The Many Crafts

The practical genius of Veniaminov: the carpentry and building by which he raised churches with his own hands, from the Holy Ascension at Unalaska to St. Michael’s Cathedral at Sitka; his clock-making and watch-work; the mechanical workshop where he made barrel-organs that were traded to the Spanish missions of California; his cabinetry and furniture; and his systematic meteorological observation — the whole picture of a missionary who could build, repair, measure, and make almost anything, and who taught these skills to the peoples he served.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox / American (canonized 1977)

A Maker by Nature

Among the things that made Veniaminov extraordinary was that he was, by temperament and skill, a maker. From his Irkutsk boyhood — when, in the household of his uncle Deacon Dimitri, he is said to have made water-clocks and sundials — he had an instinct for mechanisms and construction that never left him (see Irkutsk and the Young Priest). On the frontier, where there were no specialists and a priest had to be his own builder, smith, and mechanic, this practical genius became a missionary instrument. He could raise a church, glaze its windows, build its furniture, hang and even make its clock, and teach a whole community of native craftsmen to do the same (Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 3 and 5; Saint Innocent (Veniaminov), Canadian Orthodox History Project [orthodoxcanada.ca]). The range is worth pausing on. The same man was a carpenter and joiner, a stonemason and bricklayer, a blacksmith and metalworker, a glazier, a cabinetmaker, a clock- and instrument-maker, and a builder of mechanical organs — a span of trades that in a European town would have been divided among a dozen guilds, gathered here in one parish priest because the place afforded no one else to do them. He was physically powerful and tireless, and contemporaries remarked on his great stature and strength; the crafts were not a hobby pursued at leisure but heavy, sustained labor carried on alongside the full work of a missionary priest.

The Builder of Churches

The most consequential of his crafts was building. At Unalaska he constructed the Church of the Holy Ascension, consecrated in 1826, very largely with his own hands, and in the course of it trained the Aleuts as carpenters, joiners, bricklayers, stonemasons, blacksmiths, and metalworkers (see The Aleut Mission) (Repose of St. Innocent, Orthodox Church in America [oca.org]; Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 3). This was no small undertaking in a place almost wholly without skilled labor, milled lumber, or hardware. Veniaminov had to be his own architect, master carpenter, and foreman, working largely with driftwood and imported timber in a treeless, storm-battered environment, and to teach from scratch the very trades the work required. On Unalaska he also built his own house, a chapel, and a small meteorological station, so that the priest who served the altar was at the same time the joiner who hung its doors, the smith who forged its ironwork, and the instrument-keeper who recorded the island’s weather from a hut he had raised himself.

At Sitka his building reached its peak in St. Michael’s Cathedral (the Cathedral of St. Michael the Archangel), the great wooden cathedral of Russian America. Designed under Veniaminov’s direction and built between 1844 and 1848 — by which time he had returned to Alaska as bishop — it stood at the heart of Novo-Arkhangelsk; Veniaminov, “an accomplished carpenter,” is credited with overseeing its construction and with building the clock in its bell tower with his own hands (Cathedral of St. Michael the Archangel, Sitka, standard architectural history [referenced in the OCA and Wikipedia accounts]; Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 5). The cathedral was a cruciform timber building crowned with the onion dome and tented bell-tower of the Russian provincial style, fitted out with icons, plate, and vestments brought from Russia; for more than a century it was the mother church of Orthodoxy in America and the most conspicuous monument of the Russian presence on the coast.

The original cathedral burned in 1966, when a fire that swept central Sitka destroyed the building — though townspeople, at considerable risk, carried out most of its irreplaceable icons and furnishings before the structure was lost. It was rebuilt to the same plan and reconsecrated, and the rescued icons returned to it; that it could be so faithfully reconstructed is owed in part to the fact that the building’s dimensions and details, and the craftsmanship behind them, had been carefully recorded. The standing cathedral at Sitka today is thus a reconstruction, but a reconstruction of a church whose design and much of whose original interior trace back to Veniaminov’s hand and eye.

Clocks, Organs, and Cabinetry

Veniaminov’s craft went well beyond construction. The sources consistently list him as a clockmaker and watchmaker who could make and repair timepieces — including, by tradition, the very clock of the Sitka cathedral tower (Saint Innocent (Veniaminov), orthodoxcanada.ca; The Grandeur of Holy Simplicity, OrthoChristian.com [orthochristian.com]). Horology was, in the early nineteenth century, the most exacting of the mechanical arts, demanding a fine sense of gearing, escapement, and proportion and the patience to file and fit parts to close tolerances entirely by hand. That the same man could frame and raise a cathedral and then cut the wheels of the clock that told its hours from the tower — building, that is, at the scale of the whole structure and at the scale of its smallest mechanism — gives some measure of the range of his manual gift. The interest went back, the tradition holds, to his boyhood water-clocks and sundials, and it never lay idle: it made him, on a frontier where a broken mechanism meant a useless one, the indispensable man.

At Sitka he set up a mechanical workshop and there built barrel-organs (hand-organs) — mechanical musical instruments in which a hand-cranked pinned barrel opens a sequence of pipes to play set tunes — which, remarkably, were traded down the coast to the Spanish Franciscan missions of California (Saint Innocent (Veniaminov), orthodoxcanada.ca, the most explicit source for this detail). Such an instrument demanded the full range of his skills at once: the woodwork of the case and pipes, the metalwork of the mechanism, and the fine reckoning of pitch and rhythm needed to pin the barrel so that it played true. The image is a striking one, and tells in miniature the whole interconnected story of the Pacific coast in those years: instruments made by a Russian Orthodox missionary’s own hands at the capital of Russian America, carried south along the trading routes that linked the Russian, Spanish, British, and American spheres, to play in the chapels of the Spanish Catholic missions of Alta California. The same workshop produced cabinetry and furniture; the accounts list him plainly as a furniture-maker, and the workshop served as well to supply and repair the practical needs of the colony (The Grandeur of Holy Simplicity, OrthoChristian.com; Saint Innocent (Veniaminov), orthodoxcanada.ca).

The Weatherman of the North Pacific

Veniaminov’s scientific and practical sides met in his meteorology. On Unalaska he built and operated a small meteorological station, equipped with thermometer, barometer, and instruments to measure the wind, and kept systematic weather records over several years — among the first sustained instrumental weather observations made anywhere in the North Pacific. Sustained instrumental record-keeping of this kind was the cutting edge of the natural science of his day, the raw material from which the new disciplines of climatology and meteorology were then being built; to do it required not only diligence but the manual competence to keep delicate instruments in working order in a corrosive maritime climate, far from any maker who could mend them. He tabulated monthly temperature and barometric data, which he later published in the first volume of his Notes on the Islands of the Unalaska District (see Ethnographer and Linguist) (Saint Innocent (Veniaminov), orthodoxcanada.ca; Notes on the Islands of the Unalaska District, vol. 1). These tables gave the wider scientific world its first reliable picture of the Aleutian climate and remain a datum point for the historical climatology of the region.

He is also credited with repairing barometers and other instruments for the colony — the only man for hundreds of miles who could (The Grandeur of Holy Simplicity, OrthoChristian.com). Here again the crafts and the science were a single competence: the same hands that built the cathedral clock and tuned the barrel-organs could re-true a barometer’s column or mend a broken thermometer, so that the instruments on which both the colony’s practical life and his own scientific work depended kept running where otherwise they would have failed.

The Meaning of the Crafts

It would be easy to treat all this as colorful biography, but it was integral to the mission. Veniaminov’s hands taught what his words preached. By building churches with the Aleuts rather than for them, and by training a generation of native craftsmen, he gave his converts not only the faith but the skills to sustain its material life — to build and repair their own churches, to be self-reliant. The crafts were of a piece with the linguistics and the ethnography and the refusal to coerce: all of it expressed a single conviction that the native peoples of his diocese were capable, dignified, and meant to become a self-standing Christian people in their own right, masters of their own church life (Oleksa, Orthodox Alaska, ch. 4; see The Principles of Mission).

There is, too, a theological cast to the labor that the Orthodox tradition would recognize at once. The faith Veniaminov carried is one of incarnation and of matter taken up into holiness — a faith that builds churches, paints icons, casts bells, and sanctifies the physical world rather than fleeing it. For a priest to raise an altar with his own hands, to forge its ironwork and hang its doors and set the clock that calls the people to prayer, is not a distraction from the spiritual work but an enactment of it: the same hands that lifted the chalice had shaped the place where it was lifted. In this Veniaminov stands in a long line of monastic and missionary builders for whom manual labor and prayer were not opposed but woven together, and his workshop at Sitka and his unfinished church at Unalaska are as much a part of his sanctity as his sermons and translations. The crafts were not the setting of the mission; they were the mission, made visible in wood, iron, and glass.

Nor should it be forgotten that this practical genius served, in the end, the same people his science and his preaching served. The Aleut carpenters and smiths he trained outlived him, and the churches they learned to raise and mend became the centers of communities that have kept the Orthodox faith in Alaska to the present day — a living inheritance, built quite literally on skills a missionary priest taught with his own hands (Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 3 and 5; Oleksa, Orthodox Alaska, ch. 4).

References

Garrett, Paul D. St. Innocent: Apostle to America. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1979. (The building of the Unalaska church and St. Michael’s Cathedral; the crafts and the training of native craftsmen.)
Saint Innocent (Veniaminov). Canadian Orthodox History Project (orthodoxcanada.ca). (Clockmaking; the mechanical workshop and barrel-organs traded to the California missions; cabinetry; the meteorological station and records.)
The Grandeur of Holy Simplicity (Life of St. Innocent). OrthoChristian.com (orthochristian.com). (Veniaminov as clockmaker, organ-builder, furniture-maker, and repairer of instruments.)
Repose of Saint Innocent, Metropolitan of Moscow. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), Lives of the Saints, March 31. (The building of the Unalaska church and the training of the Aleuts in the crafts.)
Oleksa, Michael J. Orthodox Alaska: A Theology of Mission. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1992. (The crafts as part of building a self-standing native church.)
Veniaminov, Ivan (St. Innocent). Notes on the Islands of the Unalaska District, vol. 1. St. Petersburg, 1840. (The published meteorological observations.)