Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 27, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 February 1917 — MAD MONK OF RUSSIA [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

MAD MONK OF RUSSIA

Sergius Michailow Trufanoff, better known as “Illiodor, the Mad Monk of Russia,” was up’to the beginning of the war a chaplain of the imperial court at Petrograd. He was an intimate of Gregory Rasputin, the Siberian peasant priest and court confessor whose death was recently announced. Here is how the “mad monk 7 ’ got his name, according to his own version: “Perhaps I may recall the fact that when people want to kill a dog and need an excuse to do it they spread the report that the dog is mad. Well, in Russia they wanted to kill me, or do away with me in some other fashion and so they told the people I was mad—crazy, perhaps is a better word. So they called me “Illiodor, the crazy monk.”