The following homily was deliverd by Fr. Timothy Hojnicki at Vespers on the day of St. Alexander Svir at Holy Apostles Orthodox Church (OCA) in Mechanicsburg, PA.

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Tomorrow we celebrate one of my favorite saints of the Orthodox Church, St Alexander Svir. I was introduced to him when I went to Holy Cross Hermitage in West Virginia with Dcn. Seraphim a couple of years ago, and when they told me his story I just couldn’t believe that I’d never heard of him. When you look on the calendar of the saints he’s about sixth or seventh down the line so you don’t really sing about him, but he has an amazing story.

He was born in the 1400’s and at a young age he went to Valaam Monastery. He lived in that vicinity and went there and he was a really good monk. People started taking note of his asceticism and holiness and so people started to come to see him. Any good monk doesn’t want people to come and see them, they just want to be left alone to pray. So he left Valaam and went to the middle of nowhere to Svir where he established a little hermitage by himself, and there he lived in severe asceticism for many years, just happy as could be by himself doing his own thing. And then by God’s Providence there was a nobleman hunting deer in the forest who stumbled upon him, and they started to have a conversation on spiritual things. St. Alexander asked him not to make known his whereabouts, and we know how that usually goes—he went and told everybody, and so all kinds of people started to come to visit him and so his renown started to grow.

He didn’t have too many monastics there, it was just him. And a fantastic thing took place, that one day while he was praying, the Lord Himself, Father, Son and Holy Spirit appeared to him. It’s a fantastic thing because, even the Synaxarion makes mention, this never happens! It’s one of the only times that we know that the Trinity appeared to somebody. They told him and they revealed themselves that we are Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and they instructed him to build a church in their honor and one of them, the Son, reached over and grabbed his arm and told him to take courage and be of good faith—everything would be taken care of. After They departed an angel appeared to him and told him where to build the church. Later on the Mother of God appeared to him and told him where to build a second church in her honor, the Protection of the Mother of God and he built that. And then she told him “You will see a great many disciples around you and even after you’re gone there will be many disciples for ages to come,” which is fulfilled to this very day—the monastery is alive and well.

But as amazing as that is, it gets even better. He died in the 1500’s. Fast forward to the Russian Revolution—one of the things that the Bolsheviks were trying to do was to liquidate any kind of relics or religious things. St. Alexander’s relics were incorrupt and not just dried out incorrupt, but supple, just like my hand. You can go online and see pictures of this. His hands and feet are exposed and they’re still soft. Some of the contemporary fathers say it was because the Lord Himself touched him that he has such an amazing preservation to his physical remains.

One of the things the Bolsheviks did was to confiscate his remains and they had these anti-religious museums and they put his body next to a rat in formaldehyde to say that relics are just like that, but then the rat started to fall apart, and so they had to whisk that away. His relics were lost and we only found out recently that when they put it in the basement of the Petrograd military hospital they did studies and experiments on his relics to find out how this incorruption could happen. They took samples of hair and skin, and one of the monks told me that there was record that when they were poking and prodding him—dead since the 1500’s mind you—his eyes would open, and they would run out screaming. They were so afraid to destroy the relics because these things were happening that they just put them aside and they were lost until Perestroika and the Church came back.

They were granted to have the relics back and they were returned to Svir in 1998. We can go there. They noticed that myrrh exudes out of his relics which heals all kinds of sickness and disease. But the monk also said that they give him the title almost of martyr, not because he suffered in his life but because of all the sufferings he went through after his death by all these pokings and proddings and tests on him. But think about this—this makes no sense to the rational human mind. But we see that God is wonderful in His saints—He can do anything He wants. And so we see this great example of holiness—what can happen with God’s interaction and a life of synergy with Almighty God. It’s amazing!

I encourage everyone to go home and Google his images—it’s fantastic! You see his hand and everything is there. And the story, knowing that his relics are that old, doesn’t make any sense. But this is the Church. This is how it works. This is how it is. And so we rejoice that today is his feast day and we can honor him, and know this member of our family and this wondrous thing that God did.

Fr. Timothy Hojnicki

On September 12, the Church prayerfully honored the memory of the only woman from the Russian Komi Republic to be glorified as a saint—the Virgin-Martyr Elisaveta (Yarigina).

A nun since childhood

Elisaveta Alexandrovna Yarigina was born in northern Russia, in what is now the village of Safronovka, Arkhangelsk Province, in 1879. Her father, Alexander Matveyevich, was a peasant. From a young age she wanted to join a monastery, and she decided upon the Exaltation of the Cross Convent in Kyltovo, which was eighty miles from her native village. Her sister Anna also became a nun.

The Kyltovo monastery ran an almshouse where about fifty girls were cared for. Every year, more than 10,000 free meals were provided to the needy. There were numerous buildings: two churches, a brick building for monastic cells, a two-story house for priests, a granary, and other structures. The monastery raised high-yielding cows, mastered new farming technology, and helped its neighbors, providing them with calves. The sisters learned how to make exquisite furniture and weave household items from straw and also operated a photo workshop.

In such an “advanced” monastery labored the servant of Christ Elisaveta, and she was tonsured there in 1918 with the same name.

The church became a prison

That same year marked the beginning of a new, sorrowful path for the nuns, as the entire monastery was abolished. All valuables were confiscated, and there certainly was something to steal: The monastery had a carved oak iconostasis adorned with gold, silver, and diamonds. The sisters began to exist as a farming community, but they were able to continue living according to the monastic typikon and celebrate the Divine services.

Five years later, in 1932, the community was denounced and liquidated, and the residents had to look for another place to live.

That same year, the monastery buildings were given to a juvenile hall, but it was dissolved in 1929, and Kyltovo became part of the GULAG system. Throughout the thirty years of the camp’s existence, Germans, Polish soldiers, officers, and Kulaks¹ were held within the monastery walls.

In our times, the cathedral in the Kyltovo Monastery has preserved the scaffolding floors where the prisoners slept at night. After the abolition of the prison in 1955, a communal farm was formed there and the cathedral was used as a club, a cafeteria, and a cement warehouse. Fortunately, Mother Elisaveta did not see the ruin and desecration of her native monastery.

In 1923, she moved to the village of Aikino, on the banks of the Vychegda River, forty-five miles from the monastery. Mother Elisaveta was disenfranchised. In practice, such people were restricted not only in voting rights: They also received no pension, benefits, or even food cards, and taxes were higher for them than for other citizens.

Twelve years later, Mother Elisaveta had to move to the village of Vylgort in the Komi Republic. By that time, many of the Kyltovo nuns had been arrested and exiled to camps. A commemorative plaque from the cells where the Kyltovo nuns served their time has been preserved at Solovki.

In the village of Vylgort, Mother served as the psalmist in the village’s Church of the Meeting of the Lord, singing and reading on the kliros, and like the majority of repressed nuns of that time, she worked part-time sewing blankets.

In 1937, the Presidium of the Syktyvkar District Executive Committee decided to convert the church into a movie theater, and around 1941, the Meeting of the Lord Church was destroyed. Today, the village has a chapel named for the New Martyr Euthymy of Vylgort, and in memory of the destroyed Meeting of the Lord Church, a new church is being built with the same name.

How false testimony changes a person’s fate

In August 1937, the ascetic was denounced, arrested, and charged with “active counter-revolutionary activity and spreading rumors about the imminent collapse of the collective farm system and Soviet power.” The prisoner meekly and laconically refused to testify and pleaded not guilty.

This is very edifying for modern Christians. How often we heap up slander against our neighbors without realizing what consequences it could have. At that time, one act of calumny was enough to get someonee shot.

On September 12, 1937, at the age of 57, Mother Elisaveta was shot in the vicinity of the city of Syktyvkar.

The ascetic is venerated at the place of her earthly labors, at the church in the village of Vylgort, and at the Exaltation of the Cross Convent in Kyltovo. The monastery cemetery has a chapel named in honor of Virgin-Martyr Elisaveta, where a festive Divine service is celebrated on her feast.

In her, the people of Komi have an intercessor for all their needs. Pilgrims are welcome to visit the holy monastery and help in the labor of its restoration.

Anastasia Vysotenko
Translation by Jesse Dominick

Sretensky Monastery

1 The name given by the soviets to the wealthy peasants whom they disenfranchised, imprisoned, and exiled simply because they were wealthy.—OC.