Alexander Oshevenskiy

Alexander of Oshevensk, known in the world as Aleksei, was a Russian Orthodox monk of the fifteenth century and the founder of the Dormition monastery that later bore his name, the Alexander-Oshevensky Monastery, in the Kargopol district of the Russian North. Traditional hagiography, based on a Life written in 1567, dates his birth to 1427 in the village of Vshely in the Belozersk land. His parents, Nikifor Yakovlev Osheven and Photinia, are described as pious peasants. The family name and the later toponym Oshevensk are connected with their eventual settlement on the Churyega River, a northern locality then within the sphere of Novgorod and lying some forty-odd versts from the town of Kargopol. He received the baptismal name Aleksei; later church tradition sometimes associated the day of his birth with 17 March, the commemoration of Saint Alexius, but that precision depends on the same later Life.

As a young man Aleksei left home for the Kirillo-Belozersky Monastery on the White Lake, the principal monastic house of the Belozersk region, founded by Saint Kirill of Belozersk, who had died in 1427, the traditional year of Alexander’s birth. There he was tonsured with the name Alexander and trained in the communal rule and labor of that monastery. Kirillo-Belozersk in the mid-fifteenth century was among the most influential houses in Muscovite Rus, a center from which monks went out to found sketes and monasteries across the North. After years of obedience Alexander learned that his parents had moved to the Kargopol country. With the blessing of his abbot he traveled to visit them. His father asked him to establish a monastic community on the family’s land beside the Churyega. Alexander returned to Kirillov to obtain a formal blessing and then came back to the north to begin the foundation, an event generally placed in the 1460s.

He built a wooden church dedicated to the Dormition of the Mother of God and cells for a small brotherhood, thus originating the monastery known as Oshevensky or Alexander-Oshevensky. The early community faced the usual difficulties of a new northern house: isolation, poverty, and, according to the Life, hostility from some local peasants and friction with relatives over land. Alexander is reported to have been ordained priest and to have served as the first igumen, organizing liturgical life and manual labor on the pattern he had known at Kirillov. In this period Kargopol still belonged to the Novgorod archbishopric; church tradition links his ordination with the Novgorodian hierarchy, sometimes naming Archbishop Iona (Jonah), who occupied the see from 1458 to 1470. In 1478 Grand Prince Ivan III of Moscow annexed Novgorod, so that the last year of Alexander’s life fell already under Muscovite rule.

Alexander died on 20 April 1479 and was buried at the monastery he had founded. He is said to have been about fifty-two years old. Local veneration grew in the following decades. In 1567 the hieromonk Theodosius of Oshevensk composed a Life of the founder, drawing on the memories of elders of the house; that text is the principal narrative source for Alexander’s biography and belongs to the corpus of sixteenth-century northern Russian hagiography. The Russian Orthodox Church commemorates him on 20 April as a prepodobny (venerable monk). He is also included in regional synaxes of saints of the Russian North. His relics were preserved at the Alexander-Oshevensky Monastery. The monastery continued as a modest but enduring center of monastic life in the Kargopol region through the Muscovite and imperial centuries. Like many northern cloisters it was closed in the Soviet period; the site and its churches survive in the present-day village of Oshevenskoye in Arkhangelsk Oblast. Independent documentary evidence for the details of Alexander’s early life is lacking, and the chronology of 1427-1479 rests on the sixteenth-century Life rather than on contemporary acts, but the fact of the foundation and the subsequent cult are well established in the ecclesiastical history of the Russian North.