Saint Sergius of Radonezh, His Trinity Monastery, and the Formation of the Russian Identity

Chapter Seven—Interment at Trinity

Chapter Seven Interment at Trinity In a donation charter of 1523/24, having requested prayers for his soul and those of his ancestors, and that he be tonsured, Gorianin Mordvinov, a landowner in Rostov, added, “And [when] God sends for [my] soul, for me Gorianin . . . , then bury me at the house of the Life-giving Trinity.”1 Gorianin was not the first person to be buried at Trinity; nor was he the first of its patrons to make such a request. Trinity’s inventory, published in 1880, of those buried at Trinity, together with the location of their graves, contains names of many persons from whom we have no requests. By 2002 excavations revealed over 275 complete or fragmentary gravestones in the collection of the Sergiev Posad Museum-Reserve and more digging will undoubtedly uncover more. These finds confirm the burial sites of some of those in the inventory, but also contain names of the interred about whom the inventory is silent.2 We probably will never have an inventory of Trinity’s graves that is accurate and complete. One reason is that we cannot expect to recover anywhere near the sum of stones that were laid down or to decipher fully inscriptions on fragmentary finds. The markers were of soft limestone and highly perishable. Nor did it help that eighteenth-century builders used old gravestones as construction material.3 Nevertheless, the body count in the inventory alone, amounting to 952 names, leads us to the realization that in 1880 at Trinity the dead outnumbered the living by a ratio of three or four to one! Even for the period from Trinity’s foundation to the beginning of the smuta in 1605 the number of burials within Trinity’s walls recorded in the inventory, in chronicles, or on gravestones, 339, was far greater than the 220 who then resided at Trinity.4 By any standard we may conclude that in Muscovite society the cohabitation of the living and the dead at Trinity and other holy sites was accepted as normal. SAINT SERGIUS OF RAD ONEzH 204 * From late antiquity the conviction that burial in hallowed ground was beneficial for the salvation of one’s soul became rooted in Christian tradition . This being so, it is not the least surprising that in the Middle Ages a monastery might become a favored burial site, particularly if it contained the relics of a saint. Saints, after all, “hovered near the ultimate source of all power.”5 Might not that same power be inherent in their relics? Relics made a house, observed Barbara Rosenwein writing about the monastery of Cluny in Burgundy, a sacred place that “could mediate between the natural and supernatural world.” In western Christendom the dead had prominent places in and around churches and monasteries and elites marked such sites with gravestones and sarcophagi into the modern era. The same could be said about the Trinity Monastery that housed the relics of its founder, Sergius of Radonezh. The Orthodox Church in Rus’ introduced norms for burial in and around urban churches and at proliferating monastic establishments in the fourteenth century.6 We know too that requests for burial were an element of the new culture of memorializing the dead. “Gravemarkers (doski) became the pages of an immense stone sinodik,” wrote archaeologist L. A. Beliaev.7 As in the medieval West this culture, in which people sought burial within monastic walls, generated relations between monasteries and laity that were driven by complex motives on both sides. Sergius’s grave was the epicenter of Trinity’s sacred space and provided the raison d’être for the others. He died in 1392, but after the Tatar destruction of Trinity in 1408, the location of his grave supposedly was lost; that is, until 1422, when Abbot Nikon miraculously discovered it. The timing could not have been better to attract the patronage for a new stone church of the Holy Trinity from Prince Iurii Dmitrievich of zvenigorod and Galich, the younger brother and political rival of Grand Prince Vasilii I of Moscow, and one whom Sergius had baptized. He was present when Nikon translated Sergius ’s remains to the new church and established a feast honoring him as a miracle worker.8 In 1426 plague took Trinity’s lord and patron Prince Andrei Vladimirovich of Radonezh and also his brother Prince Semen of Borovsk. Although the earliest sources told different stories, it was probably Andrei whom Nikon buried in the southwest corner of the Trinity Church...