04 — Vyritsa
The move, around 1930, to the small town of Vyritsa south of Leningrad, and the hidden eldership of the 1930s: a bedridden monk in a wooden house, ministering through the years of the Great Terror to the stream of visitors who found their way to his door. These files trace the retirement that gave the elder his name and the perilous decade in which his fame quietly grew.
Tradition: Russian Orthodox (20th-c. elder; Soviet period)
Vyritsa is the place that named him. A dacha town on the Oredezh river, about sixty kilometers south of Leningrad, it became, around 1930, the elder’s home for the last two decades of his life — and the center of a quiet ministry conducted from a sickbed through the most dangerous years of the Soviet period. This section treats the retirement itself, with its mixture of failing health and the closing of the Lavra, and then the eldership of the 1930s, carried on amid the purges and arrests of the Great Terror.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| Retirement to Vyritsa | The move c.1930 to Vyritsa for his failing health, as the Lavra closed; the wooden house, the household, the schemanun Seraphima; the form his life now took. |
| The Years of the Great Terror | His hidden eldership through the purges of the 1930s; the visitors who came; the danger of such a ministry in the years of mass arrest; what the biographies relate of this period. |
See Also
- The Lavra under Assault — the closure that drove him out
- The War Years — Vyritsa under occupation, the next phase
- Orthodoxy: Soviet Persecution — the Great Terror and the church under Stalin
References
- Filimonov, Valentin P. Вырицкий старец преподобный Серафим [Vyritsa Elder St. Seraphim]. St. Petersburg, 1990s–2000s.
- Pospielovsky, Dimitry. The Russian Church under the Soviet Regime, 1917–1982. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1984.
- Davis, Nathaniel. A Long Walk to Church. 2nd ed. Boulder, CO: Westview, 2003.