Cornelius of Paleostrov
Our Venerable Father Cornelius, Abbot of Paleostrov on Lake Onega
Venerable · d. c. 1420, on Palei Island in Lake Onega
Commemorated 19 May — Repose on Palei Island
Cornelius of Paleostrov was a monk of Pskov who at the end of the fourteenth century crossed into the Olonets country and became the founder of monastic life on Palei Island in Lake Onega — the house afterwards known as the Paleostrovsky monastery of the Nativity of the Mother of God. He raised two churches for the brethren who gathered to him, one of the Nativity of the Theotokos and one of the Prophet Elias, and passed his own last years apart from them in a cave on the island, in chains and unbroken prayer. He reposed about 1420; his disciple Abramius brought his relics up from the cave into the monastery church and was in time buried beside him, and the two are honoured together as the founders of the house.
From Pskov to Lake Onega
Cornelius was, according to the received notices, a native of Pskov, and nothing is transmitted of his family, his tonsure or the house in which he was formed. He belongs to the movement of the late fourteenth century that carried Russian monks northward out of the settled principalities into the forests and lake country of Obonezhye — the Onega region, then thinly Christianised, where the monasteries were at once hermitages and missions.
Palei Island (Палей, whence Paleostrov) lies in the northern part of Lake Onega, near the mouth of the Povenets bay; it is small, low and wooded, and in the fifteenth century it was uninhabited. Cornelius settled there alone. The pattern that followed is the usual one of the northern founders and is all the more credible for being usual: solitaries found him out, asked to remain, and a community formed which required churches, a rule and an abbot.
The monastery of the Nativity
Two churches are ascribed to him. The first and principal one was of the Nativity of the Most Holy Theotokos, which gave the monastery its name; the second was of the Prophet Elias — a dedication common in the Russian north, where Elias inherited much of the reverence once paid to the weather-gods of the Karelian and Finnic peoples among whom these houses were planted, and where his feast marks the turn of the northern summer.
Having set the house in order, Cornelius did what such founders characteristically did: he handed the community's daily governance over and withdrew from it. He passed his last years in a cave on the island, wearing heavy iron chains beneath his habit and giving himself to continual prayer — the same three ascetic marks (the cave, the chains, the unceasing prayer) that the northern Lives attach to a whole family of founders, and which in his case are the only concrete details preserved. He reposed about the year 1420 and was buried where he had lived.
Relics, and Abramius
His disciple and successor Abramius of Paleostrov (commemorated August 21) took up the founder's relics and translated them from the burial place into the church of the Nativity within the monastery, thereby establishing 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 it is the ground of the local cultus: pilgrims to Palei Island came to one shrine holding both founders.
The later history of the house
The monastery Cornelius founded had a violent later history that has tended to overshadow him. In the closing decades of the seventeenth century Paleostrov became a stronghold of the Old Believer resistance in the Onega country, and the island was twice besieged — in 1687 and again in 1688–89 — the defenders ending both sieges by setting fire to the buildings and perishing in them. The house was afterwards rebuilt and continued into the modern period. None of this belongs to the founder's own memory, but it explains why so little of the medieval monastery and of its documentation survives, and therefore why his Life is reduced to the handful of sentences the calendars carry.
Feast and commemoration
May 19 (church date; Old Calendar civil June 1), kept in Russian and OCA usage only, and chiefly in the Olonets and Karelian north; he is named in the synaxis of the saints of the Karelian land. On the same day the calendars keep the greater Cornelius of Komel, and Russian day-lists accordingly give the two in sequence, distinguishing them by their epithets. His disciple Abramius of Paleostrov is kept on August 21. No proper service is transmitted: he is sung with the common of a venerable father, and the day falls always within the Pentecostarion, whose movable hymns take precedence.
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 Cornelius, thy spirit rejoiceth with the angels.
Original translation from the Slavonic
Iconography
Cornelius is painted in the northern Russian manner as a monastic elder: grey-bearded, in the dark mantle over the schema, the head in the pointed koukoulion, the right hand blessing or held to the breast and the left holding a prayer-rope or a scroll. Where the founder is being commemorated as such, the island monastery appears behind or beneath him, water at its foot; where the ascetic is stressed, the chains are indicated on the schema. He is often shown paired with Abramius, the two inclining towards a church or towards the Mother of God of the Nativity, in the manner of the double founder-icons of the Russian north.
The stored image is a Russian icon of the 1870s from the collections of the Orthodox Church Museum of Finland — the Karelian and Ladoga monastic patrimony carried into Finland in the twentieth century, and therefore an icon from the saint's own region. It shows him half-length against a blue ground, in the blue koukoulion and schema marked with the cross, the instruments of the Passion and the skull, blessing with the right hand and holding a scroll and prayer-rope in the left, with the inscription Прп. Корнилiй Палеостров. чд. ("Venerable Cornelius of Paleostrov, Wonderworker") written across the field — which confirms the identification against the better-known Cornelius of Komel. The underlying work is pre-1900 and the Commons file carries a public-domain mark; it is stored on that basis.
Disputed questions
- The date. "The end of the fourteenth century" for the foundation and "about 1420" for the repose are the received approximations; no year is transmitted, and some Russian accounts place the foundation a generation later. The corpus keeps the received dating and records that it is approximate.
- Not to be confused with Cornelius of Komel, who is commemorated on this same day and is by far the better known of the two: Komel was a Vologda founder who died in 1537, a century and more after the man of Palei Island. The coincidence of name and feast makes this the likeliest confusion in the calendar, and the two are regularly transposed in day-lists. Neither is Cornelius of the Pskov Caves (February 20) — although he, like this Cornelius, was a Pskov man, which compounds the difficulty — nor Cornelius the Centurion of the Acts.