Abramius of Paleostrov
Our Venerable Father Abramius, Abbot of Paleostrov on Lake Onega
Venerable · d. 15th century, on Palei Island in Lake Onega
Commemorated 21 August — Commemoration of the successor of Cornelius, with the translation of his teacher's relics
Abramius was the disciple and successor of Cornelius of Paleostrov, the founder of monastic life on Palei Island in Lake Onega in the Olonets country of the Russian north. When Cornelius died, about the year 1420, in the cave where he had passed his last years in chains and unbroken prayer, it was Abramius who took up his relics and translated them into the monastery church of the Nativity of the Theotokos, and so established his veneration; and when Abramius himself died he was laid beside his teacher. The double burial is the reason the two are transmitted together and the ground of the local cultus: pilgrims to Palei Island came to one shrine holding both founders. He is commemorated on August 21, and almost nothing else about him has come down.
Successor on Palei Island
Nothing is preserved of his birth, his family, his tonsure or the place he came from. He appears in the record already as a monk of the little house on Palei Island — a low wooded island in the northern part of Lake Onega, near the mouth of the Povenets bay — which Cornelius had founded at the end of the fourteenth century, and where two churches stood, of the Nativity of the Most Holy Theotokos and of the Prophet Elias.
Cornelius, having set the community in order, had handed over its daily governance and withdrawn to a cave on the island, wearing heavy iron chains beneath his habit. The governance he handed over went, in the end, to Abramius; and the pattern of the northern foundations — founder, cave, disciple, translation, shrine — completed itself here as it did at a hundred other places between the Volga and the White Sea.
The translation of the relics
The one act recorded of him is the decisive one. He raised the body of Cornelius from the place of its burial and carried it into the church of the Nativity within the monastery. In the Russian north this act is the ordinary and formal beginning of a cultus: the relics pass from a grave to a shrine, the founder becomes a patron, and the house acquires the centre round which its life and its pilgrimage will turn. That Cornelius of Paleostrov is a saint of the Russian calendar at all is owing to his disciple's decision.
Abramius governed the house afterwards, for how long is not said, and at his death was buried beside Cornelius. The two are named together in the notices ever since, and were painted together in the double founder-icons of the region.
The loss of the record
The reason so little survives is known and is worth stating, because it explains the silence rather than excusing it. In the closing decades of the seventeenth century Paleostrov became a stronghold of the Old Believer resistance in the Onega country; the island was besieged in 1687 and again in 1688–89, and on both occasions the defenders ended the siege by firing the buildings and perishing in them. The medieval monastery and its archive went with them. What is left of Abramius is the calendar entry and the sentence about the translation.
Feast and commemoration
August 21 (church date; New Calendar civil August 21, Old Calendar civil September 3), within the afterfeast of the Dormition; kept in Russian and OCA usage only, and in practice chiefly in the Olonets and Karelian north, where he is named in the synaxis of the saints of the Karelian land. His teacher Cornelius is kept on May 19, and the Russian day-lists of August 21 usually give the two together, the disciple's day carrying the memory of the translation of the founder's relics. No proper service is transmitted; the day's hymns are those of the afterfeast, with the common of a venerable father.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable father)
In thee, O Father, that which was made after the image of God was preserved unimpaired; for taking up the Cross thou didst follow Christ, and by thy deeds thou hast taught us to despise the flesh, which passeth away, and to care for the soul, which is immortal. Wherefore, O venerable Abramius, thy spirit rejoiceth with the angels.
Original translation from the Slavonic
Iconography
Abramius is painted in the northern Russian manner as a monastic elder — dark or grey mantle over the schema, the head in the pointed koukoulion, the right hand blessing or held to the breast, a scroll or prayer-rope in the left. He is almost never shown alone: his proper place is in the double founder-icon of Paleostrov, where he and Cornelius stand on either side inclining towards a church or towards the Mother of God of the Nativity, with the island monastery and the water of Lake Onega beneath them — the standard composition of the paired founders of the Russian north. No pre-1900 icon of Abramius alone has been located for this collection.
Disputed questions
- Dates. None are transmitted — not his birth, not the year of his repose. The fifteenth century follows from his being the successor of a man who died about 1420.
- Which Abramius. He is one of four saints of the name standing in the Russian calendar of August 21, and the least known of them. He is not Abramius of Smolensk, the archimandrite and preacher of the Judgement, whose day this principally is; not Abramius the lover-of-labour of the Caves; not Abramius of Galich (July 20), the disciple of St Sergius and founder in the Chukhloma country — the confusion likeliest of all, since both were northern founders of the same period; and not Abramius of Arbela.