Gerazym

Little is known with certainty about the early life of Gerasim, known in Polish-language historical writing as Gerazym, a fifteenth-century Eastern Orthodox hierarch who served briefly as Metropolitan of Kiev and All Rus’. Surviving chronicles and Constantinopolitan documents do not record the year or place of his birth, the names of his parents, or the circumstances of his education and monastic profession. He first appears in the historical record already as a member of the black clergy and as Bishop of Smolensk, a diocese whose territory then lay within the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.

After the death of Metropolitan Photius in 1431 the see of Kiev, which still claimed spiritual jurisdiction over the Orthodox populations of both Muscovy and Lithuania, remained vacant amid sharp political rivalry. Gerasim travelled to Constantinople and in 1433 received appointment as metropolitan from Patriarch Joseph II. The appointment was intended to keep the metropolitanate united under the Patriarchate of Constantinople, yet it was not accepted in Moscow, where the grand prince and the local bishops favoured their own candidate, Jonah. Gerasim therefore exercised his office chiefly in the Lithuanian lands, residing at times in Smolensk.

His metropolitanate lasted only two years and was overtaken by the civil war then raging inside the Grand Duchy of Lithuania between Grand Duke Švitrigaila and Sigismund Kęstutaitis. Contemporary Lithuanian and East Slavic annals report that Gerasim was accused of secretly corresponding with Sigismund. Švitrigaila ordered his arrest, and on 26 July 1435 the metropolitan was publicly burned at the stake in Vitebsk. The execution is one of the better-attested events of his career.

No medieval or early-modern Orthodox source records a liturgical cult, a feast day, or a formal act of canonization for Gerasim. He remains a figure of political-ecclesiastical history rather than of hagiography, illustrating how thoroughly the Kievan metropolitanate had become entangled in the dynastic struggles of fifteenth-century Eastern Europe on the eve of the Council of Florence and the later division of the see.