Vassian Rylo

Saint Vassian Rylo was archbishop of Rostov, Yaroslavl and Beloozero, born in the first third of the fifteenth century and dead on 23 March 1481. He is honoured as a hierarch, in the synaxis of the saints of Radonezh on 6 (19) July and in the synaxis of the saints of Rostov and Yaroslavl on 23 May (5 June). He was an active and learned man, known above all for the Epistle to the Ugra, by which he urged Grand Prince Ivan III to stand firm before the Tatars.

Beginnings and doubts

It is said that he was born at Volokolamsk (according to the Rostov Chronicle, nineteen versts from Rostov, on the river Lusha), that he was a relative of Venerable Joseph of Volokolamsk and that in youth he came to the monastery at Borovsk, to Venerable Paphnutius, whose beloved disciple he was and whose life he later wrote. These reports are in doubt. Vasily Klyuchevsky showed that Vassian could not have been the disciple of Saint Paphnutius, since there are no sure reports of his stay at Paphnutius's monastery. Ivan Khrushchov held the same view, thinking that Vassian Rylo was of the same age as Paphnutius and could be neither a disciple nor tonsured in his monastery, for it would be strange to suppose that a newly tonsured monk of a monastery just arisen was appointed abbot of the Trinity-⁠Sergius monastery. Probably, because of the like names of the Rostov hierarchs, a fact from the life of Vassian II (Sanin), the one of the Borovsk monastery, got by mistake into the life of Vassian I (Rylo).

Abbot and hierarch

From 1455 he was abbot of the monastery of Saint Sergius. Soon after his election he was sent by Metropolitan Jonas of Moscow to confirm in the right faith Princess Anastasia of Kyiv with her children, Simeon and Michael. He succeeded very well in this mission. He took part in the embassy to Lithuania, between 1458 and 1461. Between 1466 and 1468 he was archimandrite of the Savior-⁠Transfiguration monastery in the Forest, in place of Trifon, who was appointed to the see of Rostov. After Trifon left the see, on 6 August 1467, on 13 December 1467 he was consecrated bishop of Rostov, with the rank of archbishop. In 1479, at the monastery of Saint Sergius, he baptized Vasily, son of Grand Prince Ivan III. As an active and learned man, he had a prominent place in the political life of his time. He encouraged the princes in the struggle against the Tatars. Of peaceable character, he always sought to reconcile the princes who fought among themselves and, with his great authority, succeeded in this. His contemporaries counted him an energetic archpastor, learned, well read and eloquent. For eloquence he was held the "Demosthenes" of his time.

The Epistle to the Ugra

He is known also by his writings. In 1480, during the "Great Stand on the Ugra", learning of the retreat of Grand Prince Ivan III to Kremenets and of the negotiations with Khan Akhmat of the Golden Horde, he wrote to Ivan III, at the beginning of October 1480, a long and most persuasive epistle on steadfast resistance to the Tatars, with many examples from Holy Scripture and from the chronicles of the land. This epistle, by the importance of its content, held first place among the epistles of clerics of the time of Ivan III. Full of patriotic ideas, it became in the sixteenth century the model of the genre of church epistles to the tsars. Not long before his death, in the winter of 1480 to 1481, he commissioned at his own expense the icon painter Dionisy and three other painters to make the iconostasis of the Dormition cathedral in the Moscow Kremlin. The chronicle says that Bishop Vassian of Rostov gave a hundred rubles to the icon masters, to Dionisy, the priest Timothy, Yarets and Kon, to paint the Deisis in the new church of the Mother of God, which they painted wonderfully, with the feasts and the prophets. He died on 23 March 1481.