From Valaam to the edge of the map The North American Elder
Editor's note
In 1794 the Russian Church sent ten monks across Siberia and the Pacific to the Aleutian and Kodiak islands, the first Orthodox mission to North America. Within a few years most of them were dead, gone home, or absorbed into administration. One stayed for forty three years and never went back, and he is the reason the mission is remembered as something other than a failure.
He was born in Russia around the year seventeen fifty six, of a merchant family, and entered monastic life young. He was at the Trinity-St. Sergius hermitage near Petersburg, and then at Valaam on Lake Ladoga, where he was tonsured with the name Herman and where he spent about fifteen years, most of them in a forest cell at some distance from the monastery. He was not ordained. He remained a simple monk his whole life, which in the Russian tradition is a station and not a lack.
In seventeen ninety three the Holy Synod, at the request of the Russian-American Company, assembled a mission for the new colonies in America. Herman was chosen with nine others under the archimandrite Joasaph. They crossed Siberia by land and the Pacific by sea and reached Kodiak Island on the twenty fourth of September, seventeen ninety four, having traveled something close to eight thousand miles.
The mission baptized in large numbers in its first years. Then it began to break. Archimandrite Joasaph, consecrated bishop, went down with his ship on the return voyage in seventeen ninety nine, and most of the rest were lost, recalled, or worn out. By the early eighteen hundreds the mission was, in practice, Herman.
Against the Company
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