Background
His baptismal name was originally Grigorii and he had been a priest of the Church of Cosmas and Damian on Slave Street north of the Detinets in Novgorod before his archiepiscopate. The name Kalika means "pilgrim" in Russian (there is another word, Palomnik) and indicates that he made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land sometime prior to his archiepiscopate. He, in fact, mentions this in a famous letter he wrote to Bishop Fedor of Tver' in 1347 which has been inserted into two Russian chronicles, the Sofia First Chronicle and the Novgorod Second Chronicle. In one redaction of the Novgorodian First Chronicle, he is referred to as Kaleka (rather than Kalika), a word meaning "lame" or "cripple." Thus, he is sometimes referred to as "Vasilii the Lame" in some hagiographic literature, although the vast majority of scholars consider his surname to be Kalika; if he was lame, there is no other indication of it in the sources.
Read more about this topic: Vasily Kalika
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