Alexis of Moscow

Saint Alexis, metropolitan of Kyiv and all Rus, shepherded the Russian Church from 1354 to 1378 and in fact led the government of Moscow during the minority of the grand prince Dmitry Donskoy. He is honoured as a protector of Moscow and a wonderworker.

He was born in Moscow between 1292 and 1305, with the name Eleutherius (in some sources Simeon), the son of the boyar Fyodor Byakont, from Chernigov, and Maria. The family gave Moscow several boyar lines, among them the Pleshcheevs. Tradition says that as a child he once fell asleep while hunting birds and heard a voice: Alexis, why do you labour in vain? I will make you a fisher of men. He was tonsured at the Epiphany monastery in Moscow around 1313, with the name Alexis. Around 1333 he entered the household of Metropolitan Theognostus, and in 1340 was named his deputy at Vladimir. On 6 December 1352 he was consecrated bishop of Vladimir, and in 1354, after visiting Constantinople, Patriarch Philotheus established him metropolitan of Kyiv and all Rus.

By the will of Grand Prince Simeon the Proud he was adviser to his brothers Ivan and Andrew, and later spiritual guide and regent of the young Dmitry Donskoy and Vladimir the Brave. With wisdom and gentleness, but also firmness, he kept the peace and strengthened the grand principality of Vladimir in the hands of the Muscovite princes; in Dmitry's struggle with Tver and Nizhny Novgorod he sent Saint Sergius of Radonezh to suspend the services in churches and monasteries until the strife ended. To calm the khan's anger and to ask protection for the Russian land, he went twice to the Golden Horde. In 1357, summoned by Khan Jani Beg, he healed the khan's mother, Taidula, of blindness; it is said that this spared Moscow an invasion. In the 1360s he founded the Andronikov, Chudov and Alekseyevsky monasteries, in 1366 began the white-⁠stone Kremlin, and worked for the canonisation of Metropolitan Peter. He also wrote sermons and epistles. Toward the end of his life he tried in vain to persuade Saint Sergius of Radonezh to be his successor.

He fell asleep on 12 February 1378, in the Chudov monastery, at the age of nearly eighty-⁠five according to tradition. He was canonised fifty years later; his relics were found in 1431 in the Chudov monastery and moved several times. Since 1947 they rest in the Epiphany cathedral in Yelokhovo, in Moscow. His sisters, Abbess Juliana and the nun Euphrasia, founders of the Conception monastery in Moscow, are also venerated as saints. Saint Alexis is the patron of the patriarchs of Moscow. His feasts are on 12 February (repose), 20 May (discovery of the relics) and 5 October (Synaxis of the Hierarchs of Moscow).