vokhma
Venerable · d. second half of the 17th century, on the Vokhma
Commemorated 16 June — Kept in the Vologda calendar and in the synaxis of the saints of Vologda
Tikhon of Krestogorsk — also called Tikhon of Vokhma — was a monastic of the far north-east of the Vologda country in the second half of the seventeenth century, who in 1679 founded the Krestogorsk hermitage on the river Vokhma, some sixty versts from Nikolsk, at the place called the Cross Hill from which the house took its name. The hermitage was always poor and held almost no land; it was reduced to a parish church in the reforms of 1764, and the parish endured for another eighty-five years. Of the founder himself almost nothing survives beyond the fact of the foundation. He is commemorated on June 16 in the Vologda calendar and in the synaxis of the saints of Vologda; his name is absent from the general Russian menologia, and it is Metropolitan Evgeny (Bolkhovitinov), the compiler of the Vologda hagiography, who secured his place among the saints of that land.
The Vokhma is a northern river of the watershed between the Sukhona and the Vetluga, in a country of forest and scattered villages that lay in the Vologda diocese and belongs administratively today to the Kostroma region. In this remote place, in 1679, a monk named Tikhon established a small hermitage on the height called Krestogorye, the Cross Hill — sixty versts from the town of Nikolsk, in the phrase of the diocesan records. It is the one firm date attached to him.
Of his origins, his tonsure, the length of his life, the manner of his repose and the place of his burial, nothing has been transmitted. Neither has any narrative of miracles, and no uncovering of relics is recorded. The hermitage he made was among the poorest in the diocese; it possessed very little arable, subsisted on the offerings of a thin population, and passed through the hands of a succession of superiors whose names the diocesan lists preserve better than they preserve his. The monastic reform of 1764, which suppressed the smaller and unendowed houses across Russia, closed it and turned its church into a parish church, which served the surrounding villages for a further eighty-five years.
His commemoration on June 16 is plainly of a piece with the rest of the day: the name Tikhon carried it there, to the feast of Tychon of Amathus, beside the other Russian Tikhons.
Feast and commemoration
June 16 (church date; Old Calendar civil June 29). Vologda usage: the diocesan calendar and the synaxis of the saints of Vologda (kept on the third Sunday after Pentecost, a movable commemoration, where the whole company of that land is named together). He does not appear in the general Russian, Greek or Antiochian enumerations of June 16.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of a monastic saint)
A dweller of the wilderness and an angel in the body wast thou shown to be, O God-bearing Father Tikhon: by fasting, vigil and prayer thou didst receive heavenly gifts, and thou healest the sick and the souls of them that run to thee with faith. Glory to him who gave thee strength, glory to him who crowned thee, glory to him who works healings through thee for all.
Iconography
No individual iconography of Tikhon of Krestogorsk is known, and no image of him has been located for this collection. Where the synaxis of the saints of Vologda is painted — a crowded composition in which the whole company of that land stands in ranks around the Theotokos or the Saviour, each figure named in a small inscription — a founder of his kind would take his place among the lesser monastic figures of the lower rows, an elder in the black habit and mantle with a scroll, distinguished only by his caption. A hermitage-founder's icon would ordinarily add the wooden church on its hill; nothing of the sort has survived the closure of 1764.
Disputed questions
- A saint of one diocese only. Tikhon of Krestogorsk is absent from the general Russian menologia and from the calendars of the Moscow Patriarchate, the OCA and the Greek Churches; he is entered in the Vologda lists and in the synaxis of the saints of Vologda. The weight of his commemoration rests on Metropolitan Evgeny (Bolkhovitinov) (†1837), the historian of the Vologda diocese, who included him in his roll of the saints of that land — a serious authority for a local cultus, but one authority. The entry is written on that footing, and the day's other Tikhons should not be adjusted to accommodate him.
- A wonderworker? Some derivative lists style him a wonderworker. Nothing in the diocesan record supports it, and no miracle is transmitted; the type given here is simply venerable.
- Which Tikhon. He is the third of the Russian Tikhons of June 16, with Tikhon of Kaluga (†1492) and Tikhon of Lukhov (†1503) — three distinct monastic founders of three different centuries, all named for the fifth-century Cypriot bishop whose day it is. He is not Tikhon of Zadonsk, bishop of Voronezh (August 13, †1783), nor Tikhon (Bellavin), Patriarch of Moscow (†1925), nor the new-hieromartyr Tikhon (Nikanorov) of Voronezh (†1919).