For a couple of years this church remained unconsecrated, but in 1532 Trifon made a tour through the district of Kola, whose chief town, Kola, was not built until 1582. In that district, in the year 1529 (or, according to other authorities, in 1475), by the mouth of the Kola River, a church and monastery had been erected by the Solowetski monk, Theodorit, and at this monastery Trifon met with a certain Bishop Ilija. He persuaded the latter to accompany him back to Petschenga to consecrate the church. This was done, and it was dedicated to the Holy Troitsa, or Holy Trinity. At the same time Ilija invested the builder of the church with the monastic habit, giving him the name of Trifon, and ordaining him priest. It is probable that before becoming a monk, and during his wild career as a brigand captain, he had borne some other name, but no record of it is to be found. During the same visit Ilija baptized all the Lapps whom Trifon had instructed in the Christian faith. In this way was laid the foundation of the monastery, which was afterwards built beside the church. Trifon’s fame for sanctity soon caused both monks and lay people to come, and request permission to settle there. When they had increased in numbers, they elected from among themselves a venerable old monk, Gurij, who had travelled to Petschenga on foot, to be their Superior. At first the monks were very poor, and had great difficulty in supporting themselves. They had not as yet any ecclesiastical rights, but were wholly dependent on the charitable offerings of the poor inhabitants of the district, and the gifts of the pilgrims who visited them. Trifon therefore decided to make another journey into Russia, and this time not merely to visit Novgorod, but to get as far as the capital, Moscow, in order that he might personally present a petition to the Czar. The ruler at that time was Ivan Wasilievitsch, whom history has branded as the Cruel or Terrible, and apparently not without sufficient reason. It is related of him that ‘when he was a boy of twelve years of age, he began to put animals to death by throwing them downstairs or out of the windows; and in his fifteenth year he carried on the same sport with human beings.’ Sergius Koubasov says of him that ‘he was tall and ugly, with a long flat nose and gray eyes, thin, but broad-shouldered.’ As Czar he burnt and destroyed Novgorod, and caused twenty-seven thousand people in the town and its suburbs to be killed. Eventually, in a passion, he killed his eldest son, Ivan, with an iron bar, because on one occasion he complained that his father had been very cruel to his wife (although she was enceinte), solely because she was wearing a dress which he did not like, and he had struck her so violently that she was confined of a still-born child. But at times this tyrant indulged in fits of piety. He then retired to Alexandra Sloboda, a fortified village in the neighbourhood of Moscow,