John of Shanghai and San Francisco
Eastern Orthodox ascetic (1896-1966)
John of Shanghai and San Francisco (Russian: Иоанн Шанхайский и Сан-Францисский, romanized: Ioann Shankhayskiy i San-Frantsisskiy; born Mikhail Borisovich Maximovitch, Russian: Михаил Борисович Максимович; June 4, 1896 – July 2, 1966) was a prelate of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia who is venerated as a saint in the Eastern Orthodox Church.
He is also referred to as "John, the Wonderworker" and John Maximovitch.
Life
Early life
Mikhail Maximovitch was born on June 4, 1896, in the village of Adamovka of the Izyumsky Uyezd of the Kharkov Governorate of the Russian Empire (in present-day eastern Ukraine).
Growing up, he collected icons and church books, and indulged heavily in the reading of the lives of saints. As a child, he converted his French caretaker from Catholicism to Eastern Orthodoxy.
Maximovitch attended Poltava Military School from 1907 to 1914. Later, he attended and received a degree in law from Kharkov Imperial University in 1918. He studied and attended church in Kharkiv, where he was inspired by Metropolitan Antony Khrapovitsky to deepen his religious understanding. He later recalled that the local monastery had become more important in his life than secular institutions.
Yugoslavia
John's family moved to Yugoslavia and brought him to Belgrade in 1921.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “John of Shanghai and San Francisco” is eastern Orthodox ascetic (1896-1966). The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through John, Shanghai and Francisco, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q552432. VIAF identifies the subject as 4287096. The Library of Congress control number is n79114071. 2 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1896, 1966, 1907 and 1914.
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This entry incorporates text from “John of Shanghai and San Francisco” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.