Suggest an Edit — Evfimy II of Novgorod

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Biography

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Euthymius II (Russian: Evfimii, often styled Evfimii Vyazhitskii after the monastery where he was buried) was Archbishop of Novgorod from 1429 until his death and is venerated as a saint in the Eastern Orthodox Church. He was born in Novgorod, in the Novgorod Republic, in the later fourteenth century; no reliable historical source records an exact year of birth, and none should be inferred from the year he took office. His baptismal name was Ioann (John). His father Nikita was a priest; liturgical tradition also names his mother Anna. He received the monastic tonsure at the Khutyn Monastery of the Saviour, taking the name Euthymius, and later became archimandrite of the Lisitsky Monastery near Novgorod. In 1429 the Novgorod veche elected him archbishop after the death of Archbishop Euthymius I. Because the metropolitan see of Kiev and all Rus' was vacant after the death of Metropolitan Photius in 1431, he remained bishop-elect for several years. Metropolitan Gerasim consecrated him to the episcopate in 1434.

As archbishop he was the leading churchman of the still-independent Novgorod Republic and one of the principal patrons of architecture and letters in fifteenth-century Novgorod. He sponsored an extensive program of stone church building and reconstruction in the city and its monasteries; historians often treat the 1430s–1450s as a distinct Euthymian phase in Novgorod architecture. In 1433 he had the Episcopal Chamber (Vladychnaya Palata) erected in the Novgorod Kremlin, employing craftsmen from the German lands. He developed the Nikolo-Vyazhishchsky (Vyazhishchi) Monastery north of the city, which served as an archiepiscopal residence in his later years. He encouraged chronicle-writing and organized liturgical commemoration of earlier Novgorod princes, posadniks, and hierarchs. At his invitation the Serbian monk Pachomius the Logothete (Pachomius the Serb) worked in Novgorod, composing hagiographical texts that shaped the later memory of the city's saints and, after Euthymius's death, a Life of Euthymius himself.

His long episcopate coincided with growing Muscovite pressure on Novgorod and with the mid-century crisis of the metropolitanate. After the Union of Florence, Metropolitan Isidore was rejected in Rus', and in 1448 Jonah was installed as metropolitan in Moscow without consecration from Constantinople, a decisive step toward the autocephaly of the Russian Church. Euthymius had to navigate relations with Moscow, residual ties to Constantinople, and the Novgorod veche, which traditionally elected its archbishop. He sought to preserve the dignity and customary privileges of the Novgorod cathedra. That see, though exceptionally honored among the dioceses of Rus' and later associated with the white klobuk, remained an archbishopric: Euthymius was never a patriarch, nor a pope.

He died on 11 March 1458 and was buried at the Vyazhishchi Monastery. Miracles were reported at his tomb, and his relics were later described as incorrupt. Local veneration in Novgorod grew in the later fifteenth century. He was formally numbered among the saints at the Moscow church councils held under Metropolitan Macarius in 1549. The Russian Orthodox Church keeps his principal feast on 11 March. He is remembered as a builder-bishop and wonderworking hierarch of medieval Novgorod. Having lived as a monk and then as a bishop, he was not married and had no children. No separate Western-style beatification is recorded, and the sources do not attach to him a distinct list of patronages of places, causes, or professions in the later Catholic sense.

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