George of Novgorod

Blessed George of Novgorod, a fool for Christ, called Budilov, lived in the fifteenth century and is honoured in the Shenkursk land and on the Vaga. The reports about him are in his life, composed about the middle of the seventeenth century, according to the author, many years after the blessed one's death.

George was born in a peasant family in the village of Yaropoli, in the Velikonikolaevsk parish, near the town of Shenkursk. After the death of his parents he gave himself to the service of God and took on the struggle of foolishness for Christ. He wore a foul and torn garment, roamed the forest through impassable places and avoided people, wearing down his body with fasting, thirst, heat and the cold of rain and snow. It is told that he often went to the churchyard of the church of Saint Nicholas and to a hill among marshes, a poprishche, that is, about a kilometre and a half from the church. Feeling that his death was near, he left the command that he be buried on that hill and prophesied that soon a church would be raised near there. So it happened: it seems that at the beginning of the sixteenth century, because of the danger of flooding by the river Vaga, the church of Saint Nicholas was moved to a place not far from the saint's grave. The Life gives no exact time of George's life and death, but a later work states that the blessed one passed to the Lord around the year 1450.

The greatest part of the Life describes ten posthumous miracles, wrought at prayers to the saint; the author testifies that the blessed one often delivered him too, the unworthy, from troubles and illnesses. The first miracle is about the saint's foretelling of the near death of the grand prince's governor in the Vaga land, Prince M. V. Khvorostina, on 22 March 1514. The ninth miracle is dated 1640, so the Life was composed at about that time. It seems that, with the moving of the church, the finding of George's incorrupt relics took place, in the first part of the sixteenth century, before 1514, after which they were buried again. By order of the governor there a chapel with a stone tomb was raised over the grave. In 1716 the parishioners petitioned Archbishop Barnabas of Kholmogory for the moving of the chapel and the grave because of the danger of the bank being washed away; the archbishop ordered the moving and the consecration. By the 1880s the chapel no longer existed and the place of burial had been lost.

His veneration is witnessed by the Praise of Venerable Procopius of Ustyug, of the sixteenth century, which says that in the northern country, on the river Vaga, they bless and glorify George, the fool for Christ. In the calendars of the Old Believers he appears on 3 November and on 22 April, as George the fool of the Vaga, and on 23 April as George of Shenkursk. With the blessing of Bishop Alexander of Arkhangelsk (1890-1893) he was commemorated in the churches of Shenkursk at every dismissal. His canonization was confirmed by the entering of his name in the Synaxis of the Saints of Novgorod, the celebration of which was renewed in 1981. The blessed one is commemorated on 11 July, a movable day.