Xenia of Petersburg

Origins and marriage

Almost nothing is known with certainty of Xenia's birth and childhood, and the sources give her dates only within a wide range — she was born, most reckon, between about 1719 and 1730, in or near Saint Petersburg, and bore the patronymic Grigorievna, so that her father's name was Gregory. She grew to womanhood in the young capital of Peter the Great, and married Andrei Feodorovich Petrov, a singer of the imperial court choir attached, the tradition says, to the cathedral of Saint Andrew the First-Called on Vasilievsky Island. The sources differ over his rank in the service: some style him colonel, others (the OCA life among them) major, the title attaching to his place in the court establishment rather than to any soldiering; all agree that he was a chorister — a pevchy — and that the couple lived in modest comfort in the parish of Saint Andrew. Xenia was, by every account, devout and devoted; she was about twenty-six years old, and childless, when the whole course of her life was overturned.

The death of Andrei, and the taking of his name

Andrei Feodorovich died suddenly — struck down, the tradition holds, at a gathering, without the Church's last mysteries, unconfessed and uncommuned. For a believing wife of that age this was a grief sharper than bereavement: her husband had passed into eternity unprepared, and the fate of his soul lay, as she understood it, upon her. Out of that grief came a resolution that astonished everyone who knew her, and that the Church has honoured ever since as the beginning of her sanctity. Xenia determined to take her husband's unfinished repentance upon herself — to become, in his place and for his sake, the pauper and the stranger before God.

She gave the house to her friend Paraskeva Antonova, on the sole condition that she shelter the poor; she distributed her money and her goods to the needy; and she went to the authorities to give away what remained, so that her astonished relatives, fearing she had lost her reason, sought to have her restrained — until the physicians and officials who examined her found her, on the contrary, entirely sound of mind. Then, at the funeral, or soon after, she put on Andrei's own clothes — his caftan, his uniform coat of green and red — and when people called her by her name she answered that Xenia was dead, that she herself was Andrei Feodorovich, and that she had only come to bury his wife. From that day she would answer to no other name than her husband's; she had buried her own self with him, and taken up his.

The fool-for-Christ

So began the strangest and longest of ascetic labours. When Andrei's clothing at last wore to rags, Xenia would not exchange it for anything new but kept always to his regimental colours — a green jacket and a red skirt, or the reverse — refusing the warm garments that pitying neighbours pressed on her and going half-clothed through the pitiless winters of the north. She had no home. By day she wandered the streets and squares of the Petersburg Side (the Peterburgskaya storona) and of Vasilievsky Island, about the parish of Saint Andrew that had been her own; she took no money except the occasional copper "king on horseback" (the tsar na kone, a small coin bearing Saint George), which she at once gave away to the poor, and a little bread. She bore in silence the jeers of the street-boys, who threw mud and stones at the "crazy Andrei Feodorovich," and the contempt of those who took her for a madwoman. By night, when the city slept, she went out beyond the houses into the open fields and there prayed until dawn, bowing to the ground toward the four quarters of the earth — a discipline a pious observer once secretly witnessed, and which became known only afterward.

Two traditions of her hidden labours are especially loved. In those years a new stone church was rising over the Smolensk cemetery, and the masons found each morning that their bricks had been carried up, in the night, to the top of the scaffolding — until they kept watch and discovered the blessed Xenia bearing the heavy loads aloft, unseen, for the house of God. And it was observed that wherever she chose to spend her charity or her word, blessing followed: the market-women found that if Xenia took so much as a scrap from a stall, that seller's trade prospered all day, so that they vied to press their wares on her; the cab-drivers held that to carry her even a few yards brought a lucky fare; and mothers begged her to bless their children, believing that a child she touched or fed would thrive.

The gift of prophecy

As the decades passed and her sanctity could no longer be hidden, Xenia became known as a seer. The tradition preserves several of her prophecies, told and retold in the city. On the eve of the Nativity she went through the streets crying, "Bake pancakes! Soon all Russia will bake pancakes!" — the funeral bliny of a great death; the next day the Empress Elizabeth died (1761). To a devout woman named Paraskeva, who had taken her in, she said one day, "You sit here mending, and you don't know that God has sent you a son — go quickly to the Smolensk cemetery"; the startled woman ran there to find that a pregnant woman had just been knocked down and killed by a carriage and had been delivered of a living child, whom Paraskeva took and raised as her own. To a mother who doted on a promising suitor for her daughter Xenia gave a warning that turned the family from a marriage that would have ended in ruin; to another she pointed, in her riddling way, toward the husband God intended. The pattern of these stories is constant: her foolish words, rightly read, were prophecy, and her blessing or her refusal decided marriages, journeys, and fortunes across Petersburg.

Repose

Xenia bore her homeless podvig for forty-five years, and reposed about the year 1803 — some accounts say 1806 — at the age, the tradition reckons, of about seventy-one. She was buried at the Smolensk Orthodox cemetery on Vasilievsky Island, in the very churchyard whose church she had helped to build. From the first the faithful came to her grave; they carried away the earth from the mound for a blessing, so that it had again and again to be renewed, and later even the stone slab laid over it was carried off in fragments by pilgrims. Over the grave a small chapel was raised, rebuilt at the beginning of the twentieth century (1902) as the graceful stone chapel of the Blessed Xenia that stands today.

Veneration and glorification

Through the whole of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth the grave at Smolensk was one of the most frequented holy places of the Russian capital, sought by the poor and the great alike; petitioners wrote their needs on the chapel walls, and an unbroken testimony of answered prayers — for work, for marriage, for the recovery of the sick, for lost children — gathered about her name. The Soviet authorities closed the chapel and at times walled it up, but the stream of pilgrims never wholly ceased; people prayed at its doors and slipped their written petitions through the cracks. The Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia glorified her on 24 September 1978; the Moscow Patriarchate canonised her at the Local Council of 6 June 1988 — the council of the millennium of the Baptism of Rus'. The chapel was restored and reopened in 1987, and Xenia's veneration, always vast in fact, became universal in the calendar. She is honoured as the patroness of Saint Petersburg, and her intercession is sought throughout the Orthodox world — with a particular reputation, born of the stories of her life, for the finding of work, of a spouse, and of a home, and for help in every family distress.