Barlaam (Konoplyov)

Barlaam of Chikoy, known in the world as Vasily Fedotovich Konoplyov (Konoplev), was a Russian Orthodox hermit, hieromonk, and founder of the Chikoy monastic settlement in Transbaikalia. He was born in 1774 in the village of Maneevo, in the Ardatov district of the Nizhny Novgorod Governorate, into a family of peasant Old Believers. The surviving tradition says little about his childhood beyond that Old Believer upbringing in the Volga countryside. In early adulthood he left his native region and traveled east, eventually reaching the remote Chikoy Mountains in Transbaikalia, in the basin of the Chikoy River beyond Lake Baikal, a frontier inhabited by Russian settlers, Old Believers, and indigenous peoples of the region.

There he took up the eremitical life in the taiga. In the course of the early nineteenth century he entered into communion with the established Russian Orthodox Church, received monastic tonsure with the name Barlaam, and was ordained a hieromonk under the authority of the Irkutsk diocese. Disciples gathered around his hermitage, which developed from a skete into the Monastery of the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist on the Chikoy (the Chikoy or Chikoisky Monastery). Later hagiography and diocesan memory present him as an austere desert-dweller, a man of prayer and fasting, and a figure associated with efforts to draw Old Believers into canonical Orthodoxy, rather than as a bishop, writer, or public administrator.

Barlaam remained at the Chikoy foundation until his death on 23 January 1846 and was buried at the monastery. Local veneration of the elder grew in Siberia in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In 1984 the Russian Orthodox Church glorified the Synaxis of the Saints of Siberia, including Barlaam of Chikoy, thereby confirming his cult on a church-wide level. His memory is kept on 23 January, the day of his repose (Julian calendar), and on 10 June with the other Siberian saints.

The historical record for Barlaam is typical of many imperial-era Siberian ascetics: it rests on monastic tradition, Irkutsk diocesan documentation, and later compilations rather than on a large contemporary literary corpus. Precise details of his early wanderings, the exact year of his tonsure, and the inner organization of the first Chikoy skete are only partly recoverable. The monastery itself declined in the Soviet period and has been the object of later revival attempts. Barlaam is remembered as a representative of Russian eremitical monasticism on the empire’s eastern frontier.