John of Novgorod

Saint John of Novgorod was archbishop of Novgorod from 1165 to 1186. Until 1185 he was called Ilya; John is his name in the great schema. He is venerated as a hierarch and patron of Novgorod and is remembered on 7 September (20 September on the new calendar).

The son of a priest, Ilya was priest of the church of Saint Blaise, south of the Novgorod kremlin. He became known for his works of piety and, after the death of Saint Arkady, the Novgorodians chose him for the episcopal see. In 1165 he was appointed bishop by Metropolitan John of Kyiv and was the first to hold the title of archbishop, a rank that afterwards remained with his successors. He is venerated as patron of Novgorod, through whose prayers the city was saved in February 1170 from the siege by the united armies of the Russian princes. In 1172 he went to Vladimir for peace negotiations with Prince Andrey Bogolyubsky. Together with his brother Gavriil (Grigory in monasticism), who succeeded him as archbishop (1186-1193) and consecrated the Khutyn monastery, he built several churches, among them the church of the Annunciation at Arkazhi, built in 1179 in seventy days, probably for the tenth anniversary of the Novgorodians' victory over the Suzdal army.

In 1185 he took the great schema with the name John and the next year he died, on 7 September 1186. He was buried in the cathedral of Saint Sophia, in the west gallery, next to the porch of the Forerunner, having first been placed under the floor in the Martirievsky porch, where Gavriil lies. His relics were found in 1439, and Archbishop Euthymius ordained a local feast. He was numbered among the saints at the Council of 1547, as a saint of all Russia. The relics were desecrated in the Soviet anti-⁠religious campaigns, on 3 April 1919, and are now in a different sarcophagus, with an effigy of the 1990s.

In medieval literature John is the quintessential archbishop of Novgorod. The most famous tale says that he conquered a devil, forcing it to turn into a horse and carry him to Jerusalem and back in a single night. According to the tale the devil ended up shut in the washbasin when the saint made the sign of the cross over the vessel of water. In Jerusalem John measured the Holy Sepulchre, and this tale was developed to explain how a chapel with the exact measurements of the Holy Sepulchre came to be in the cathedral. The devil asked him to tell no one, but John used the story, without giving names. Then the devil, to take revenge, slandered him as a fornicator: he pretended to be a woman leaving the saint's cell or made women's things appear in the cell. The townspeople drove John out of Novgorod, putting him on a raft, but the raft went upstream on the Volkhov. Seeing the miracle, the Novgorodians begged him to return. At the place where the raft reached the shore a stone cross was set up, which still stands. His monastic cell was kept in the archiepiscopal palace and made into a church several centuries later; the copper washbasin in which he is said to have caught the devil was shown to visitors into the twentieth century. John is also depicted in the fifteenth- and sixteenth-⁠century icons of the Battle of the Novgorodians with the Suzdalians, where he carries the icon of Our Lady of the Sign from the church of the Transfiguration on Ilin Street to the cathedral of Saint Sophia, in the time of the siege of 1169, when, according to tradition, the Mother of God saved the city.