The Orphanage and the Flock

At New Valaam, St. Herman gathered around himself a community of the most vulnerable: the orphaned Aleut children, for whom he built a school and whom he fed from his own garden. With his disciple Sophia Vlasova as his helper, he taught them the faith and church singing, gathered the wider Alutiiq community for prayer on Sundays and feasts, cared for the sick through the epidemics, and kept the spring at the heart of the island. This file describes Herman’s pastoral household and his guarded relations with the priests who came to Kodiak in his last years.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (glorified by the OCA and ROCOR, 1970)

A School for the Orphans

The center of Herman’s life on Spruce Island was not his own asceticism but the children. The epidemics and dislocations of the colonial period had left many Alutiiq children orphaned, and Herman made their care the practical work of his hermitage. The Life records that “with this aim he created a school not far from his cell for the orphaned Aleut children” (1867 Valaam Life; Little Russian Philokalia vol. 3, St. Herman Press; orthochristian.com, The Life of Our Holy Father Saint Herman of Alaska).

The school was no abstract charity but a household economy of self-sacrifice. The same source continues: “All that he was able to acquire through his toil in his garden, he utilized to provide food, clothing, and books for his orphans” (1867 Valaam Life; orthochristian.com). The vegetables Herman raised by his own labor (see New Valaam) went not to ease his own diet — which remained severe — but to sustain the children. He taught them himself: “he himself taught them the Law of God and church singing,” catechism and the chant of the services together, so that the orphans were formed at once in doctrine and in worship (1867 Valaam Life; orthochristian.com).

Sophia Vlasova, His Helper

In this work Herman did not labor alone. His chief helper was a young Alutiiq woman, Sophia Vlasova, who became his disciple and the supervisor of the children’s life. The Life preserves Herman’s own account of her coming, in a letter of his that Yanovsky kept: “Recently, after Pascha, a young girl about twenty years of age, who knows Russian well, came to me. Having heard of the Incarnation of the Son of God and of eternal life, she became so inflamed with love for Jesus Christ that she does not wish to leave me” (Herman, letter preserved by Yanovsky, in the 1867 Valaam Life; orthodoxcanada.ca, Saint Herman of Alaska).

[Disputed: the date of Sophia’s arrival is given as 1820 in the OCA chronology (“a 20-year-old Aleut woman, Sophia Vlassov, becomes St. Herman’s disciple”), consistent with Herman’s “after Pascha” letter (OCA, Chronology of the Life of St. Herman of Alaska, entry for 1820); her surname is variously spelled Vlasova / Vlassov in the English sources.] Sophia remained at the school until Herman’s death, watching over the good conduct of the children who studied there (1867 Valaam Life; orthochristian.com). Herman’s regard for her was such that, on his deathbed, he willed her to continue living on Spruce Island and to be buried at his feet upon her death — a final disposition that joined his closest collaborator to his own resting place (1867 Valaam Life; orthochristian.com, The Life of Our Holy Father Saint Herman of Alaska).

Sunday Gatherings and Catechesis

Beyond the resident children, Herman drew the wider Alutiiq community to himself for worship and instruction. “With this in mind, he would gather the Aleuts for prayer in the chapel near his cell on Sundays and feast days” (1867 Valaam Life; orthochristian.com). On these occasions the unordained monk did what an unordained monk could do: he could not celebrate the Liturgy or administer the sacraments, but he led the people in prayer, read and expounded the Scriptures and the Law of God, and taught the singing of the services. The wooden chapel beside his cell thus became, for the people of Spruce Island and their neighbors, a place of regular catechesis under a teacher who asked nothing of them and gave them everything he had.

This pattern — the gathered community, the simple chapel, the lay catechist at its center — is the seed of what would become a durable native Orthodoxy in the Alutiiq villages, long outlasting the Russian departure of 1867. Herman’s catechesis was not a substitute for the priesthood he had refused but the patient groundwork on which a later, ordained native clergy would build.

The Spring and the Care of the Body

Herman’s care for his flock extended to their bodily sustenance, and the Life records this through the small spring-fed stream that ran down the island to the sea. “In the middle of Spruce Island a little stream runs from the mountain into the sea, the mouth of which is continually washed by breakers” (1867 Valaam Life; orthochristian.com). In the spring, when the small fish ran up from the sea, “the Elder raked away some of the sand at its mouth so that the fish could enter,” and from this run he drew food, sending his disciple to gather fish when there was need (orthodoxcanada.ca, Saint Herman of Alaska). The detail is humble and exact: the same hands that bore the chains and dug the cave cleared a fish-run to feed the children. The spring on Spruce Island is venerated to this day, and the tradition of its blessing belongs to the pilgrimage that grew up around the saint’s hermitage.

Care During the Epidemics

The defining test of Herman’s pastorate was pestilence. When the epidemic of 1819 swept the Alutiiq settlements with catastrophic mortality, Herman, by the testimony of Yanovsky, went tirelessly among the sick for the whole month the disease raged, exhorting them to patience, prayer, and repentance, and preparing the dying for death — and the tradition holds he was the only Russian to go among them (see Conflict with the Company; 1867 Valaam Life; orthodoxcanada.ca, Saint Herman of Alaska). The same disposition that filled his garden for the orphans drove him into the houses of the dying: the care of the flock was, for Herman, a single undivided thing, whether it meant teaching a child to sing or holding the hand of a parent in the last extremity.

Relations with the Later Clergy

Herman’s last years on Spruce Island coincided with the arrival of resident priests at Kodiak, and his relations with them were marked by a certain wariness — documented, but to be reported only as far as the records warrant. In 1824 the priest Frumenty (Frumentius) Mordovsky arrived at Kodiak to give pastoral care to the Orthodox of the region (OCA, Chronology of the Life of St. Herman of Alaska, entry for 1824; orthodoxcanada.ca, Saint Herman of Alaska). In 1825 a party of Company employees, accompanied by the colonial administrator and by Fr. Frumenty Mordovsky, came to Spruce Island to investigate the activities and quarters of Father Herman (orthodoxcanada.ca, Saint Herman of Alaska).

What the sources attest is the fact of the investigation, not a settled judgment of the priest’s motives. The episode reflects the structural tension of Herman’s whole life: an unordained hermit of immense moral authority, beloved of the native people and inconvenient to the colonial administration, drew the scrutiny of the very institutions — Company and, at moments, clergy acting alongside it — whose treatment of the Alutiiq he had long opposed. The Life and the chronology record the investigation soberly; they do not make of Fr. Frumenty a villain, and neither should this account. The documented point is that Herman’s standing among the native people was such that the colony thought it worth sending an official party, priest included, to look into a hermit on a small island — and that the hermit’s authority survived the scrutiny intact, as the veneration that gathered at his grave from his death in 1837 onward would prove.

References

The Life of Our Holy Father Saint Herman of Alaska (the 1867 Valaam Life), reprinted in Little Russian Philokalia, vol. 3: St. Herman of Alaska. Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood / St. Herman Press. Online edition: orthochristian.com/47984.html (the school, Sophia Vlasova, the Sunday gatherings, the spring, the deathbed disposition).
Canadian Orthodox History Project. “Saint Herman of Alaska.” orthodoxcanada.ca (used to locate Herman’s letter on Sophia, the fish-run at the spring, and the 1824/1825 arrival and investigation involving Fr. Frumenty Mordovsky).
Orthodox Church in America. “Chronology of the Life of St. Herman of Alaska.” oca.org (used to locate the 1820 entry on Sophia Vlasova and the 1824 arrival of Frumenty Mordovsky).
Oleksa, Michael. Orthodox Alaska: A Theology of Mission. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1992.
Korsun, Sergei, and Lydia Black (trans./ed.). Herman: A Wilderness Saint — From Sarov, Russia, to Kodiak, Alaska. Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Publications, 2012.