Euphrosynus of Pskov

Saint Euphrosynus of Pskov, whose baptismal name was Eleazar, was born in 1386 in the village of Videlebye in the Pskov lands. At that period Pskov was the center of an independent medieval republic, politically distinct from Novgorod and from the rising principality of Moscow. The chief narrative of his life is a hagiographical Life written in the sixteenth century, well after his death; it portrays him as literate and devout from youth. He entered the Snetogorsky Monastery of the Nativity of the Most Holy Theotokos, which stood on Snyatnaya Hill beside the river Velikaya near Pskov. There he was tonsured a monk and given the name Euphrosynus. The Snetogorsky house was one of the principal monasteries of the Pskov region, and it provided him with the liturgical and ascetic formation typical of northern Russian monasticism in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.

Unsatisfied with communal life and seeking hesychastic solitude, Euphrosynus left Snetogorsky and settled in a wild, wooded district on the River Tolva, about twenty-five versts from Pskov. He lived at first as a hermit, supporting himself by the labor of his hands and by prayer. Over the years other monks joined him. He constructed a wooden church dedicated to the Three Holy Hierarchs—Saints Basil the Great, Gregory the Theologian, and John Chrysostom—and organized the growing brotherhood according to a monastic rule that he himself composed. The community became known as the Spaso-Eleazarov Monastery (Savior-Eleazar Monastery), the name Eleazar preserving the saint’s name in the world. The rule is said to have stressed humility, poverty, obedience, and careful observance of the church’s services. Euphrosynus acquired a reputation for spiritual discernment and for a severe personal asceticism.

A distinctive and later controversial element in his memory is his teaching on the singing of Alleluia. The Life attributes to him a firm defense of the double Alleluia (sung twice) as the correct and ancient practice, as opposed to the triple Alleluia. Hagiographical accounts connect this concern with inquiries directed toward Constantinople or with visionary confirmation, though these episodes cannot be verified from fifteenth-century documents. In the seventeenth century the double Alleluia became a mark of the Old Believer opposition to the Nikonian liturgical reforms, which prescribed the triple Alleluia. Despite that later association, the official Russian Orthodox Church continued to number Euphrosynus among its saints. He is thus an example of a locally formed liturgical custom that was subsequently overridden in the national church without the founder himself being rejected.

Euphrosynus died on 15 May 1481, the date recorded in the liturgical calendar, at the traditional age of ninety-five. He was buried in the monastery he had established. Veneration by the brethren and by the people of Pskov began soon afterward; his relics were later described as incorrupt. The Russian Orthodox Church keeps his feast on 15 May. The Spaso-Eleazarov Monastery endured as a spiritual center of the Pskov land. In the early sixteenth century it housed the monk Philotheus, who in letters to the Muscovite court articulated the idea of Moscow as the Third Rome; that development, however, belongs to the monastery’s later history rather than to Euphrosynus’s own lifetime. Outside the hagiographical tradition, contemporary chronicles and acts yield little independent biographical detail, a situation typical of many northern Russian monastic founders of the fifteenth century. The outline that remains reasonably secure is that a monk named Euphrosynus (Eleazar) founded a community on the Tolva, died in 1481, and was honored as a saint in Pskov and thereafter in the wider Russian Orthodox Church.