St. Basil the Blessed

He was born to peasants at Yelokhovo outside Moscow around 1468 and was apprenticed to a shoemaker. The tradition dates his change to the day a merchant ordered boots and Basil wept, because he had seen that the man would be dead before they were finished, which he was.

From about the age of sixteen he lived on the streets of Moscow with nothing, through Russian winters, for the rest of his life. He took what the tradition calls the folly of Christ: behaving as a madman so that the honor due to holiness could not attach to him, and so that he could say things nobody else was free to say. He overturned market stalls and was found to have destroyed food that was spoiled or bread that was short weight. He threw stones at the houses of the devout and kissed the walls of the houses of the notorious, and explained, when pressed, that the demons stood outside the first and the angels wept outside the second.

He rebuked the Tsar. Ivan the Fourth, who executed men for less, feared him and let him speak, and the accounts have Basil telling him to his face that he had been elsewhere in his mind during the liturgy. Ivan carried his coffin.

He reposed on the second of August, 1557, and was buried at the church of the Trinity on the Moat, beside Red Square. The cathedral raised there over the graves of the Kazan campaign is known to the whole world by his name rather than its own, which is a fair summary of what Moscow thought of him.