Saint Avvakum

Avvakum Petrov (Russian: Аввакум Петров; 20 November 1620/1621 – 14 April 1682; also spelled Awakum) was a Russian Old Believer and protopope of the Kazan Cathedral on Red Square who led the opposition to Patriarch Nikon's reforms of the Russian Orthodox Church. His autobiography and letters to the tsar and other Old Believers such as Feodosia Morozova are considered masterpieces of 17th-century Russian literature. He was born in Grigorovo, in present-day Nizhny Novgorod. Starting in 1652 Nikon, as the patriarch of the Russian Church, initiated a wide range of reforms in Russian liturgy and theology. These reforms were intended mostly to bring the Russian Church into line with the other Eastern Orthodox Churches of Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Avvakum and others strongly rejected these changes. They saw them as a corruption of the Russian Church, which they considered to be the true Church of God. The other churches were more closely related to Constantinople in their liturgies. Avvakum argued that Constantinople fell to the Turks because of these heretical beliefs and practices. For his opposition to the reforms, Avvakum was repeatedly imprisoned. First he was exiled to Siberia, to the city of Tobolsk, and partook in an exploration expedition under Afanasii Pashkov to the Chinese border. In 1664, after Nikon was no longer patriarch, Avvakum was allowed to return to Moscow, and was then exiled again to Mezen. He was then allowed to return to Moscow again for the Church Council of 1666–67, but due to his continued opposition to the reforms, he was exiled to Pustozyorsk, above the Arctic Circle, in 1667. For the last fourteen years of his life, he was imprisoned there in a pit or dugout (a sunken, log-framed hut). He and his accomplices were finally executed by being burned in a log house. The spot where he was burned has been commemorated by an ornate wooden cross.