Evdokia of Suzdal

Holy Blessed Evdokia of Suzdal, a fool for Christ, was born not later than the first quarter of the eighteenth century in Suzdal and died on 22 December 1776. Information about her is very scant.

From 1726 she laboured in the Euphrosyne Monastery in Suzdal, dedicated to the Deposition of the Robe of the Mother of God at Blachernae. According to the accounts of contemporaries, living as a fool for Christ, she often struck her head with a wooden stick or a stone. On a portrait kept until 1923 in the abbot's quarters of the monastery, Evdokia is shown with a piece of stick in her hand, and on her head, above the brow, two lumps are visible.

She was buried behind the altar of the cathedral of the Monastery of Saint Basil the Great in Suzdal. At the burial place, the ascetic's venerators often served memorial services, and in 1825 a stone monument with an iron roof crowned with a cross was erected. According to the abbot of the Saint Basil monastery, Modest, in Suzdal there was almost no commemoration book in which the name of Evdokia of Suzdal was not written, and in the city's churches no memorial liturgy was held in which the name of this fool was not proclaimed several times.

In 1982, on the initiative of Archbishop Serapion of Vladimir and Suzdal, the Synaxis of the Saints of Vladimir was established, on 23 June, the day of the honouring of the Vladimir icon of the Mother of God, in which Evdokia of Suzdal is also included. The ascetic is depicted on the icon of the Synaxis of the Saints of Suzdal of the end of the twentieth century. She is commemorated on 6 July, in the Synaxis of the Saints of Vladimir.