Serapion

Saint Serapion, hierarch, was Metropolitan of Sarai and Podon, with his see at Krutitsy in Moscow, in the first half of the seventeenth century. The Russian Church honours him among the saints of the Tver land, where he was born and where he ended his life.

He was born at Kashin into the family of the cathedral archpriest Savva Maximovich Sysoev and his wife Stefanida, who later became a nun with the name Philonida. Nothing is recorded of his early years. He received monastic tonsure at the Holy Trinity monastery of Kalyazin on the Volga.

From 1628 he was archimandrite of the Andronikov monastery of the Saviour in Moscow, and from 1634 of the monastery of the Nativity of the Mother of God in Vladimir. On 1 January 1637 he was consecrated bishop of Krutitsy with the rank of metropolitan. The see bore the names of Sarai and Podon because it had first been based at Sarai, capital of the Golden Horde, and was later moved to Krutitsy.

After the death of Patriarch Joasaph I at the end of 1640, Metropolitan Serapion administered the affairs of the Russian Church until March 1642, when he took part in the election and enthronement of the new patriarch, Joseph. In 1645 he was present at the coronation of Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich.

In extreme old age he withdrew to the Kalyazin monastery where he had begun his monastic life, and there he reposed in the Lord in the month of May. The sources give the year of his death as either 1652 or 1653. He was buried in the porch of the monastery's Trinity church.

Beside his white stone tomb a full-⁠length image of him in hierarchical vestments was placed. According to tradition it was made at the expense of a merchant of Saint Petersburg, to whom the saint had appeared during an illness, asking him to have his image painted. The icon was brought to the monastery in 1779, and scholars link the beginnings of his veneration as a saint to that year.

He is commemorated on 2 May, the day of his repose, and in the Synaxis of the Saints of Tver.