Alexander of Vochsk

Venerable Alexander of Vochsk (Alexander of Galich) was a Russian hegumen of the second half of the fourteenth century and the first quarter of the fifteenth. He is a saint of the Russian Church, venerated among the venerable. His commemoration is, by the old calendar, on 23 January, in the Synaxis of the Saints of Kostroma, and on 30 August.

Alexander is considered the founder of the Transfiguration monastery at the confluence of the river Veksa with the river Vocha. The first written mentions of the monastery date from 1533, when Alexander was already dead. No information about his life has survived; a few brief reports are known from the service to him, written in the sixteenth century. It says that Alexander received tonsure at the Resurrection monastery of Soligalich and was a conversation partner of Venerable Abraham of Galich.

The exact time of Alexander's canonization is not known; local veneration began from the end of the sixteenth century, when a service was composed for him. In various charters of the seventeenth century Alexander is called saint, venerable and wonderworker. His ancient icons have not survived; a description of the eighteenth century says: his image, in a stone chamber, is like Zosima of Solovki, with a narrower beard, in monastic vestments, with the schema on his shoulders.

The relics of Venerable Alexander lay under the ground in the monastery founded by him. In 1764 the monastery was suppressed and made a parish church. The Transfiguration cathedral built over his tomb was closed in the 1930s and then destroyed, but the relics of the saint were not uncovered. Local veneration of Alexander of Vochsk ceased, for unknown reasons, in the 1830s. In 1981 his canonization was confirmed by entering his name in the Synaxis of the Saints of Kostroma, for veneration throughout the Church.