Область Войска Донского
Georgy Ivanovich Maximov was born in 1861 in Stanitsa Nogavskaya in the Don Host Oblast of the Russian Empire to a Cossack family. His father was a church reader (Russian: псаломщик). He finished elementary and parochial school in Nogavskaya and high school in Ust-Medvedicka. He studied from 1879 to 1882, in the Don Theological Seminary in Novocherkassk, and then attended the Spiritual Academy in Kiev.