At some point during the sixteenth century, the intact corpse of a man was found and a miracle proclaimed. The remains were thought to belong to the steward Kirill Vel'skii, who, fearing the anger of the Novgorod governor (namestnik), had jumped into a river and drowned. His body had then been buried without commemoration by the river, where it was later found. Local residents built a chapel on the spot to hold the relics and celebrated the cult annually in June. When the chapel burned down, however, the cult died out. According to historian Eve Levin, a significant number of mystery cults arose following the discovery of preserved remains, even when their identity was never established, and the popular belief in the miraculous properties of these relics sometimes even allowed the recasting of suspicious deaths. Such a process apparently occurred in Kirill Vel'skii's case: the polluted body of a suicide had briefly become a holy relic. Nevertheless, the disappearance of the cult following the fire suggests that the local population (and possibly the church) remained ambivalent about this suicide cum saint; the signification had again been inverted, the sanctified revealed as sacrilege.

Unfortunately the evocative case of Kirill Vel'skii is a rarity. Sources on suicide in medieval and early-modern Russia are scattered and elliptical. Those that do exist include normative texts (church rules) and more literary ones (chronicles, miracle tales, didactic literature).