Spiridon Stroganov

Spiridon is the earliest named ancestor of the Stroganov family, recorded in the 1390s during the reign of Grand Prince Dmitry Donskoy of Moscow; his grandson Luka Kuzmich rented lands along the Northern Dvina.

A later family tradition, reported by seventeenth-century Dutch travellers, makes him a baptized Tatar put to death by a khan in 1395 for refusing to abandon Christianity, a tale the historian Nikolay Karamzin rejected as a fable.