Macarius of Kalyazin

Origins and early life

Macarius was born about the year 1400 in the village of Kozhino (Gribkovo) near the town of Kashin, in the principality of Tver, and given in baptism the name Matthew (Matvei). His parents — the tradition names his father Basil Kozha, a boyar in the service of the princes of Tver, and his mother Irina — were people of piety who later themselves ended their lives in the monastic habit. From boyhood Matthew was drawn to the church and to the monastic life, but at his parents' insistence he married, taking to wife a young noblewoman named Helena. The marriage was short: within a few years his wife died, and about the same time his parents also reposed, so that Matthew found himself, still young, alone in the world and released from every bond that had held him back. He saw in his sorrows the hand of God clearing his path, distributed his inheritance, and went to become a monk.

Monastic beginnings

He received the tonsure at the Nikola Klobukov monastery in Kashin, taking the name Macarius, and gave himself to the ascetic labours of the community with such fervour that he soon outran his brethren in humility, obedience, and prayer. Seeking a stricter solitude than a town monastery could give, he obtained his abbot's blessing and withdrew, with a few like-minded companions, into the forest some eighteen versts down the Volga from Kashin, into a wild and uninhabited tract of woodland and marsh between two small lakes near the river's bank. There he raised a cross and built himself a cell, and there he meant to live out his life unknown.

Founding of the Kalyazin monastery, and the name

Solitude did not last, for disciples gathered to him as they always gathered to a true ascetic, and Macarius — reluctantly, in obedience to their need — became the father of a community. They built a wooden church of the Holy Trinity, and about the year 1434 the Holy Trinity monastery was established, with Macarius as its abbot.

The monastery's very name preserves the story of its founder's humility. The land on which it rose belonged to a local landowner named Ivan Kolyaga (Kalyaga), who at first bitterly opposed the monks, fearing they would swallow up his estates, and even, the tradition says, plotted against the saint's life. But misfortune fell upon Kolyaga's house — sickness carried off his family — and, brought low, he came to Macarius, repented, confessed his enmity, and gave over all his land to the monastery, himself entering it as a monk. Macarius received him with such gentleness that, rather than let the memory of the man's sin be perpetuated, he directed that the monastery be called not by his own name but "Kalyazin," after Kolyaga — so that the house of God should bear the name of the sinner it had reconciled rather than the saint who had founded it. From the monastery grew, in time, the town of Kalyazin on the Volga.

Ascetic struggle and the gift of wonders

As abbot, Macarius was known for a poverty and simplicity of life that set him apart even among ascetics: he wore the meanest clothing, laboured with his own hands alongside the brethren, and bore himself so lowly that visitors could not tell the abbot from the least of the monks. His rule was strict but tempered with mercy, and his fame for holiness spread through the Tver land and beyond; the tradition records that even Joseph of Volokolamsk, the great organiser of Russian coenobitic monasticism, visited Kalyazin and praised its order and the spirit of its founder. To his ascetic gifts was joined the gift of healing: the sick who came to the monastery were cured at his prayer, and the wonders that attended him in life multiplied at his tomb. He governed his monastery into deep old age and reposed on March 17, 1483, having lived, the tradition says, some eighty-three years, and was buried in the monastery he had founded.

Relics and glorification

In the year 1521, when the brethren were digging the foundations of a new stone church of the Holy Trinity, the relics of Macarius were uncovered and found incorrupt, with his very vestments preserved and a fragrance rising from them; healings followed at once. The uncovering was received as the seal of his sanctity, and Macarius was glorified among the saints of the Russian Church, his canonisation confirmed at the great councils of Moscow under Metropolitan Macarius in the mid-sixteenth century (1547). His monastery became one of the most honoured of the region, a place of pilgrimage for tsars and people, and his relics its chief treasure, kept in a rich shrine in the cathedral of the Holy Trinity.

Later history of the shrine

The Trinity Kalyazin (Makaryev) monastery flourished for four and a half centuries. Its end came not from persecution of the old kind but from engineering: in 1940 the damming of the Volga for the Uglich reservoir flooded the town of Kalyazin and the monastery with it, and the ancient buildings were demolished or drowned — the half-submerged bell-tower of Kalyazin, standing alone above the waters, became one of the melancholy emblems of the Soviet era. The relics of Saint Macarius had been removed before the flooding and were kept through the Soviet years in Tver (in the cathedral of the White Trinity); a portion has since been returned toward the restored veneration at Kalyazin. His memory remains one of the pillars of the sanctity of the Tver land.