Before he became Patriarch of Moscow and a confessor under the Soviet regime, St Tikhon spent nine years in America. As head of the Russian Orthodox diocese here from 1898 to 1907 he turned a mission centred on Alaska into a church for all of North America, and the Orthodox Church in America honours him as one of its founding fathers.
Bishop of the Aleutians and Alaska
Vasily Bellavin was born in 1865 in Russia and became a monk with the name Tikhon. In 1898 he was appointed Bishop of the Aleutians and Alaska, a diocese with its seat in San Francisco that also included the growing Orthodox communities of the rest of the United States and Canada.
A church for America
Under Tikhon the diocese grew quickly, serving Russian, Carpatho-Russian, Greek, Arab, Serbian and other Orthodox immigrants. He moved the diocesan seat to St Nicholas Cathedral in New York and was raised to the rank of archbishop. He encouraged services and publications in English, supporting Isabel Florence Hapgood's English translation of the Orthodox service books, and he imagined a future in which the Church in America would be a self-governing local church.
He also laid foundations that still stand. He was the primary founder of St Tikhon's Orthodox Monastery in South Canaan, Pennsylvania, named after St Tikhon of Zadonsk. In 1904 he consecrated St Raphael Hawaweeny as bishop for the Arabic-speaking Orthodox, the first Orthodox bishop consecrated in North America.
Patriarch and confessor
Tikhon returned to Russia in 1907. In 1917 he was elected Patriarch of Moscow, the first since the office was abolished nearly two hundred years earlier, and led the Russian Church through the revolution and the first years of Soviet persecution, during which he was arrested and imprisoned. He died in 1925. The Russian Orthodox Church glorified him on 9 October 1989. He is commemorated on 9 October and on 25 March (7 April in the civil calendar), the day of his repose.
In icons
St Tikhon is usually depicted as Patriarch, wearing the white patriarchal head covering marked with a cross, and holding the Gospel. In American icons he often appears among the saints of North America, sometimes holding a model of a church or standing beside St Raphael, whom he consecrated, or St Alexis Toth.