Local Veneration

The cult of St. Herman before the Church glorified him: the contested date of his repose, the grave and chapel on Spruce Island, the unbroken veneration of the Alaskan native faithful through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the long guardianship of Archimandrite Gerasim (Schmaltz), the centennial of 1935–36, and the pilgrimage tradition that carried the saint’s memory across more than a century until 1970.

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

The Veneration That Preceded the Glorification

St. Herman is one of the relatively few modern saints whose formal glorification (1970) merely ratified a veneration that had run continuously, and locally, for more than a century before it. The cult was never imposed from above. It grew at a grave on a small island at the edge of the Russian-American colonies, kept alive first by the native Alutiiq and Aleut faithful Herman had served, then by a succession of solitary clergy who came to guard his memory. By the time the Church acted, “Father Herman” had been honored as a saint by the people of Kodiak and Spruce Island for generations (Oleksa, Orthodox Alaska; OCA, “The Saint Herman Pilgrimage in Alaska,” oca.org). This file describes that veneration; the miracle accounts that fed it are treated in Miracles in Life and After, and the Church’s recognizing act in The 1970 Glorification.

The Contested Date of Repose

The first thing a careful account of the veneration must settle is also the first thing the sources disagree about: when Herman died. Two datings stand side by side, and this compendium reports both rather than collapsing them.

The 1867 Valaam Life — and the older devotional and liturgical tradition descending from it — dates the repose to the evening of November 15, 1836. This is the date used in the narrative of his death and the pillar of light, and it is the figure the pious tradition carried for a century (St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, Life; see Miracles in Life and After, which narrates the death under this dating).
The documentary record points instead to 1837, and to a distinction between the day of death and the day of burial. Reading the contemporary dispatch of the Russian-American Company manager Kupreyanov to the Bishop of Irkutsk, the modern scholar Sergei Korsun concludes that Herman reposed on 15/28 November 1837 and was buried on 13/26 December 1837, the burial day having later been remembered as the day of death (Korsun, Herman: A Wilderness Saint, 2012; see the worked analysis in What Is Attested).

The Orthodox Church in America commemorates the repose on December 13 (December 25 New Style), the date fixed by liturgical usage from the burial day (OCA, “Repose of Venerable Herman of Alaska, Wonderworker of All America,” oca.org).

[Disputed: the year and day of St. Herman’s repose are given differently by the two source classes. The 1867 Valaam Life dates the death to 15 November 1836 and the liturgical tradition commemorates 13 December (the OCA’s December 13 / 25 N.S. feast of the repose); Korsun, working from Kupreyanov’s contemporary dispatch to the Bishop of Irkutsk, dates the death to 15/28 November 1837 with burial on 13 December 1837 (Korsun, Herman: A Wilderness Saint, 2012). The discrepancy is real and turns on a genuine documentary correction of a devotional date; this compendium reports both and does not collapse the liturgical commemoration into the archival date.]

The veneration described below does not depend on resolving the date. Whether 1836 or 1837, the grave was the same grave, and the people who kept it did not wait for the archives.

The Grave and the Chapel on Spruce Island

Herman was buried where he had lived — at his hermitage of “New Valaam” on Spruce Island, across a narrow strait from Kodiak (see New Valaam). His disciples buried him without a priest present, laying him near his cell. The grave became at once the center of the cult: the Alutiiq carried soil from it and water from the spring near the hermitage, both associated with healings (St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, Life; OCA, “The Saint Herman Pilgrimage in Alaska,” oca.org).

Over the grave a chapel was eventually raised. The Sts. Sergius and Herman of Valaam Chapel — named for the founders of Valaam Monastery, Herman’s own house of profession — was built on Spruce Island in 1894, the centennial year of the 1794 Valaam mission’s arrival, and stood directly over Herman’s burial place (orthodoxcanada.ca, “Saint Herman of Alaska”; the chapel’s dedication binds the Alaskan saint to the Russian monastery that formed him). It was beneath this chapel that Herman’s relics lay until they were translated to Kodiak at the 1970 glorification (see The 1970 Glorification).

The Aleut Veneration Through the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

The deepest root of the cult is the memory of the native faithful. Herman had spent his last decades as the Aleuts’ defender against the Russian-American Company and as the teacher of the orphanage children he gathered on Spruce Island (see Defender of the Aleuts and Orphanage and Flock). After his death the Alutiiq community of Spruce Island, Afognak, and Kodiak kept his grave, told his story, and treated him as their intercessor — a continuity Fr. Michael Oleksa identifies as itself a form of evidence: Orthodox practice survived in the Alutiiq villages for generations precisely because the people’s memory of Herman was deep and unbroken (Oleksa, Orthodox Alaska; Alaskan Missionary Spirituality).

The earliest recorded act of official veneration belongs to this same period and confirms it. In 1842, the newly consecrated Bishop Innocent (Veniaminov) — later St. Innocent, Enlightener of the Aleuts — was caught in a storm at sea and, the tradition holds, vowed that if delivered he would serve a memorial for the Elder Herman; delivered, he kept the vow, serving a panikhida at the grave on Spruce Island (St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, Life; cf. Miracles in Life and After, which notes this as the first recorded act of official veneration). A hierarch petitioning a dead monk and then keeping his vow is the cult’s institutional beginning, but it rested on a popular devotion that was already there.

Through the rest of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth — across the 1867 sale of Alaska to the United States and the long lean decades that followed for the native Church (see Alaskan Orthodoxy After Herman) — the grave was tended and visited. Materials gathered from Herman’s disciples and the Alutiiq community in this period fed the 1867 Valaam Life itself; the cult and the biography grew together (orthodoxcanada.ca, “Saint Herman of Alaska”).

Archimandrite Gerasim (Schmaltz), Guardian of the Cult

The most important single figure in the modern survival of the veneration is Archimandrite Gerasim (Schmaltz) (1888–1969), who for the last decades of his life lived alone on Spruce Island as guardian of Herman’s grave. Born Michael Schmaltz on October 28, 1888, in Tula province, Russia, raised on the lives of the saints, he came to Alaska as a missionary and served some eighteen years as a parish priest at Afognak before moving to Spruce Island in 1935 to take up the solitary, hermit’s life at the place of Herman’s repose (roca.org, “St. Herman’s Guardian — Archimandrite Gerasim Schmaltz”; orthochristian.com no. 63356).

Fr. Gerasim’s guardianship — which lasted from 1935 until his death on October 12/13, 1969 — spanned the cult’s most fragile decades. He maintained the chapel and grounds (the record notes that in July 1936 he undertook to clean and paint the church), kept the grave, received the pilgrims who came across the strait, and, through the long jurisdictional confusion that followed the 1920s Russian church schism, held to his commemorations when much of Alaskan Orthodoxy was in disarray. He also became a link in the relics’ later history: a particle of St. Herman’s relics that Fr. Gerasim had given years earlier to Holy Trinity Monastery at Jordanville was brought back for the ROCOR glorification in 1970 (roca.org, “St. Herman’s Guardian”; ROCOR Synod, “The Glorification of St. Herman,” synod.com). Within the tradition Fr. Gerasim is widely identified as the fulfillment of Herman’s own prophecy that “a monk similar to me, fleeing the glory of men, will come and will live on Spruce Island” — an identification this compendium reports as a pious reading of the prophecy, attested in twentieth-century accounts, not a claim of the 1867 Life (see Miracles in Life and After). Fr. Gerasim was himself buried on Spruce Island, near the saint he had guarded.

The Centennial (1935–36) and the Examination of the Grave

The centennial of Herman’s repose — reckoned from the Life‘s 1836 date and falling in 1935–36 — coincided with Fr. Gerasim’s arrival and with a renovation of the chapel that became, in effect, an examination of the grave. In 1935 the foundation of the Sts. Sergius and Herman chapel was restored, and in the course of the work Herman’s relics were unearthed and reverently placed in a new coffin within the church (orthodoxcanada.ca, “Saint Herman of Alaska”; roca.org, “St. Herman’s Guardian”). The centennial passed not with formal hierarchical ceremony but with a quiet attention to the grave by its new guardian — a fitting marker of a veneration that had always been local and undramatic. It was also in this period, on the eve of the Second World War, that the Metropolia and ROCOR — not yet in their later estrangement — first cooperated toward a possible glorification, a movement dated by later accounts to 1939 that would not bear fruit for three more decades (christthesavioroca.org, St. Herman resource page; johnsanidopoulos.com, “40th Anniversary of the Glorification of St. Herman”).

The Pilgrimage Tradition

Pilgrimage to Spruce Island long predates any organized program: the faithful came to the grave, the spring, and the chapel across the strait from Kodiak throughout the century of local veneration. The festive services at the 1970 glorification gave this devotion a new focus, and in 1973, when Bishop Gregory (Afonsky) was consecrated for Alaska, he instituted the annual pilgrimage to Kodiak and Spruce Island timed to St. Herman’s August feast — held every year since, drawing Orthodox Christians from across America to the island, the spring, and the hermitage (OCA, “The Saint Herman Pilgrimage in Alaska,” oca.org). The continuity is exact: the people still come to the place the Aleuts kept and Fr. Gerasim guarded. The shape of the pilgrimage today is treated in Legacy.

References

St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, trans. The Life of Our Holy Father Saint Herman of Alaska (the 1867 Valaam Life; repr. in Little Russian Philokalia, vol. 3). Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood. (The November 15, 1836 repose date, the grave, the spring, and the 1842 Innocent memorial.)
Korsun, Sergei. Herman: A Wilderness Saint — From Sarov, Russia, to Kodiak, Alaska. Trans. and ed. Lydia Black and Daniel Marshall. Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Publications, 2012. (The 1837 documentary dating from Kupreyanov’s dispatch.)
Oleksa, Michael. Orthodox Alaska: A Theology of Mission. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1992; and Alaskan Missionary Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1987) — the survival of Alutiiq Orthodox memory.
Orthodox Church in America. “Repose of Venerable Herman of Alaska, Wonderworker of All America” and “The Saint Herman Pilgrimage in Alaska — A Long Tradition.” oca.org.
“St. Herman’s Guardian — Archimandrite Gerasim Schmaltz.” roca.org (Orthodox America, vol. IV, no. 35); repr. orthochristian.com no. 63356. (Fr. Gerasim’s birth, arrival in 1935, the 1935 examination of the relics, and his repose in 1969.)
Canadian Orthodox History Project. “Saint Herman of Alaska.” orthodoxcanada.ca (the 1894 chapel, the 1935 relics examination, used as a locator to the Valaam material and Korsun).
Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia. “The Glorification of St. Herman of Alaska.” synod.com (the Jordanville relic particle given by Fr. Gerasim).
christthesavioroca.org, St. Herman of Alaska Special Resource Page; johnsanidopoulos.com, “40th Anniversary of the Glorification of St. Herman of Alaska” (2010) — the 1939 inter-jurisdictional cooperation.