Galaktion of Vologda

Venerable Galaktion of Vologda was a hermit and recluse who lived in Vologda and was killed by Lithuanians in 1612, in the Time of Troubles. According to his life, he was born in Moscow in 1535 in the family of the Belsky princes. He is venerated as a saint by the people, especially at the Holy Spirit Monastery in Vologda, and is commemorated on 24 September.

Origins

His life relates that he was born in the capital, Moscow, and was the son of Prince John Ivanovich Belsky, whom Ivan the Terrible is said to have ordered put to death. Many scholars consider him the son of Prince Ivan Fyodorovich Belsky, ousted by the Shuisky in 1542, while the compiler of the life in the Russian Menaion Readings thinks that prince was the saint's grandfather. Even at the end of the seventeenth century no firm view of his origin was ventured in Vologda, and the historian Golubinsky calls him an ascetic and recluse of Vologda of obscure origin. Even his secular name is uncertain: he is usually called Gabriel, but there are also grounds for George.

Life

According to the life, in 1542, when the Belsky princes were persecuted, relatives and benefactors hid Gabriel, then seven, in the town of Staritsa. From there he went secretly to Vologda and became an apprentice to a leather worker. When grown, he took a wife from simple people and had a daughter. Widowed, and after raising his daughter, he gave himself to ascetic labours.

He asked the townspeople for a small place near the settlement on the river Sodima and settled there in a small cell. He took monastic vows with the name Galaktion, as some scholars believe on the evidence of manuscripts, at the Saints Boris and Gleb Monastery in Rostov, and was a disciple of the famous recluse of Rostov, Venerable Irinarkh, whom he imitated in his labours. According to Veryuzhsky he was also certainly a priest. He was marked by strict abstinence, wore a hair shirt and chains, and shut himself away entirely in his cell, even chaining himself with an iron chain to the ceiling beam.

The people of Vologda held him in great respect. In the interregnum he called the city to repentance and urged it to build beside his cell a church of the Sign of the Mother of God, but the building was prevented by a rich townsman, Nechai Shchelkunov.

His end

On 22 September 1612 Lithuanians who had attacked Vologda found him in his cell and beat him without mercy, cut him with swords and finally struck him on the head with a piece of wood, leaving him barely alive. He fell asleep on 24 September 1612 and was buried beside his cell. The small hermitage on the river Sodemka became a place of veneration. First a church of the Sign was built, and in 1654, with money given by Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich, the church of the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit men's monastery.

Veneration

In the seventeenth century the question of examining his relics and numbering him among the saints was raised several times. Archbishop Gabriel found his coffin in the ground whole and untouched by corruption, but no reliable information about his life was found and some miracles proved unclear. Patriarch Adrian wrote in 1691 that he did not order the relics taken up and forbade their glorification in church, since it was not fitting to honour one whose holiness was not certainly known. Nevertheless, in 1717 a service in his honour was composed, and by the end of the nineteenth century he was already venerated as a saint without formal canonization, and a side chapel was made for him in the church of the Sign at the Holy Spirit Monastery.

His relics lie on the lower floor of the church of the Sign, beneath a silvered copper shrine with his image. Beside it are kept his heavy chains, his paramand, his cap and his chain. The words carved on the paramand are: the servant of God Gabriel, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, promised to endure to the end.