Commontide
Ecumenical Commemoration
Monk & Missionary to the Native Alaskans
November 15 · d. 1837
also known as Herman of Kodiak, Venerable Herman, Святой Герман (Russian)
Herman of Alaska was a Russian Orthodox monk, one of the first missionaries to Russian America, who spent more than forty years among the peoples of Kodiak Island and its neighbor Spruce Island in what is now Alaska. He was a simple lay monk and never a priest, yet he catechized and defended the Alutiiq and Aleut, nursed them through a deadly epidemic, and lived out his last years as a hermit on the island he called New Valaam. In 1970 he became the first Orthodox saint glorified in the Americas. His feast is November 15.
Herman was a monk of Valaam, the great northern monastery on an island in Lake Ladoga in Russia, when the call came to cross the world. The Empress Catherine had granted a mission to Russian America, the far Alaskan coast that Russian fur traders had lately claimed, and monks were asked to carry the gospel to peoples who had never heard it. Ten set out from Valaam. Herman, still a simple monk under vows and no priest, was among them. They travelled the length of Siberia and over the northern Pacific, the better part of a year on the road, and came at last to Kodiak Island in the autumn of 1794.
The first years broke the mission. Within a few years most of the monks were dead: one drowned at sea returning to Russia, one was killed among the very people he had gone to baptize, and the small band that had crossed an ocean together was scattered. Herman remained. Because he was not a priest, he could not celebrate the Liturgy or hear confessions; he was only a monk, a layman under vows. But he stayed, and he learned the people, and he loved them, and out of that plain fidelity he became the father of a church he was not ordained to serve.
The peoples of Kodiak were the Alutiiq, whom the Russians called the Aleut, together with their neighbors along that coast. The Russian-American Company that ruled the colony treated them as a workforce to be spent. Their men were carried off to hunt sea otter for the Company's profit, their villages emptied, their families left to fend for themselves. Herman set himself against this with nothing but his own moral weight. He wrote to the colony's governors, he took the people's part in their quarrels, he stood between them and the men who used them, and he called himself their servant. When a sickness swept the island and the Russians shut their doors in fear, Herman went from house to house through the dying, the one Russian who would come, sitting with the sick and preparing the dead for God.
He loved the children most of all. He baked biscuits for them, gathered them to sing, and built a school on Spruce Island for the orphans, teaching them himself to read and to chant the services. Then he withdrew to that island for good. Across a narrow strait from Kodiak, Spruce Island lay wooded and quiet, and there Herman made his hermitage and named it New Valaam, for the monastery of his youth. He dug a cave for his first summer and later raised a small cell, a chapel, and the schoolhouse, and planted a garden with his own hands. He wore one deerskin garment year after year, slept on a bench with two bricks for a pillow and a plank he called his blanket, and bore heavy iron chains beneath his clothes. He ate almost nothing. Whatever his garden and his labor yielded, he gave away, to the orphans and to buy books for the children.
The people knew him as a father, and wonders were told of him that are still told. Once, when a flood threatened the settlement, he carried an icon of the Mother of God to the water's edge, set it upon the sand, and prayed; the people say the tide rose to the icon and came no farther. He turned back a forest fire along a strip of ground he had cleared. Wild creatures came to his cell, and an ermine ate from his hand. He knew things before they happened, and told a young boy that one day a monastery would stand on that ground.
Simeon Yanovsky, the governor of the colony, came to the island suspecting the old monk of stirring the natives to revolt, and went away his disciple. In their long talks Herman turned him back to the faith he had let slip, until Yanovsky could say that through the Elder's words and prayers he had become a real Christian. To such men, educated and worldly, Herman put a single question: what do we love most, and what most deserves to be loved? He pressed it until they could answer nothing but God, and then he set his vow before them. Yanovsky remembered the words, and they have become the saying Herman is best loved by:
For our good, for our happiness, at least let us make a promise to ourselves, that from this day, from this hour, from this very moment we shall strive to love God above all, and fulfill His holy will.
When Herman knew his end was near he had a disciple light candles and read to him from the Acts of the Apostles, and his face shone as he said, "Glory to Thee, O Lord." He lived another week, and died quietly as the reading went on, in the eighty-first year of his life. That night the people of the villages across the water saw a pillar of light standing over Spruce Island. A storm held off the priest and the fine coffin the governor had ordered, and for a month the old monk's body lay unchanged; at the last, the people he had loved buried him themselves, in the ground he had chosen, as he had asked. He had told them he would not be forgotten, and he was not. More than a century later the church he had served without an altar named him a saint, and the grave on Spruce Island became a place his people still come to, sure that the monk who had loved them into the faith is not lost to them but alive with God.
How we know Herman is through a small and well-kept body of testimony. The fullest early source is the Life issued by Valaam Monastery in the 1860s, which drew on the memories of those who had known him, above all Simeon Yanovsky, the former colonial governor whom Herman had returned to the faith and who set down what he remembered in letters decades afterward. Alongside the Valaam Life stand the recollections of his disciples on Spruce Island, a few of Herman's own letters, and, in the twentieth century, the documentary work gathered for his canonization and the labors of historians of Russian Alaska.
His origins are genuinely uncertain. The Valaam Life reports that his name before he took vows was not known, and placed his birth around 1756 in a merchant family of Serpukhov, south of Moscow. Modern research complicates even that: the biographer Sergei Korsun argues from archival evidence that Herman came instead from a peasant family in the Voronezh region and had served as a military clerk under the name Egor Ivanovich Popov before his tonsure at Valaam in 1782. The year of his birth, his family, and his baptismal name are all held with an honest uncertainty. What is firm is that he was a monk of Valaam, formed under the abbot Nazarius in the hesychast revival of that house, and that he sailed for America in 1793.
Two things are worth stating plainly, because they are easily blurred. First, Herman was a simple monk and never a priest. He was offered ordination more than once, and the leadership of a mission to China, and he refused; when the Kodiak mission needed a head he took charge of its affairs, but he could not himself celebrate the Eucharist and never sought to. His authority was the authority of a holy layman under vows, which is part of what makes him unusual among the founders of a church. Second, the peoples he served on Kodiak were chiefly the Alutiiq, who call themselves Sugpiaq and were known to their neighbors as Koniag, together with the Aleut, or Unangan, of the island chain to the west; the Russians used the one word "Aleut" for them all. In one of his own letters, in the collection of his correspondence, Herman set down the ground of his whole life among them: "A true Christian is made by faith and love of Christ."
The Life and the island memory are rich with the miraculous, and the church has held these accounts as part of Herman's holiness for well over a century. It tells of the flood turned back by an icon, the fire halted at a cleared line, the animals that came to his hand, and his foreknowledge of things to come, including the monastery that would one day stand on Spruce Island. These reach us from those who lived beside him and from the tradition that has prayed to him since; the record is the reminiscence of disciples and the settled devotion of the church that keeps him, and it is in that spirit, cautiously and gratefully, that they are received. After his death the people of the neighboring settlements saw a pillar of light above the island, a sweetness is said to have filled his cell, and his body lay a month unchanged. Whether one reads these as the church reads them or holds them at the distance the sources allow, they are woven into how Herman has been remembered, and to omit them would be to report less than his history.
Herman is kept on two days. His repose is commemorated on December 13, the date the Valaam Life records, and on November 15 in some calendars, including the one Commontide follows; his Glorification is celebrated on August 9, a summer feast set so that pilgrims can reach Kodiak and Spruce Island when the northern waters are open. He is venerated throughout the Orthodox world as the Wonderworker of All America, and he is honored increasingly beyond it, as one of the great missionary saints and as the apostle of North America.
Spruce Island, the New Valaam of his hermitage, is the heart of his cult. His cell, his grave, and the chapel of Saints Sergius and Herman that stands over it draw pilgrims each year, most of all around the August feast, when many cross the strait from Kodiak on foot and by boat. In icons he is shown as an old monk in a plain mantle, often with the wooded island and a cross behind him, and sometimes with the animals that came to him or a scroll bearing his vow to love God above all. He is honored as a patron of Alaska and of North America and as an intercessor for its native peoples, whom he served and defended; monasteries, parishes, and the Saint Herman of Alaska Brotherhood and seminary carry his name. He is remembered, above everything, as a small and gentle man of great spiritual weight, the father who stood between a people and those who would use them, and the first of the saints the church has recognized on this continent.
Letters and sayings of Saint Herman of Alaska (Treasury of Saint Herman's Spirituality)(Russian, early 19th century)
A selection of Herman's own written correspondence with Simeon Yanovsky and others, the source of "A true Christian is made by faith and love of Christ" and of his counsel on the Christian life.
Public domain: OrthoChristian (English translation)
The Life of the Valaam Monk Herman, Missionary to America(Russian, 1860s)
The monastery Life compiled in the 1860s, preserving Yanovsky's firsthand reminiscences and the disciples' memories; the source of nearly the whole received account, including the banquet vow, the flood-icon, the asceticism, and the death.
Public domain: fatheralexander.org (English)
Repose of Venerable Herman of Alaska, Wonderworker of All America(English, modern)
The OCA's synaxarion life of Herman, drawn from the Valaam Life; the standard church account of his mission, hermitage, wonders, and repose.
Public domain: Orthodox Church in America
Father Herman: Alaska's Saint(English, 1920s)
The first English-language biography of Herman, written in the 1920s and reissued by St Vladimir's Seminary Press; short, readable, and reverent, the believing life for a general reader.
Public domain: St Vladimir's Seminary Press
Orthodox Alaska: A Theology of Mission(English, 1992)
The standard believing study of Orthodox Alaska, by a priest who served there for nearly thirty years; the deeper way into the church and the peoples among whom Herman lived.
Public domain: St Vladimir's Seminary Press
Primary sources. A few of Herman's own letters survive, chiefly his correspondence with Simeon Yanovsky, from which comes the line that "a true Christian is made by faith and love of Christ"; a selection is available online in an English translation. Yanovsky's reminiscences, written down years later and preserved within the Valaam Life, are the nearest thing we have to a firsthand portrait of the Elder.
Principal hagiography. The Life of the Valaam monk Herman, compiled by his monastery in the 1860s from the memories of Yanovsky and his disciples, is the source of nearly everything told of him: the mission and its losses, the defense of the natives, the nursing in the epidemic, the hermitage, the wonders, and the death. It is freely available online.
Recommended modern biography. F. A. Golder's Father Herman: Alaska's Saint, the first English biography, written in the 1920s and reissued by St Vladimir's Seminary Press, is the short, readable, believing life to put in a reader's hand. For the wider world the mission belonged to, Michael Oleksa's Orthodox Alaska: A Theology of Mission (St Vladimir's Seminary Press) is the deeper study, by a priest who served three decades in Alaska, and the best single account of the church Herman helped to plant.
Further reading. Oleksa's sourcebook Alaskan Missionary Spirituality (St Vladimir's Seminary Press) gathers the primary documents of the mission, including Yanovsky's account of Herman, in translation; Sergei Korsun's archival study underlies the modern reappraisal of Herman's origins.
Online resources. The Orthodox Church in America hosts full accounts of both his repose and his glorification; the Valaam Life is available in English translation at fatheralexander.org.
The date of his repose is not perfectly fixed. The Valaam Life gives December 13, 1837, in the eighty-first year of his life; some accounts place the death in November, and even the year has been given as 1836, and the disagreement has never been fully resolved. His glorification is more certain. On August 9, 1970, at the Holy Resurrection Cathedral on Kodiak Island, the bishops of the Orthodox Church in America proclaimed him a saint, the first the Orthodox Church had glorified in the Americas; the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia canonized him the same year. His relics rest at Kodiak, and his grave on Spruce Island is a place of pilgrimage.
Readings for a Missionary
Isaiah 49:1–7Psalm 98Romans 10:11–18Luke 5:1–11
Almighty and everlasting God, you called your servant Herman of Alaska to preach the Gospel to the Aleut people: Raise up in this and every land evangelists and heralds of your kingdom, that your Church may proclaim the unsearchable riches of our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.