Joachim of Korsun

Saint Joachim of Korsun was the first bishop of Novgorod, shepherding the city from about 989 until 1030. The chronicles tie him to the time of the baptism of Rus, and the Church remembers him as the one who laid the foundation of the Christian faith in the north of the land.

His name suggests that he came from Cherson (Korsun in Slavic), the Byzantine city in Crimea. Almost nothing is known of his early life. One chronicle calls him "Archbishop Akim of Korsun". By tradition he arrived in Novgorod in 989, although some chronicles give 992 and another gives 988.

According to the chronicles, when he reached Novgorod he overthrew the pagan shrines and cast the idol of Perun into the river Volkhov. The Peryn Monastery later rose on the spot where the idol had stood. He also built the city's first cathedral, a wooden church of Holy Wisdom raised on the site of a pagan burial ground. The sources give it twelve or thirteen domes, and it burned in 1045. He further built the stone church of Saints Joachim and Anna, named for his patron saints, and some sources say that in 998 he founded a monastery called the Desyatinny or Sophia monastery.

Very little is certain about his years as bishop. A text known as the Joachim Chronicle, preserved only in the eighteenth-⁠century history of Vasily Tatishchev, was long ascribed to him and gives detailed accounts of the uprooting of paganism at Novgorod. Scholars now regard that attribution as highly doubtful and consider the work a later compilation. In the nineteenth century he was also thought to be the author of the oldest part of the First Novgorod Chronicle, but the studies of A. A. Shakhmatov showed that this too was a mistake.

He remained on the see for about forty-⁠two years. When he reposed in 1030, his disciple Ephrem administered the diocese until the arrival of Luke Zhidiata. The saint was buried in the church of Saints Joachim and Anna, and his relics were later moved into the stone cathedral of Holy Wisdom. His image is kept in the altar of that cathedral, on the wall, as the first of the bishops of Novgorod.

Saint Joachim is venerated in the Russian Church as a locally honoured saint. His feast is kept on 10 February with the Synaxis of the Novgorod hierarchs, and also at the Synaxis of Novgorod saints on the third Sunday after Pentecost. His inclusion in this synaxis, when its celebration was renewed in 1981, is regarded as his canonization.