Augustine Sokolovski
In 330, Constantine the Great founded a new capital of the Roman Empire, which was called New Rome, on the European shore of the Bosphorus. According to the emperor's plan, the City of Constantine, Constantinople in Greek, was to become an Orthodox Christian city, unlike, for example, Rome, which was still full of pagan idols, or Alexandria, which was always filled with false teachers and heretics, and, moreover, was located too far away, in Egypt.
Just seven years after the founding of Constantinople, when Constantine was finishing his earthly journey, there were already as many as fifteen monasteries in the new capital, the existence of which we know for sure. Soon, the monastery of Dalmatus was added to this list. It received its name not at all from the historical region of "Dalmatia" in the Balkans, as many people think, but from the name of its founder and patron, Dalmatus, who later became a monk in it and was even glorified by the Church as a saint.
The first abbot of the Dalmatian monastery was Saint Isaac. He was from Syria and initially lived as a hermit outside the city walls. When the new Byzantine emperor Valens (364–378) began to openly support the Arian heretics and persecute the Orthodox, Isaac broke his solitude and literally came out to confront the ruler with a denunciation. Valens was then going to war with the Goths. He ordered Isaac to be arrested and kept in chains to deal with him as a false prophet who had predicted his defeat for his heresy. However, Valens was soon killed, so that even his body, a rare case in Roman history, was not found. Along with freedom, Isaac also gained fame as a confessor, which became the true reason why he was simply forced to head the monastery.
Thirteen centuries later, in 1672, on the day of Isaac's memory, the future first Russian emperor Peter the Great was born in Moscow. To honor his heavenly patron, Peter ordered the construction of a church named after him in the future new capital on the Neva. The church was repeatedly rebuilt to eventually become that majestic St. Isaac's Cathedral, the largest temple in St. Petersburg.
Such is the earthly and heavenly path of the saint, who became the disaster of the heretic ruler Valens and the blessing of the Orthodox Russian Tsar Peter. It is also interesting that while Constantine left the former pagan capital for a Christian city on the Bosphorus, Peter founded St. Petersburg, because the old capital Moscow seemed too traditional and too religious to him.