The life of St Herman of Alaska
The company reached Kodiak Island in September 1794, and their preaching soon brought several thousand people, until then pagan, to baptism. As the years passed and the others of the original mission died or moved on, Herman remained the last of them, and he withdrew from Kodiak to nearby Spruce Island, a small wooded place he named New Valaam, and stayed there for the rest of his life, decades spent in near solitude.
He kept a hard rule of his own even as he labored for the people he had come to serve, wearing chains, sleeping little, and giving long hours to fasting and prayer. Because he was never ordained a priest, tradition holds that angels themselves came down each year at Theophany to bless the waters of the bay, water Herman then carried to the sick who sought his help.
He reposed in 1836, remembered among the Aleuts as their enlightener, and was glorified in 1970 as the first saint canonized by the Orthodox Church in America.
