Alipia of Goloseevo

Alipia of Goloseevo (in the world Agapia Tikhonovna Avdeeva) was an Orthodox nun of Kyiv, known for her austere life of ascetic struggle and for the veneration she enjoyed among the faithful of the city. Our sources give her birth as 1905, while our calendar gives 1910, and they agree that she died on 30 October 1988. Our sources show no canonization and no feast in the menaion: her veneration, as far as we read here, is that of the faithful people.

Childhood and wanderings

She was born in the Penza province, to the simple peasant Christian family of Tikhon and Vasya Avdeev. As a child she did not speak Russian. In 1918 she was left an orphan. According to one version of the story, she fell into a unit of Budyonny's army, and the commander, moved by the girl's tears, personally signed an order allowing her to leave. After two years Agapia set out on pilgrimage to holy places.

It is known that in the 1920s and 1930s she was imprisoned, on charges connected with a "religious" article in the Odesa region, and was sentenced to be shot, but she managed to escape. During the Second World War she was taken to forced labour in Germany, from which she fled. She reached Kyiv on foot and lived with a large family in the village of Kapitanivka, in the Kyiv-⁠Sviatoshyn district.

The Lavra and the tree

She was received at the Kyiv Caves Lavra, reopened by the Germans in 1942, and lived there until it was closed in 1961. Her spiritual father was Archimandrite Kronid, the vicar of the Lavra, who gave her the name Alipia at her tonsure. One source says he also blessed her for the labour of the pillar. From 1951 to 1954 she spent her time in the open air, in the hollow of an old linden tree. Archimandrite Kronid fell asleep in 1954, and the schemamonk Damian took over her guidance.

On her back she always wore an icon of the holy martyr Agatha, whose name she had borne before her tonsure.

Her last years

After the closing of the Lavra, in 1961, she lived on Holosiivska street and began to attend the church of the Ascension of the Lord at Demiivka in Kyiv, where she went until the end of her life. In 1979 the wall of the house where she lived began to collapse. Through the efforts of those who revered her, a small room was found and fitted up among the ruins of the Goloseevo monastery, on Pustynska street, and she lived there until her death.

She fell asleep on Sunday, 30 October 1988, and was buried in the Lisove cemetery, on a plot given to the Florovsky monastery in Podil. On 18 May 2006 her remains were solemnly moved from the cemetery and placed in a sarcophagus in the crypt beneath the main church of the Goloseevo Hermitage. The Serbian text says instead that these were her mother's remains, but the Ukrainian source refers to Mother Alipia herself, as she is customarily called.