Irkutsk and the Young Priest (1797–1823)

The Siberian beginnings of St. Innocent: birth in 1797 at the village of Anginskoye in the Irkutsk hinterland as Ioann Popov, son of a poor church server; the death of his father and the care of his uncle; the Irkutsk seminary, where the surname Veniaminov was conferred on him; his marriage, his ordination as deacon and then priest at the Church of the Annunciation in Irkutsk; and the 1823 summons from the Holy Synod for a priest to go to the Aleutian Islands — a call no one in the diocese would answer, until he did.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox / American (canonized 1977)

Anga: A Siberian Childhood

The future Apostle to America was born Ioann (John) Evseyevich Popov on 26 August 1797 (Old Style) in the village of Anginskoye (Anga), in the Verkholensk district of the Irkutsk province, deep in eastern Siberia (Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 1; Repose of St. Innocent, Orthodox Church in America [oca.org]). His father, Evsevii (Euseby) Popov, was a poor church server — a sacristan and reader (ponomar) — at the village church of the Holy Prophet Elias; his mother was named Thekla (Fekla). The family belonged to the lowest, hereditary rank of the Russian clergy estate, a world of rural poverty in which a clerical son’s path lay almost inevitably toward the seminary and the priesthood.

The boy’s ailing father began to teach him his letters early — the tradition holds, from about the age of four or five — before dying in 1803, when the child was six (Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 1; Saint Innocent (Veniaminov), Canadian Orthodox History Project [orthodoxcanada.ca]). The orphaned boy was taken in and raised by his uncle, Deacon Dimitri (Dmitri) Popov, who continued his education. From this uncle, an able and curious man, the young Ioann seems to have absorbed the lifelong appetite for practical skill — for mechanisms, clocks, and craft — that would later mark him out among missionaries (see The Many Crafts).

It is worth pausing on the world into which this child was born, for it shaped everything that followed. Anga lay in the Lena river country northeast of Lake Baikal, a thinly settled corner of eastern Siberia where Russian peasant and clerical families lived alongside the indigenous Buryat and Evenki peoples of the taiga. The Irkutsk province was itself a frontier — the administrative gateway through which Russia’s eastward expansion passed toward the Pacific and toward the new American colonies — and the diocese of Irkutsk, erected only in 1727, was among the youngest and most far-flung in the Russian Church, responsible for a territory of almost unimaginable extent (Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 1; Black, Russians in Alaska, on the Siberian context of the eastern mission). A boy raised in this borderland grew up accustomed to distance, to hard travel, and to the coexistence of Russian Orthodoxy with peoples of other tongues and ways — an unconscious apprenticeship for the apostolate that lay ahead.

The poverty of the Popov household was real and not merely a hagiographer’s flourish. The lowest rank of the parish clergy — readers, sextons, and sacristans like Evsevii Popov — lived close to the subsistence level of the peasants among whom they served, supported by small parish dues and the labor of their own hands on a scrap of glebe land. The death of the father in 1803 left the family without even that precarious income, and the survival of the children depended on the charity of kin. That the orphan should be lodged with his uncle the deacon was the ordinary mechanism by which the clerical estate reproduced itself: sons followed fathers and uncles into the Church not by free vocation alone but by the iron logic of an inherited, semi-closed caste (Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 1).

The Seminary and the Name Veniaminov

In 1807, at the age of ten, Ioann was enrolled in the Irkutsk Theological Seminary on a meager state stipend (Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 1; Innocent (Veniaminov), Boston University School of Theology, History of Missiology [bu.edu/missiology]). He was a strong student, and it was here that he received the surname under which he would be known for most of his life.

The Irkutsk seminary of the early nineteenth century was a spartan institution, training the parish clergy of an enormous diocese on a curriculum that mixed Church Slavonic, Latin, rhetoric, theology, and a smattering of philosophy. Discipline was severe and the life austere; for a poor boy on a state stipend the seminary was at once a hard school and the one ladder out of grinding rural poverty. The young Veniaminov took to it. He was remembered as quick, diligent, and — already — restlessly practical, a student as interested in how things were made and how they worked as in the texts set before him. The tradition preserves the picture of a youth who built clocks and tinkered with mechanisms in his spare hours, the same hands that would one day raise a church on a treeless island and fashion the furniture for it (Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 1; see The Many Crafts). This conjunction — a first-rate theological mind joined to a craftsman’s eye and a frontiersman’s hardihood — was the rare equipment he would carry to the Aleutians.

The change of name is well attested and is the kind of detail the tradition has preserved with care. By the practice of the Russian clerical schools, surnames were freely assigned and reassigned to seminarians. When the much-loved Bishop Veniamin (Benjamin) of Irkutsk died in 1814, the seminary rector, wishing to honor his memory, conferred the bishop’s name on his most promising pupil: the boy ceased to be Popov and became Veniaminov (Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 1; Saint Innocent (Veniaminov), orthodoxcanada.ca, which dates the official receipt of the surname to 1814). It is worth keeping this rename distinct from the monastic name he would take a quarter-century later: in 1840, on becoming a monk, he was given the name Innocent in honor of a different figure, St. Innocent (Kulchitsky) of Irkutsk (see Widowed and Consecrated). The two names honor two different Irkutsk hierarchs and should not be conflated.

Marriage and Ordination

Veniaminov did not take the monastic road that the seminary’s best students often followed. In his final years of study he married Ekaterina (Catherine) Ivanovna, the daughter of a priest, on 29 April 1817 (Old Style) (Saint Innocent (Veniaminov), orthodoxcanada.ca; Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 1). His was therefore the path of the white (married) clergy, the ordinary parish priesthood — the world from which he would be lifted into the episcopate only by the early death of his wife.

He was ordained deacon on 18 May 1817 by Bishop Michael (Burdukov) of Irkutsk, and assigned to the Church of the Annunciation (Blagoveshchensk Church) in Irkutsk (Repose of St. Innocent, oca.org; Saint Innocent (Veniaminov), orthodoxcanada.ca). [Disputed: most accounts give the diaconal ordination as 18 May 1817, following the OCA and the Garrett-based lives; one secondary source gives 13 May 1817 — the divergence is of days only.] Four years later, having served as a deacon and as a teacher in the local clerical school, he was ordained to the priesthood on 18 May 1821, again by Bishop Michael, and continued at the Annunciation church (Repose of St. Innocent, oca.org). The Annunciation parish would remain a touchstone for him for the rest of his life: decades later, when a new Russian city rose on the Amur, it would be named Blagoveshchensk — “Annunciation” — in memory of the Irkutsk church where his ministry had begun (see The Immense Diocese).

Between his ordination as deacon in 1817 and his ordination as priest in 1821, Veniaminov also taught in the Irkutsk clerical school, an experience that joined his theological learning to the daily, practical work of instruction — and that foreshadowed the schoolmaster-missionary he would become on Unalaska, where catechesis and literacy went hand in hand (Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 1). Those years gave him not only the standing of a respected city priest but a settled domestic life: a wife from a clerical family, a household, and the ordinary round of liturgy, confession, and pastoral care in a busy parish. It was, by the measure of the Russian clergy of his day, a fortunate and stable situation.

By the early 1820s, then, Fr. Ioann Veniaminov was a settled, respected, and gifted young Irkutsk priest — married, a father, secure in a good city parish, with a reputation for learning and for an unusual practical genius. There was nothing in his situation to suggest the wandering apostolate that was about to claim him.

The Call No One Would Answer (1823)

In early 1823 the Holy Synod, prompted by the Russian-American Company — the chartered commercial monopoly that governed Russia’s North American colonies — directed the diocese of Irkutsk to send a priest to Unalaska, in the Aleutian Islands, to serve the scattered Russian traders and the Unangan (Aleut) people, many of whom had already been baptized by earlier missionaries (Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 2; Innocent (Veniaminov), bu.edu/missiology). The Aleutian assignment was a sentence to the edge of the world: a voyage of thousands of miles across Siberia and the North Pacific to a treeless, storm-battered archipelago. No one in the diocese would go. “One by one,” the lives record, the priests of Irkutsk declined the appointment.

The reluctance is easy to understand. The Russian-American Company, chartered in 1799, ran its colonies as a fur-trading enterprise, and the spiritual care of the colonies’ native and Russian inhabitants was, for the Company, a secondary obligation grudgingly met. A priest sent to Unalaska faced not only the months-long ordeal of the journey but a posting at the literal end of the empire — no Russian society to speak of, a difficult climate, dependence on the Company for transport and supply, and the near-certainty of years cut off from family, books, and brother clergy. For a married priest with children, it could mean uprooting an entire household to a place from which return was uncertain. That the appointment went unfilled was, in human terms, the ordinary response of ordinary men to an extraordinary demand (Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 2; Black, Russians in Alaska, on the Company and the colonial clergy).

Fr. Ioann at first declined as well. What changed his mind was an encounter with a layman from the islands whose testimony to the Aleuts’ eagerness for the faith pierced his reluctance — and this is a point where the sources must be handled with care. The best-attested account names the man as Ivan Kryukov, a long-resident layman (some accounts call him an Aleut) of the Unalaska district, whose description of the islanders’ spiritual hunger so moved Veniaminov that he reversed himself and volunteered (The Grandeur of Holy Simplicity, OrthoChristian.com [orthochristian.com/173078]). [Disputed: a number of popular accounts attribute the volunteering to the influence of the old Aleut Ivan Smirennikov of Akun Island; this conflicts with the chronology, since the Smirennikov episode belongs to 1828, after Veniaminov was already on the islands (see The Aleut Mission). The Garrett-based scholarship keeps the two episodes distinct; “Ivan Kryukov” is the better-attested name for the man who moved him to volunteer.]

Whatever the precise name, the decision was made, and it was decisive. A comfortable Irkutsk priest, with a wife, an infant son, and an aged mother to consider, chose to carry his whole household to the far side of the Pacific. The journey that followed — overland across Siberia and by sea to the Aleutians — is told in its own place (see The Voyage to Unalaska). The man who set out was twenty-five years old. He would not see Russia again for fifteen years.

References

Garrett, Paul D. St. Innocent: Apostle to America. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1979. (Birth 1797 at Anga; the Popov family; the seminary and the Veniaminov rename; marriage 1817; ordinations; the 1823 call and the decision to volunteer.)
Repose of Saint Innocent, Metropolitan of Moscow, Enlightener of the Aleuts and Apostle to America. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), Lives of the Saints, March 31. (Birth date; ordinations of 1817 and 1821 at the Annunciation church, Irkutsk.)
Saint Innocent (Veniaminov). Canadian Orthodox History Project (orthodoxcanada.ca). (Detailed Old-Style chronology, drawn from Garrett: father’s death 1803; uncle Dimitri; surname received 1814; marriage 29 April 1817.)
Innocent (Veniaminov), Ivan Popov-Veniaminov (1797–1879). Boston University School of Theology, History of Missiology (bu.edu/missiology). (Concise scholarly summary based on Garrett; the Russian-American Company context and the 1823 call.)
The Grandeur of Holy Simplicity (Life of St. Innocent), Parts 1–2. OrthoChristian.com (orthochristian.com/173078). (The encounter with Ivan Kryukov that moved him to volunteer.)