Leonid of Ustnedumsk
Our Venerable Father Leonid, Founder of the Ustnedumsk Monastery of the Entry of the Theotokos
Venerable · Priest · b. 1551 — d. 17 July 1654
Commemorated 17 July — Repose at the Ustnedumsk monastery on the Luza
Leonid was a peasant farmer who ploughed the land until he was fifty, and then, on the strength of a dream he twice tried to disregard, became a monk, walked the length of the Russian North twice over to fetch an icon he had been told to fetch, and founded a monastery in an uninhabitable marsh on the river Luza. To drain it he dug, with his own hands, three canals running some two kilometres in all — from the Luza to Black Lake, from Black Lake to Holy Lake, and thence to the Black Brook — and while he was digging he was bitten by a venomous snake. Refusing either treatment or anxiety, he committed the matter to God, lay down, and woke up well; and he named the canal the Nedumaya, "the Unthought-of river," and the monastery Ustnedumsk, "at the mouth of the Nedumaya," in memory of it. He is honoured as one of the first enlighteners of the far north-eastern forest lands, and reposed on 17 July 1654 at something over a hundred years old.
Fifty years at the plough
Leonid was born in 1551 in the Poshekhonye district — the sources place it variously in the Novgorod land and in the Poshekhonye–Yaroslavl country — to devout peasants named Philip and Catherine, who brought him up in the fear of God and taught him to read. Until he was about fifty he worked the land. His hagiographer, unusually, makes a virtue of the delay: half a lifetime of farming, he says, gave him a true estimate of things, enlarged his view, strengthened his will, and — because the husbandman must wait with patience for the precious fruit of the earth (James 5:7) and can look for it only from the bounty of the Father of heaven — taught him patience and preserved in him the simplicity of heart that made him fit for revelations.
The dream, and the icon
In 1603 he saw in sleep the Mother of God, who told him to go to the Morzhevsk St Nicholas hermitage on the Dvina, near Kholmogory, to take from it Her Hodegetria icon, to carry it to the river Luza by Turina Hill, in the Usolsk (later Solvychegodsk) district, and to build a church there for it and remain by it until his death.
He did not go. Judging the vision a chance dream and himself unworthy of it, he went instead to the Kozheozersk monastery, was tonsured there, and stayed a year at work and ascetic labour; from there he passed to the Solovki monastery and laboured about three years in the bakery. The vision came back, and with it the warning not to set himself against the will of God. He then went to the Morzhevsk hermitage, spent a full year in the ordinary work of the house without saying anything, and only afterwards told the superior — igumen Cornelius (1599–1623) — what he had seen. He was given both a blessing and the Hodegetria icon, and went off with it to the Luza, eighty versts from Ustiug, where he built himself a hut of woven brushwood by the river Yakushitsa near Turina Hill.
The marsh, the canals, and the snake
The local people, afraid that their land would be taken for a monastery, drove him out. He moved two poprishcha up the river, and with the help of one villager cut a cell and set a chapel beside it; then he walked to Rostov to ask the metropolitan for an antimension and a blessing to build a church, and returned ordained priest. In 1608 he built a wooden church of the Entry of the Most Holy Theotokos into the Temple, and set in it the Hodegetria he had carried across the North.
The place was a bog and would not sustain a community. To drain it Leonid dug a canal from the Luza to Black Lake, and afterwards two more — from Black Lake to Holy Lake, and from Holy Lake to the Black Brook — so leading that brook, which rose in impassable forest marshes, into the Luza; about two kilometres of channel in all, cut by an old man with a spade. While he was digging he was bitten by a snake. The thought of what the poison would do came at once and frightened him; and then, casting his hope on God, he resolved simply not to think about the danger — and remained well. It is from this that both river and monastery take their names: the canal he called Nedumaya, "the un-thought-of," and the house at its mouth Ustnedumsk.
Even so the drainage was not enough: at the spring flood the Luza came over the monastery. Toward the end of his life the old man moved the whole community to a spit of higher ground above Black Lake by the Nedumaya, and there, with the blessing of the metropolitan of Rostov, built a new church of the Entry with a chapel of the Great-martyr Paraskeva, called Friday. It was consecrated on 25 May 1652 by Arsenius, archimandrite of the Archangel monastery at Ustiug.
Repose and veneration
Leonid died at the monastery on 17 July 1654, in his hundred and third year, and was buried by the church. His hair-shirt — coarse and heavy — was kept for centuries afterwards at the monastery, and later at the parish church of the Theotokos that succeeded it, a plain memorial of what the work had cost him. From the foundation onward pilgrims gathered at the monastery on the ninth Friday after Pascha, the day of the Paraskeva chapel.
He is honoured as one of the first enlighteners of the Luzskaya Permtsa, the "pocket-land of the wild Permians" — the frontier of the forest peoples on what is now the border of the Kirov and Vologda regions — and is counted in the regional synaxes of that country: the Synaxis of the Saints of Novgorod (movable, third Sunday after Pentecost), the Synaxis of the Saints of Vyatka (21 October) and the Synaxis of the Saints of the Archangelsk Metropolia (1 November). A troparion to him is in use, and his icons stand in the churches of the places where he laboured.
Feast and commemoration
July 17 (church date; New Calendar civil July 17, Old Calendar civil July 30), the day of his repose. He is also commemorated in the regional synaxes named above — Vyatka on 21 October, the Archangelsk Metropolia on 1 November, and Novgorod on the movable third Sunday after Pentecost. His veneration is Russian; he does not appear on the Greek or Antiochian calendars. On the day itself he stands in the shadow of the great-martyr Marina, and in Russian practice his service is that of a venerable one sung with hers.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable one)
In thee, O father, was the divine image preserved unimpaired; for taking up the cross thou didst follow after Christ, and by thy deeds thou didst teach us to despise the flesh, for it passeth away, but to have care for the soul, which is a thing immortal. Wherefore, O venerable Leonid, thy spirit rejoiceth with the angels.
Original translation from the Slavonic
Iconography
Leonid is painted as a very old monastic — a long white beard reaching the breast, the face deeply lined, in the dark habit and mantiya, bareheaded or in the koukoulion — and is identified by two attributes drawn straight from his Life: the Hodegetria icon of the Mother of God, held before him in both hands or in the crook of his arm, and, in the background, the wooden church and the water-channel of his monastery in the marsh, sometimes with a spade in his hand. Where he appears in the regional synaxes of Vyatka and the Archangelsk lands he stands among the northern founders with the same icon.
No storable pre-1900 image has been located. The one icon of him on Wikimedia Commons (File:IconLeonid.jpg) is a photograph of a modern painted icon, uploaded as the photographer's "own work" under a Creative Commons licence. That licence covers the photograph only and leaves the iconographer's rights in the painting untouched, so the image is not storable under this collection's icon policy and has been rejected on that ground.
Disputed questions
- His age at death. The Slavonic Life makes him born in 1551 and dead on 17 July 1654 — 103 years old, which is what the Russian sources say. The OCA notice rounds this to "died at age 100." The arithmetic of the Life is followed here.
- Which metropolitan of Rostov ordained him. The OCA notice names Philaret (Romanov), metropolitan of Rostov from 1606 and afterwards patriarch, which fits an ordination of about 1607–08. The Slavonic Life as printed by Russian calendars names Varlaam, metropolitan of Rostov — a hierarch of 1587–1603, which does not fit the year of the church. The discrepancy is recorded, not resolved; Philaret is the chronologically possible reading.
- Where he was born. "Poshekhonsk district of Vologda" (OCA), "the Novgorod land, Poshekhonye district, the village of Shchekinskaya" and "the Poshekhonye–Yaroslavl land" (Russian recensions) are variants of the same locality on shifting administrative boundaries.
- The date of tonsure. 1603 in the Russian Life; the vision and the tonsure are placed in the same year, with the three Solovki years and the year at Morzhevsk following, which puts the arrival on the Luza about 1607 and the church of 1608 immediately after.