Adrian of Uglich
Our Venerable Father Adrian, Hieromonk and Superior of the Monastery of Saint Nicholas on the Grekhov Stream at Uglich
Venerable · Priest · d. after 1504, at Uglich
Commemorated 26 August — Principal commemoration
Adrian was one of the first ten disciples of Paisius of Uglich, his cell-attendant and closest companion, and afterwards a hieromonk and the superior of the monastery of St Nicholas on the Grekhov stream, on the right bank of the Volga below Uglich, which he helped to found in 1489. He shared his elder's vision of the Mother of God in 1472, laboured with him on the stone church of the Protection of the Theotokos in 1482, came back to Uglich to bury him in 1504, and asked to be laid near his grave. He is one of those Russian saints whose whole record is a list of the things he helped another man to build — which is, in the northern monastic tradition, a description of sanctity rather than an absence of one.
Disciple of Paisius
The house at the centre of this life is the Protection (Pokrovsky) monastery of Uglich, founded on the Volga in the second half of the fifteenth century by Paisius, nephew of Macarius of Kalyazin and the spiritual figure of the appanage principality of Uglich under Prince Andrei Vasilyevich the Elder. Adrian was among the first ten who gathered to Paisius, and became his cell-attendant — the disciple who lives in the elder's own quarters, keeps his rule with him and is trusted with what is not said to the brotherhood. Nothing is transmitted of his birth, his family or his age.
The vision of 1472
In 1472 the tradition of the house records a vision of the Mother of God granted to Paisius, in which the monastery's foundation and its dedication were confirmed. Adrian is named as having been present and as having seen it with him — the only occasion on which the sources let him speak for himself, and the ground of his own veneration, since a disciple who shares an elder's vision is thereby marked as more than a servant.
Builder
The rest of the record is building work. In 1482 Adrian laboured on the raising of the stone church of the Protection of the Most Holy Theotokos at the monastery — a stone church being, in the Russia of that generation, an event in the life of a whole district. In 1489 he was sent, or went, to help establish a second house: the monastery of St Nicholas on the Grekhov stream, on the right bank of the Volga, where he was ordained hieromonk and afterwards made superior. He governed it for the rest of his life.
Repose
He returned to the Protection monastery for the funeral of Paisius in 1504, and outlived him by an unrecorded number of years. At his own death he was buried, at his request, beside his elder's grave at Uglich, which is where his veneration attached itself. The year is not transmitted; the entry gives "after 1504" rather than the round figures sometimes printed.
Veneration
His cult is local and follows that of Paisius, whose canonisation for local veneration is placed in 1610; Adrian's own is generally assigned to the seventeenth century, on the evidence of the tomb and the local commemoration rather than of any surviving act. In 1964 he was included in the Synaxis of the Saints of Rostov and Yaroslavl, the collective feast by which the Russian Church regularised many such local memories in the Soviet period. He is also named among the venerable fathers commemorated on the Saturday of Cheesefare, the movable synaxis of all monastic saints.
Feast and commemoration
August 26 (church date; Old Calendar civil September 8), on which the OCA and Russian day-lists give him. He is also kept in the Synaxis of the Saints of Rostov and Yaroslavl and on the Saturday of Cheesefare with the venerable fathers; neither of these is a fixed date and neither is carried in this entry's feasts list. He is unknown to the Greek and Antiochian books. Since no proper service survives, the day is served with the common of a venerable one.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 8
In thee, O father, was the divine image preserved unfailingly: for taking up the Cross, thou didst follow after Christ, and by thy deeds didst teach us to despise the flesh, which passeth away, and to care for the soul, which is a thing immortal. Wherefore, O venerable Adrian, thy spirit rejoiceth with the angels.
Original translation from the Slavonic
Iconography
No early image of Adrian has been identified. Where he appears at all it is in the modern compositions of the Synaxis of the Saints of Rostov and Yaroslavl — great assemblies of standing figures in ranks, painted since the 1964 institution of that feast — in which he is shown as a monastic priest of middle age in mantia and epitrachelion, with a grey beard of moderate length, sometimes holding a scroll and sometimes a model of a church, and always in proximity to Paisius of Uglich, who is the recognisable figure of the pair. The natural proper subject for him, were one painted, would be the vision of 1472 shared with his elder. No pre-1900 depiction is available for storage.
Disputed questions
The transmitted dates — 1472, 1482, 1489, 1504 — come from the monastery's own tradition as it was written down much later, and each of them attaches to an event in the life of Paisius rather than to an independently documented act of Adrian. They should be read as the frame of a life, not as a chronology.
Not to be confused with the martyr Adrian of Nicomedia, kept with his wife Natalia on this same August 26; with Adrian of Ondrusov (†1549/50), also kept on August 26; or with Adrian of Poshekhonye (†1550, March 5). Three Russian Adrians of the sixteenth century and one martyr of Nicomedia crowd this single day, and the confusion in printed calendars is constant.