Bassian and Jonah of Pertominsk
Our Venerable Fathers Bassian and Jonah, Wonderworkers of Pertominsk on the White Sea
Venerable · d. 1561
Commemorated 5 June — Finding of the relics on the shore of the Una Bay
Bassian and Jonah were monks of the Solovki Transfiguration monastery on the White Sea and disciples of the Igumen Philip — the future Metropolitan Philip of Moscow — who were drowned in a storm in the Una Bay (Unskaya Guba) in 1561. Their bodies were cast ashore at the place afterwards called Pertominsk, and were buried there by fishermen; signs and healings followed, a chapel was raised over the graves in 1599, and out of it grew the Pertominsk monastery. In 1694 Peter the Great, delivered from shipwreck in the same waters, came to their tomb and cut with his own hands a wooden cross in thanksgiving. The finding of their relics is commemorated on June 5.
Monks of Solovki
Nothing is transmitted of the two men's origins. They appear in the record as monks of the Solovki monastery — the great island house in the White Sea founded by Zosimas and Sabbatius — in the years when it was governed by the Igumen Philip Kolychev (abbot 1548–1566, afterwards Metropolitan of Moscow and martyred by Ivan the Terrible in 1569). They were, that is, of the generation that Philip formed: the generation that dug the Solovki canals, built the great refectory and the stone Transfiguration church, and made the monastery the economic and spiritual capital of the Russian north.
The storm in the Una Bay, 1561
In 1561 Bassian and Jonah were sent, with others, on the monastery's business across the White Sea — the ordinary traffic of a house whose salt-works, fisheries and granges lay scattered along the mainland coast. Their boat was caught in a storm in the Unskaya Guba, the Una Bay on the Summer Coast west of the mouth of the Northern Dvina, and they were drowned.
The sea gave up the bodies on the shore of the bay, at a spot near the Pertominsk sands where a company of local fishermen found them. Recognising them by their habits as Solovki monks, the fishermen buried them there on the shore and marked the graves.
The chapel of 1599 and the growth of the monastery
The place did not remain obscure. The fishermen and sailors of the coast, whose lives depended on that dangerous water, began to invoke the two drowned monks, and healings and deliverances at sea were reported at their graves. In 1599 the monk Mamant, travelling that coast, built a chapel over the burial place; this is the act the calendar remembers as the finding of the relics. Around the chapel a small brotherhood gathered, and in the early seventeenth century it became the Pertominsk monastery of the Transfiguration, which stood — a poor, remote, storm-battered house — until the twentieth-century closures.
Peter the Great's cross, 1694
The most celebrated episode in the monastery's history is not from the founders' lifetimes. In June 1694 the young Tsar Peter I, sailing the White Sea, was caught in a violent storm and was brought with difficulty into the shelter of the Una Bay — into, that is, exactly the water in which Bassian and Jonah had died. Coming ashore at Pertominsk, he went to the tomb of the two monks and there, in thanksgiving for his deliverance, cut a wooden cross with his own hands, some three metres high, carved with a Dutch inscription, and set it up on the shore. The cross survived and was afterwards removed to Archangel, where it has been kept in the cathedral and in the regional museum; it is one of the few surviving objects made by Peter's own hands, and it is what has kept the memory of the Pertominsk saints alive in the general Russian consciousness.
Feast and commemoration
June 5 (church date; Old Calendar civil June 18) — a Russian commemoration, kept by the Moscow Patriarchate (verified live) and by the Orthodox Church in America, and absent from the Greek and Antiochian menaia. They are named in the synaxis of the saints of Archangel and among the saints of the Solovki monastery, and are invoked in the Russian north as helpers of those in peril on the sea — the natural patronage of two monks whom the sea killed and whose graves stand on the shore. No proper service is appointed in the general Menaion; the common of venerable fathers is used.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 8 (common of venerable fathers)
The sea that took you gave you back, and the shore on which you were laid became a house of prayer; for having left the world for the island of Solovki, you were perfected in the waters, O venerable Bassian and Jonah. Wherefore, entreat Christ our God to deliver from every storm those who call upon you.
Original translation from the Slavonic
Iconography
The two are written together, as a pair of monastic fathers of the Russian north: in black habit, cowl and analavos, with the schema cross on the breast, one older and grey-bearded and one younger and dark-bearded, their hands raised in prayer or holding scrolls, and above them a small figure of Christ or the Transfiguration blessing them — the Transfiguration both because it is the dedication of Solovki and because it is the dedication of Pertominsk. The setting is the distinguishing feature: they stand on a strand with the sea behind them, often with a boat foundering in the waves and, on the shore, the chapel or the wooden church of Pertominsk. Where the cycle is fuller, the finding of the bodies by the fishermen is shown, and in nineteenth-century northern icons and prints the cross cut by Peter the Great is sometimes added on the beach — an unusual case of an icon carrying a piece of imperial history.
No pre-1900 icon of Bassian and Jonah has been located for this collection. Their cult is narrowly local to the Archangel coast, and the surviving Pertominsk material was largely dispersed when the monastery was closed. As a June commemoration they lie far outside the range of the Menologion of Basil II.
Disputed questions
- The names and the pairing. The two are always commemorated together and no independent material exists for either. Bassian (Vassian) and Jonah (Iona) are the received forms.
- Circumstance of the drowning. The sources agree that they perished in a storm at sea in 1561 and that the bodies came ashore at the Una Bay; whether they were on a journey for the monastery, on a fishing expedition, or returning from the mainland is not stated.
- What June 5 commemorates. The calendar entry is a finding of relics (obretenie moshchei), which Russian usage attaches to the building of the chapel over the graves in 1599 rather than to any exhumation; a later formal uncovering and glorification is sometimes distinguished from it. The date of the drowning itself is not transmitted, and the saints have no other feast in the general calendar, so the finding is ranked here as their primary commemoration.
- Not to be confused with the many other northern Russian ascetics named Jonah, and in particular not with Jonah of Klimetsk or Jonah of Solovki of later date; nor with Bassian of Uglich or Bassian of Tiksna.