Blessed Basil, Fool-for-Christ, Wonderworker of Moscow — August 2 / August 15 (Julian Calendar)

On this day, August 2 according to the Julian Calendar (August 15 civil calendar), the Georgian Orthodox Church commemorates Blessed Basil, Fool-for-Christ, Wonderworker of Moscow (†1557).

Blessed Basil, fool-for-Christ, was born in 1468 in the village of Elokhovo near Moscow. When the boy grew up, his parents apprenticed him to a master to learn shoemaking. Once, when the saint was sixteen, a merchant came into the workshop and ordered boots. Basil burst into tears: the merchant, he said, would not even manage to put the boots on before he died. Within a few days the prophecy was fulfilled. After this the blessed one made his way to Moscow and took upon himself the ascetic struggle of foolishness for Christ.

In the scorching heat of summer and the bitter frost of winter he went about half-naked. His behavior seemed strange: now he would overturn a tray of bread loaves, now strike a jug full of kvass. The enraged sellers shouted at him and beat him, but afterward it would come to light that the bread had been badly baked and the kvass poorly made. Little by little it became clear to all that Blessed Basil was a man of God and an exposer of injustice.

Once a merchant resolved to build a church in Moscow, but he could not carry out his intention: three times the vaults collapsed. Troubled, he turned for counsel to the holy fool, who was sitting in a poor hut, rocking an empty cradle. “Whom are you rocking?” he asked. “I am repaying my mother the unpayable debt of my birth and upbringing,” came the reply. Only then did the merchant remember that he had driven his mother out of his house, and it became clear to him why he could not finish the construction. He returned to Moscow, brought his mother back home, and completed the good work to the end.

The blessed one helped above all those who needed help more than others, yet were ashamed to ask for alms. There was an occasion when he gave a rich gift from the tsar to a foreign merchant who had lost everything and for three days had not had a morsel of food, yet could not beg, because he wore fine clothing. For love of neighbor the chosen one of the Lord would even enter the taverns, seeking seeds of goodness in utterly ruined people.

Many noticed that when Blessed Basil passed by houses where people caroused and made merry senselessly, he would kiss their corners, while at the houses of the pious he threw stones. When asked to explain, the saint replied that beside the houses of wild revelry stand sorrowing angels, grieving over the lawlessness of men: “With tears I implore them to pray for the conversion of sinners. But in the houses of the God-fearing there is no room for the demons — they stand outside, and I drive them away.”

St. Basil reposed on August 2, 1552. Together with the others, Tsar Ivan the Terrible himself accompanied his coffin to the grave prepared beside the church of the Holy Trinity. In 1554 the church of the Protection of the Mother of God was built over the grave of the blessed one. In 1558 the saint was canonized and his relics were uncovered.