Basil the Blessed

Basil the Blessed (1468 - 1552) was born on this day, August 2nd, in the portico of the Elokhov Church. His poor parents apprenticed him to a shoemaker, who taught him to make shoes. One day a traveling merchant came into the shop and ordered a fancy pair of boots, to be picked up on his next annual pass through town. Basil told him, "Please don't do that; you'll never wear them." When the cobbler asked him what he meant, he predicted the merchant's death, which occurred just a few days later.

At sixteen he ran away to the big city (Moscow) and began to make a name for himself. In one incident he received a beating for overturning a cart selling kalachi. It turned out later that the kalachi were bad, and he may have saved dozens of people from food poisoning. Another time, a builder having trouble with fallen arches sought Basil for help. He told him to go see John the Cripple, a poor man in Kiev. He did, only to find John rocking an empty cradle. "What's with the cradle?" the builder asked. "My mother!" cried John. "She went poor raising me." The builder suddenly remembered his own mother, whom he had unceremoniously thrown to the curb some years prior. He found her, begged her forgiveness, and took her into his home, whereupon his buildings stopped collapsing.

Although he was generally well-loved, Basil's predilection for calling people out for their secret sins (especially the rich for their treatment of the poor) had something of a dampening effect on his popularity. He once called Tsar Ivan the Terrible to account for woolgathering about palace blueprints while he should have been paying attention in church. For once Ivan neglected to hold a grudge, and indeed, when Basil died, he acted as one of the pallbearers, carrying the coffin to its resting place in the church in the Moscow Kremlin that now bears Basil's name. Yes, St. Basil's Cathedral (officially the Cathedral of the Protection of Most Holy Theotokos on the Moat) was not named after the great Cappadocian Father, but after a sixteenth century street beggar.