Basil of Kashin

Righteous Vasily of Kashin (Kozhin, † c. 1419-1421), a boyar of Tver, was the father of Venerable Makarios of Kalyazin and the husband of the righteous Irina. He has been venerated as a local saint in the Tver diocese since the twentieth century, entered in the Synaxis of All Saints Who Shone Forth in the Russian Land; he is commemorated on 1 June.

Vasily Ananievich Kozhin came from a boyar family of Tver. Dosithei Toporkov, in the Joseph-⁠Volokolamsk Paterikon, calls Makarios "a great Tver boyar" and names the Tver boyar Zacharias Borozdin as a relative. The historian S. B. Veselovsky regarded the Kozhin family as landholders of middling size. Brief news of him is found in the Life of Venerable Makarios of Kalyazin and in a biographical note written from the account of his relative, the nun Euphrosyne. With his wife Irina he had four children: Matthew (Venerable Makarios), Alexander, Gregory and Xenia. Alexander continued the family; Gregory (Gennady) was archimandrite of the Otroch Monastery in Tver and, in 1461-1477, bishop of Tver; Xenia married Ivan Gavrenev, and their son Pavel became a monk, Venerable Paisius of Uglich. About 1420 Matthew entered the monastery, and a year earlier or a little before, his parents died. Each year on 1 June Venerable Makarios came to his native village and served a memorial service for his parents. After his repose the abbots of the Kalyazin monastery made a procession to Kozhino on this day. In 1610 the monastery was devastated by the Poles; Abbot Anthony, who rebuilt it, wished to end the memorial services, but a descendant, Ivan Vasilievich Kozhin, appealed to Patriarch Filaret, who ordered by a special charter that the archimandrite serve a memorial service and Liturgy at Kozhino, in the church where Makarios's parents are buried. The services resumed in 1632.

Local tradition, which contradicts the Life of Makarios, says that Vasily fought against Prince Dmitry Shemyaka and that in 1450, pursuing him, he killed his horse and cut a piece of its skin, whence the nickname Koza (skin) and then the family name Kozhin; but the charter of grant of that year has been proved forged. In 1732, at Kozhino, in place of the old church, a stone church of the Nativity of the Mother of God was built, and the grave of the parents and the wife of Makarios received a wooden covering. In the church an icon of the Nativity of the Mother of God of 1512 was kept. Today only a half-⁠ruined church and part of the cemetery remain in the former village of Kozhino.

The local canonization of Vasily and his wife Irina took place at the beginning of the twentieth century, when Archbishop Demetrius Sambikin of Tver entered them in the "Alphabetical List of Locally Venerated Saints of the Tver Diocese." Later they were included in the Synaxis of All Saints Who Shone Forth in the Russian Land.