Bishop Tikhon

“I have left my beloved homeland, my elderly mother, my good friends and associates to go to the land of a people I do not know.”

— Bishop Tikhon of the Aleutians and Alaska, 1898 (later Patriarch of Moscow and all Russia)

In eight years of managing the remote diocese of former Russian America, Tikhon established two congregations, Alaskan and Brooklynite, formed the Brotherhood of the Orthodox Church of New York and the Order of Sisters of the Exhaltation-of-the-Cross, opened a seminary in Minneapolis, founded the St. Tikhon Monastery in Pennsylvania, established a seminary in Cleveland and founded a women’s orphanage on Kodiak Island. Tikhon initiated the construction of the St. Nicholas Cathedral in New York and had the San Francisco-based bishopric transferred there. The number of congregations in America was increased from 15 to 75. New churches and cathedrals were opened in Chicago, New York and other cities and towns across the United States and Canada, and the Russian language was heard everywhere more and more. Nearly 400,000 Orthodox believers were registered in the diocese managed by Bishop Tikhon.