Biography
Xenophon of Robeika
About Xenophon of Robeika
Xenophon is remembered as the founder of a secluded monastery on the Robeika River near Novgorod. His personal history is difficult to reconstruct. A research-based account published by the Novgorod diocese places him in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, and identifies the monastery’s first chronicle mention in 1417. This conflicts with the much earlier lifetime repeated in some modern calendars.
The received Life tells of a conflict with an abbot named Barlaam, after which Xenophon left on a raft and was carried upstream to the place where he founded his community. The diocesan study treats the voyage as tradition and rejects identification of the abbot with the twelfth-century Barlaam of Khutyn. It reports Alexander Bobrov’s proposal that the abbot was instead Barlaam of Lisitsky. The same study identifies the foundation’s church as dedicated to Nicholas.
The Orthodox Church in America’s notice preserves another received version: Xenophon succeeds leaders at Khutyn, founds a Trinity monastery, and dies in 1262. Those details cannot be reconciled with the later reconstruction by simply combining them. They are therefore presented as a conflicting tradition, and no precise death year is assigned here. The OCA calendar honors him on January 26 and June 28 and with the Novgorod saints.
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