Joachim the Korsunian

Joachim the Korsunian (Russian: Ioakim Korsunianin), also called Joachim of Korsun, was the first bishop of Novgorod the Great, holding the see from about the last decade of the tenth century until his death in 1030. His epithet indicates origin in Korsun, the Slavic name for the Byzantine city of Chersonesus in the Crimea, a place from which Prince Vladimir of Kiev is also said to have taken clergy after his own baptism. After the official Christianization of Kievan Rus' in 988, Vladimir sent hierarchs into the chief towns of his realm; Joachim was assigned to Novgorod, then a major northern centre still devoted to the cult of the thunder-god Perun. Later Novgorodian chronicle tradition reports that the new bishop had the wooden idol of Perun torn down, beaten with rods, and thrown into the Volkhov River, a public act that later generations remembered as the symbolic beginning of organized Christianity in the city.

In Novgorod he built the first cathedral dedicated to Holy Wisdom (Saint Sophia). That original church was a wooden building later described as having thirteen tops or domes; it stood until it burned in the mid-eleventh century, after which a stone cathedral was begun under his successors. He also founded a church in honour of Saints Joachim and Anna, his patronal saints, which became his place of burial. Through these foundations he created the first stable Christian topography of Novgorod and the institutional core of a diocese that would remain among the most important in the church of Rus'. Contemporary administrative records of his episcopate do not survive, so little can be said in detail about baptisms, clerical training, or the suppression of remaining pagan practice, but as first resident hierarch he would have borne responsibility for all of those tasks in a conversion that was neither immediate nor uncontested.

Joachim died in 1030 and was interred in the Church of Saints Joachim and Anna. After a vacancy he was succeeded by Luka Zhidiata. In the late seventeenth century his relics were uncovered and translated into the stone Cathedral of Holy Wisdom, where they were thereafter venerated. The Russian Orthodox Church numbers him among the saints of Novgorod; his principal feast is kept on 10 February, and he is also commemorated in the synaxes of the hierarchs and of the saints of Novgorod. No contemporary Life is extant. The so-called Ioachim Chronicle, which the eighteenth-century historian Vasily Tatishchev claimed derived from the bishop’s own writings, is treated by most modern scholars as a later compilation rather than an authentic eleventh-century text. What can be affirmed with confidence rests on the Novgorod chronicles and on the consistent liturgical memory of the local church.

Because so few early documents mention him, his date of birth, monastic formation, and exact year of arrival remain unknown. Historians generally reconstruct his episcopate as running from approximately 989 or 992 until 1030, but those years are inferences from later annalistic notices, not from dated acts issued in his name. He was never patriarch or pope: Novgorod was a suffragan bishopric of the Metropolitanate of Kiev, itself dependent on the Patriarchate of Constantinople. His historical importance lies in his role as founding bishop who planted Byzantine Christianity in Novgorod, overthrew its chief pagan shrine, and built its first cathedral.