Xenophon of Robeika

Venerable Xenophon of Robeika was a Russian monk at the turn of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, tonsured at the Lisitsa Monastery near Novgorod, where he received the tonsure from Abbot Barlaam. He founded a small monastery on the bank of the river Robeika, near Novgorod. He is venerated as a venerable saint, but his written life is not a reliable source. He is commemorated on 28 June, the day of his death, on 26 January, the day of his patron saint, Xenophon of Constantinople, and on the third Sunday after Pentecost, in the synaxis of the saints of Novgorod.

What is known

His life was lost, and when it was rewritten in the eighteenth century, the scholars confused two Barlaams, Barlaam of Khutyn and Barlaam of Kiev, and made Xenophon a disciple of Barlaam of Khutyn, who had lived two centuries earlier. They also made him a friend of Anthony of Dymsk, who probably lived in the fifteenth century and was confused by hagiographers with Anthony the Roman of the twelfth. The only text of the life was found only at the end of the twentieth century and published by A. G. Bobrov. It was composed no earlier than the eighteenth century, the text uses the word predmet, a translation of the Latin objectum, which entered Russian only in 1720, though the author tried to imitate ancient models.

According to one version he was abbot at Khutyn and resigned, then left the monastery to live more strictly and founded on the bank of the river Robeika, long called the Selifontova because of a distortion of his name, the monastery of Saint Nicholas. According to another, he left Barlaam because he wanted a more ascetic life, and the place where he came to rest on the Robeika is where the monastery was later raised. His relics lay in the monastery church, later a parish church. The dates in our sources differ: one field of the entry gives 1262 as the year of death, while the sources speak of the end of the fourteenth and beginning of the fifteenth century.

Research

His monastery is mentioned briefly in the literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with the same data, often wrong: a disciple of Barlaam of Khutyn, foundation in the thirteenth century. The first study was by P. M. Silin, in 1902, who did not question the thirteenth-⁠century dating. The second, by Bobrov, of 1997, rejected this dating, judging that the monastery was founded at the beginning of the fifteenth century.