Program

NYS Historic

Subject

People, Religion

Location

13 E 97th St, New York, NY 10029, USA

Lat/Long

40.788239, -73.954273

Grant Recipient

Russian American Cultural Heritage Center

Tikhon of Moscow (1865-1925) was born in Pskov, Russia as Vasily Ivanovich Bellavin. He was educated at Petrograd Ecclesiastical Academy. When he took monastic vows in 1891, he was given the name Tikhon in honor of Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk. In 1898, he was named archbishop of North America and the Aleutian Islands for the Russian Orthodox Church and served in that capacity until 1907. On May 22, 1901, he consecrated Saint Nicholas Cathedral, the first Russian Orthodox Church in New York City, laying the cornerstone of the building at its site on Ninety-seventh Street near Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. He later moved the American headquarters of the Russian Orthodox diocese from San Francisco to New York and lived in a suite of apartments in the rectory at St. Nicholas.

Archbishop Tikhon spent nearly 10 years in America before becoming the bishop of Yaroslavl, Russia in 1907, and then the archbishop of Lithuania and Vilna in 1913. He was elected the 11th Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia in July of 1917, by a joint vote of clergy and laypeople. In May 1923, the Soviet government arrested him and accused him of treason for aiding counter-revolutionists. Though the trial was dropped, they eventually unfrocked him. In 1989, he was canonized as a saint by the Russian Orthodox Church and is also recognized as a saint by the Episcopal Church in America. His remains, considered a holy relic, rest in the cathedral of the Donskoy Monastery in Moscow.