Sophia of Suzdal

Saint Sophia of Suzdal, in the world Solomonia Yuryevna Saburova, was the first wife of Grand Prince Vasili III of Moscow. She was sent to a convent for want of children and lived there as a nun until her repose in 1542. She is venerated by the Russian Church as a saint and commemorated on 29 December and 14 August.

She was born around 1490 into the boyar family of Saburov, daughter of Yury Konstantinovich Saburov. She lost her mother early and was raised by her aunt, her father's sister. She was said to be gentle, of fine manners and devout. Vasili chose her at a bride show among five hundred girls brought to court from all over the country, after the custom of the Byzantine emperors. For the first time in Moscow's history a reigning ruler took as wife neither a foreign nor a Russian princess, but a girl from the old Moscow boyar nobility. The wedding took place on 4 September 1505 in the Dormition Cathedral in the Kremlin, and Metropolitan Simon blessed them.

After twenty years Solomonia had no children. Vasili was greatly troubled, for he did not want his brothers to inherit the throne, and so had forbidden them to marry until he had a son. Solomonia sought help from foreign doctors. In 1525 Vasili decided to divorce, with the approval of Metropolitan Daniel and the boyar Duma. Vassian Patrikeyev, Maximus the Greek, Metropolitan Varlaam and others said the separation was unlawful, and Vassian is said to have answered that he had found no such question in Scripture except that of Herodias about the head of John the Baptist. Some of them were exiled, and Metropolitan Varlaam was, for the first time in Russian history, deprived of his rank.

In November 1525 the marriage was annulled, and Solomonia was forced to take the veil with the name Sophia at the Nativity convent in Moscow, then moved to the Intercession convent in Suzdal, built by Vasili and his wife in supplication for an heir. Herberstein says she was taken by force, while the Russian chronicles stress her submission to her lord's will. Such a divorce with enforced monasticism had no precedent in Russia. At the start of 1526 Vasili married Elena Glinskaya, from whom Ivan the Terrible was born. Rumours spread that Sophia had borne a son, George, in the convent. She fell asleep at Suzdal in 1542, after seventeen years of monastic life.

After her repose the report of her holiness spread quickly. In his letters to Ivan the Terrible, Prince Andrei Kurbsky calls her a venerable martyr, and in the time of Tsar Feodor she was already venerated as a saint. According to tradition, healings took place at her tomb at Suzdal, and in 1609, during the Polish invasion, she protected the city from plunder.