Vasily Kalika

His baptismal name was originally Grigory 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.

[2] 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.

In 1339, he sent his nephew as party to a Novgorodian embassy to sign a peace with Sweden, in which he sought to protect the Orthodox Karelians from being killed if they crossed over to Novgorod.

That being said, several modern scholars have accused Vasily of not having done enough to fight the Strigolniki heresy that spread through Novgorod and Pskov in the fourteenth and into the fifteenth century.

[11] However, the building projects that he undertook and his vigorous political activity, fully utilizing the church's wealth and property as it were, would have violated the beliefs against clerical or ecclesiastical ownership of land that the Strigolniki held.

[13] His body was brought back to Novgorod and interred in the Martirievskaia Porch in the Cathedral of Holy Wisdom where many of his predecessors and successors are buried.