St. Tikhon of Zadonsk

He was born Timothy in the village of Korotsko in the Novgorod region in 1724, the youngest son of a village sacristan who died and left the family destitute. The poverty is not a pious flourish: the family came near to giving him away to a coachman for food, and he worked in the fields for bread as a boy.

At sixteen he was taken into the Novgorod seminary on a state place, and he was very good at it. He stayed on to teach Greek, then rhetoric and philosophy, and in 1758 was tonsured a monk with the name Tikhon. Advancement came fast: rector, archimandrite, vicar bishop in 1761, and in February 1763 bishop of Voronezh.

Voronezh was enormous, poor, thinly clergied, with a half-pagan folk festival still running in the town and priests who could barely read the service. He spent four and a half years on it, founded a seminary, wrote instructions the clergy could actually use, preached constantly, and shut down the festival by walking into it. Then his health broke and he asked to be released.

From 1769 he lived at the monastery of the Nativity of the Theotokos at Zadonsk with no rank, wearing what the monks wore, refusing to be served, and asking to be treated as the last of the brotherhood. He suffered long stretches of what he called darkness, and wrote out of it rather than around it. He gave his pension away in small sums, in person, and went into the villages and the jails himself, and serfs who came to his door were let in.

He died at Zadonsk on the thirteenth of August, 1783, in his sixtieth year. The Holy Synod glorified him in 1861 before a crowd the reports put in the hundreds of thousands. Dostoevsky read him closely and used him for the elder Zosima. The Church keeps his memory on the thirteenth of August and on the fourteenth of May, the uncovering of his relics.