Irenarchus of Rostov

Elias of Kondakovo

The saint was born in 1548 into a peasant family in the village of Kondakovo in the district of Rostov, and given in baptism the name Elias (Ilya). The tradition holds that even as a boy he showed the marks of his calling, once telling his mother that he would wear irons and labour for God. After some years spent in trade at Rostov and Nizhny Novgorod, he renounced the world, and in his thirtieth year was tonsured a monk at the Borisoglebsky Monastery, the house of Saints Boris and Gleb some eighteen versts from Rostov, receiving the name Irenarchus.

The ascetic in chains

At the monastery Irenarchus gave himself to labours of an extraordinary severity. Moved by the sight of a poor man going barefoot in the cold, he gave away his own boots and went unshod; he withdrew into reclusion, shutting himself in a narrow cell, and there took up the "bonds" (Russian verigi) for which he is famous — binding himself with iron chains and fetters and hanging heavy crosses upon his body, adding to them year by year. The inventory the tradition preserves of what he left behind is itself his portrait: some 142 copper crosses, chains for the shoulders and the neck, iron fetters for the hands and feet, heavy weights worn at the belt, and iron rods with which he chastised his flesh. Chained to the spot, he passed some twenty-five years in prayer, fasting, and the making of clothing for the poor, enduring cold, sickness, and the hostility of those who thought his way excessive — for at times he was driven out or ill-used by superiors who did not understand him, and returned each time to his cell and his chains.

Prophet of the Time of Troubles

Irenarchus lived through the catastrophe of the Time of Troubles (1598–1613), the years of dynastic collapse, famine, pretenders, and foreign invasion that nearly destroyed the Muscovite state. In his reclusion he was given, the tradition says, a vision of the coming disaster — that the armies of Poland and Lithuania would overrun Russia, take Moscow, and lay waste its churches — and he wept bitterly over it. At his abbot's bidding he went to Moscow to warn Tsar Vasily Shuisky (1606–1610) of the ruin to come. When the invasion came as he had foretold and the Poles occupied the country, the interventionist commanders — even the Polish leaders Sapieha and others who passed through the region — are said to have come to see the recluse in his chains, and to have been struck by his fearless confession that the Russian land was God's and would be freed.

The blessing of Minin and Pozharsky

In the decisive hour, when the national militia gathered to expel the invaders, Irenarchus sent his blessing to its leaders, Prince Dmitry Pozharsky and the merchant Kuzma Minin, and — the tradition holds — gave them his own cross to carry into the campaign, promising in God's name that they would see the glory of God and that Moscow would be delivered. In 1612 the militia retook the Kremlin and drove out the Poles, and the recluse's word was counted among the spiritual causes of the deliverance; his memory is bound up with the national resurrection that ended the Troubles.

Repose

Irenarchus reposed at the Borisoglebsky Monastery on January 13, 1616, after some thirty-eight years of monastic struggle and reclusion. His chains and crosses were kept at the monastery as relics and instruments of healing, and his tomb became a place of pilgrimage; he was soon numbered among the venerable saints of the Russian Church. His cell, and the spring he is said to have opened, remain sites of veneration at the monastery to this day.