Xenia of Tver

Holy Right-⁠believing Princess Xenia of Tver, Xenia Yurievna (in monasticism Maria, † 1312, Tver), was the second wife of the grand prince of Vladimir Yaroslav (Athanasius) Yaroslavich, daughter-⁠in-⁠law of the holy right-⁠believing grand prince Alexander Nevsky, mother of the holy prince Michael Yaroslavich of Tver and of the Venerable Sophia of Tver. Most historians consider her the daughter of a Novgorod boyar, from the chronicle report of the marriage in 1265, at Novgorod, of Yaroslav Yaroslavich, then seated on the princely throne: "and he took to wife the daughter of Yuri Mikhailovich". According to a later tale about the Otroch monastery of Tver (second half of the seventeenth century), Xenia was the daughter of a sacristan from the village of Edimonovo near Tver. For Yaroslav the marriage to her was his second; the name of his first wife, who perished in 1252 at the Mongol capture of Pereslavl-⁠Zalessky, is not known.

Xenia left her native city, it seems, in 1268, when Yaroslav left Novgorod, leaving a deputy there, for Vladimir. By then she had borne two daughters. At the end of 1271, on the way back from the Horde, Yaroslav died, and his body was brought to Tver. Xenia and the first bishop of Tver, Simeon, buried him in the church of Saints Cosmas and Damian. In the winter of 1271/72 Xenia gave birth at Tver to her son Michael. According to the long Life of the right-⁠believing prince Michael of Tver, composed around 1319-1320 by the abbot of the Otroch monastery in Tver, Alexander, Xenia took an active part in raising her son: "his most holy and wise mother raised him in the fear of the Lord and taught him the holy books and all wisdom". After Yaroslav's death his stepson Sviatoslav (1271-1282/85) became prince of Tver. In 1282 Xenia gave her elder daughter in marriage to Yuri Lvovich, a prince of Kholm and Galich, the future prince of Galicia and Volhynia.

In 1285, in place of the wooden church of Saints Cosmas and Damian in Tver, Michael, aged thirteen, his mother Xenia and Bishop Simeon laid the foundation of the new stone cathedral of the Transfiguration (consecrated by Simeon in 1287). After Simeon's death in 1289 Xenia, with her son and the boyars, abbots, priests and clergy, chose to the see of Tver the abbot of the common-⁠life monastery of the Mother of God, Andrew, son of the Lithuanian prince Gerden, and sent him to Kiev to be ordained. In 1293 Michael's younger sister, the Venerable Sophia, became a nun, and founded at Tver a convent of virgins in honour of Saint Athanasius of Alexandria, her father's patron. It may be that Xenia took part in the choice of Michael's bride, the Rostov princess Anna Dmitrievna; the wedding took place in the cathedral of the Transfiguration on 8 November 1294 and ended the enmity between the ruler of Tver and the princes of Rostov.

At the end of her life Xenia received monasticism, then the schema. In the view of some researchers she was tonsured right after Michael's wedding to Anna, on 21 November 1294, on the feast of the Entry of the Mother of God into the Temple, but there are signs that she was tonsured later, a little before her death. According to the Life of Michael of Tver, in 1304 Metropolitan Maximus asked the Moscow prince George (Yuri) Danilovich not to seek from the khan the grand principality of Vladimir, invoking the authority of Xenia: "I stand surety for you with the princess, mother of Prince Michael: whatever you wish from your patrimony, she will give you". The metropolitan does not mention the princess's monasticism. In an epistle of Patriarch Nephon I of Constantinople to the grand prince Michael, of 1310/11, the patriarch blessed also the prince's "God-⁠loving mother", without calling her a nun. Xenia and Michael are painted standing before Christ in a miniature of a Tver manuscript of the Chronicle of George Hamartolos, from the end of the thirteenth or the beginning of the fourteenth century; the princess is shown in lay dress. Xenia was buried in the burial vault of the Tver princes in the cathedral of the Transfiguration.

Local veneration began, probably, after her death and was strengthened after the death of Michael, in 1318; the memory of mother and son was from the first linked. Saint Peter the Metropolitan taught the young prince Dimitry of the Terrible Eyes († 1326), grandson of Xenia, who became prince of Tver in 1318: "Do not give way to lack of fear (of God); the elders remember well how it was in the time of the grand prince and his mother; let them remind the young". The Life of Michael, written by a contemporary, mentions Xenia and shows her as a grand princess of high authority. In the service of Michael of Tver there are hymns to Xenia in the first canon (tone 8), composed in the view of some scholars in the fourteenth or fifteenth century: "From the holy womb of the all-⁠wise Axinia you were born, blessed one, with her we call you blessed, much-⁠praised martyr, save your city, the people who sing to you". In 1765 the rector of the Tver seminary, Archimandrite Macarius (Petrovich), wrote a new redaction of the Life of Michael, in which he spoke much of Xenia, calling her "the consolation of the city and the protection and hope of the whole fatherland". Her name is mentioned in the akathist to Prince Michael of 1883 and in the service of All the Saints of Tver composed by Metropolitan Alexei (Konoplev) between 1978 and 1988, and in the service of All Russian Saints. At the beginning of the twenty-⁠first century the Tver priest George Beloduroy wrote a troparion and kontakia to Xenia, and a Moscow author, A. S. Prutkova, wrote the Life of Xenia, and a service, akathist and prayer to the right-⁠believing princess (unpublished).

Saint Xenia is commemorated on 18 July, with the Synaxis of the Saints of Tver (the date moves), in the new style.