The Flight to Valaam

Around 1474, the young Amos secretly left his Vepsian home on the Oyat and made his way to the Valaam Monastery on Lake Ladoga, where after a period of testing he was tonsured a monk with the name Alexander — the name by which the Church knows him. The account rests on the near-contemporary Life by his disciple Irodion (c. 1545) and is reported as that Life attests it.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox

The Secret Departure

According to Irodion’s Life, Amos’s parents intended him for marriage and a settled life in the world; the young man, resolved instead on the monastic life he had learned of from the Valaam monks, told no one of his purpose and slipped away from home (Irodion, Life of St. Alexander of Svir, c. 1545; “Venerable Alexander, Abbot of Svir,” oca.org/saints/lives/2021/08/30/102423). The traditional date for the departure is around 1474, when he was in his mid-twenties — the Life and the standard accounts place his tonsure in that year (OrthodoxWiki, “Alexander of Svir,” giving tonsure in 1474; oca.org). Some devotional accounts place him younger, at about nineteen, at the time of his flight; the collection reports the range as the sources give it rather than fixing a single figure (per METHODOLOGY §3.5).

[Disputed: the exact age at which Amos left for Valaam. The traditional tonsure date of 1474 (age c. 26, reckoning from a birth in 1448) is the most commonly given; some accounts describe him as leaving home at about nineteen and spending an interval before the tonsure. The Life’s chronology of these early years is not precise, and this collection reports the estimates without collapsing them (Irodion, Life, c. 1545; oca.org; orthodoxwiki.org/Alexander_of_Svir).]

The Meeting on the Road

The Life surrounds the journey with an episode of the kind proper to the saint’s Life: as the young Amos traveled the long and unfamiliar way toward Lake Ladoga, uncertain of the road, he was met — in the Life’s telling — by a mysterious companion, understood in the tradition as an angel, who confirmed him in his purpose and set him on the way to Valaam (Irodion, Life of St. Alexander of Svir, c. 1545; the episode is reported in the OCA and OrthodoxWiki accounts). Per METHODOLOGY §3.5, this is reported as what the Life attests — a providential guidance narrated in the hagiographic idiom — and not as documented event; its function in the Life is to mark the journey to Valaam as divinely willed, of a piece with the vocation the whole Life is written to display.

Arrival at Valaam

The Valaam Monastery — the monastery of the Transfiguration of the Savior on the island of Valaam in the northern waters of Lake Ladoga — was by the later fifteenth century a well-established and austere northern house, a center of the monastic life to which the young from across the Novgorod land were drawn (on Valaam’s standing, see the accounts of the monastery’s history; and The Years at Valaam). Reaching the monastery, Amos asked to be received. The Life describes the customary testing of a would-be monk — a period during which his resolve and his obedience were proved before he was admitted to the tonsure — after which he was made a monk (Irodion, Life, c. 1545; oca.org).

Meanwhile, according to the Life, his father Stephen, grieved at his son’s disappearance, sought him out and at length found him at Valaam, urging him to return home. Amos would not; and the Life relates that his father was so moved by his son’s steadfastness and by the monastic life he saw that he, together with the boy’s mother, in time also embraced the monastic tonsure — Stephen taking the name Sergius and Vassa the name Barbara (Varvara) (Irodion, Life of St. Alexander of Svir, c. 1545; the tradition of the parents’ tonsure is preserved in the standard accounts, orthodoxwiki.org/Alexander_of_Svir; oca.org). This detail — the conversion of the parents who had resisted the vocation — is a recognizable hagiographic motif, and is reported here as the Life gives it (per METHODOLOGY §3.5).

The Tonsure as Alexander

At his tonsure — traditionally in 1474 — Amos received the monastic name Alexander, the name he would carry through the wilderness years, the founding of the monastery, and into the calendar of the Church (Irodion, Life, c. 1545; oca.org, “Venerable Alexander, Abbot of Svir”). The change of name marks, in the monastic tradition, the death of the man of the world and the birth of the monk; from this point the sources speak of Alexander, not Amos.

With the tonsure, the foundations narrated in this section are complete: a Vepsian child of the Oyat, drawn from youth to the monastic life, has fled the world in secret, been received and tested at Valaam, and been made a monk. What follows — the years of ascetic formation on the island, the withdrawal into the trackless forest of the Svir, and the founding of the Holy Trinity Monastery — belongs to the sections that follow (see The Years at Valaam and The Withdrawal to the Svir).

It bears repeating that the whole of this narrative — the secret flight, the meeting on the road, the father’s pursuit and the parents’ tonsure, the testing and the naming — comes to us through Irodion’s single near-contemporary Life. It is a relatively firm source for a saint of the Russian North, written by a disciple within about a dozen years of the saint’s death; but it is hagiography, and this collection reads it as such, pinning its narrative to it as testimony (per METHODOLOGY §3.5; see The Life by Irodion).

See Also

References

  • Irodion (Herodion Kochnev). Life of St. Alexander of Svir. Composed c. 1545. In the Great Menaion Reader of Metropolitan Macarius. (The secret departure; the meeting on the road; the arrival, testing, and tonsure at Valaam; the tradition of the parents’ tonsure as Sergius and Barbara.)
  • “Venerable Alexander, Abbot of Svir.” Orthodox Church in America. oca.org/saints/lives/2021/08/30/102423.
  • “Alexander of Svir.” OrthodoxWiki. orthodoxwiki.org/Alexander_of_Svir. (Tonsure in 1474; the name Alexander.)