Karp of Myodushi

The Righteous Karp of Myodushi (Karp of Kovrov) is honoured by the Russian Church as the heavenly patron of the Kovrov region of Vladimir province. He died between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries (the birth year 1500 in our record has no basis). His commemoration is on 23 June. He is a saint honoured chiefly locally. The exact date of his birth and death is not known. In any case, in the seventeenth century he was already venerated as a saint and his veneration was widespread. He may have been a contemporary of Ivan the Terrible or even have lived in the fifteenth century.

According to tradition, in the place called Myodushi, Karp lived in a small wooden cell which he had built himself, near a church, where he struggled in faith and piety. He reached a very great age and was already in life venerated by the surrounding peasants as a great righteous man. After the elder's death, healings of the sick are said to have taken place at his grave, to which they were specially brought and carried. For this reason the people of Kovrov, having no other saints in their district, began to venerate the righteous Karp of Myodushi as their heavenly protector. In the Nativity of the Mother of God church at Myodushi, which by the middle of the nineteenth century, by the will of the local landowner Grigory Mikhailovich Drozdov and at the expense of his family, among them the descendants Andreev and Maikov, was rebuilt in stone, a side chapel of Saint Karp appeared.

The widespread popular veneration of Karp continued until the end of the 1930s. At his grave all the visitors to the Myodushi fairs, held on 6 September, on the eve of the patronal feast of the Nativity of the Most Holy Mother of God, were sure to come. In time the resting place of the righteous man at Myodushi was forgotten. The church at Myodushi, closed by decision of the Ivanovo regional executive committee of 24 July 1941 and then laid waste, was restored a few years ago. But the burial place of the saint, who, according to archive documents and old books, "rests beneath a slab", perhaps on the site of the earlier wooden church, could not be found. Recently, however, thanks to a local resident, the exact place of the elder's burial was found. According to him, in the 1990s his father, digging a grave for a dead villager beside the Myodushi church, came upon an ancient oaken coffin coated with pitch, with the remains of an elder in monastic dress. Frightened by such a find, he buried the coffin again and for a long time told no one. Later he shared the information. At the request of an activist of a group of Orthodox searchers, Nikolai Makarevich, the resident of the Kovrov district who had made this unique find, and his son, came specially to Myodushi and showed the exact place of burial of Karp of Myodushi, to the south of the church.