Macarius of Oredezhsk
Our Venerable Father Macarius of Oredezhsk, founder of the Hermitage on the Oredezh
Venerable · d. 1532
Commemorated 9 August — Repose at his hermitage on the Oredezh
Macarius was a disciple of Alexander of Svir (†1533), the great luminary of the monastic north, and one of the several of that elder's spiritual children who went out from Svir to found houses of their own in the forests between Lake Ladoga and Novgorod. He settled beside the river Oredezh and there gathered a small brotherhood, the community afterwards known as the Makaryevskaya Pustyn. He reposed in 1532, a year before his teacher. Almost nothing else of him is transmitted: he is commemorated on August 9, and again with the Karelian saints and with the saints of Novgorod and St Petersburg in their synaxes.
A disciple of Alexander of Svir
Macarius belongs to the generation of northern Russian monastics formed by Alexander of Svir, whose monastery of the Holy Trinity between Lakes Ladoga and Onega became, in the first third of the sixteenth century, the mother-house of a whole province of hermitages. The pattern was constant: a monk trained under Alexander in obedience and in the labour of prayer, then sent — or permitted to go — deeper into the forest to a place he had found for himself, where a cell became a chapel, the chapel a church, and the church a small coenobium, cleared and built by the men it attracted. Adrian of Ondrusov, Athanasius of Syandem, Gennadius and Nicephorus of Vazheozero, Ignatius of Ostrov and Macarius of Oredezhsk are of that company.
The hermitage on the Oredezh
Macarius' place was on the Oredezh, a slow forest river of the Novgorod land — the country south of the Neva that in the next century became the hinterland of St Petersburg. The house he founded there was small, and is remembered under his own name as the Makaryevskaya Hermitage; like most of the little northern pustyni it lived by fishing, by a few cleared fields, and by the alms of the villages, and it never became a great monastery. The American synaxarion places his foundation "near Lake Ladoga," which is the general direction of the Svir tradition rather than the precise geography of the Oredezh itself; the river runs south-west of the lake, into the Luga.
He reposed in 1532, before his teacher, who died on 30 August of the following year. Nothing is transmitted of his origins, his age, his rule or his sayings, and no Life of him survives — the fate of most of the founders of the small hermitages, whose memory was kept by their own house and, when the house failed, only by the calendars.
Veneration
His commemoration is a local Russian one and was carried into the general Russian calendars by way of the regional synaxes. He is numbered among the Karelian saints, whose synaxis is kept on the Saturday between 31 October and 6 November, and among the saints of Novgorod and St Petersburg, whose synaxis falls on the third Sunday after Pentecost — both movable commemorations, and both belonging to the movable sweep rather than to this fixed day.
Feast and commemoration
August 9 (church date; Old Calendar civil August 22), within the afterfeast of the Transfiguration and within the Dormition Fast. A local Russian commemoration, kept by the Moscow Patriarchate and by the Orthodox Church in America; the Greek books do not carry him. His two other commemorations — with the Karelian saints and with the saints of Novgorod and St Petersburg — are movable and are not counted among his fixed feasts here.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable father)
In thee, O father, was preserved unfailing that which is according to the image; 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 care rather for the soul, a thing immortal: wherefore, O venerable Macarius, thy spirit rejoiceth with the angels.
Original translation from the Slavonic
Iconography
Macarius takes the standard type of the northern Russian founder: an elder in the monastic mantiya and skhima, grey-bearded, the right hand raised in blessing or in prayer and the left holding an unrolled scroll with a sentence of monastic counsel. Where such founders are painted with their foundations, a small wooden church among firs is set beside the figure — the pustyn on the river — and where they are painted with their teachers, Macarius would stand among the disciples ranged about Alexander of Svir in the composite icons of the Svir tradition, or in the ranks of the Synaxis of the Karelian Saints, the great multi-figure compositions of the Russian north in which the small founders survive pictorially even when their houses have not.
No pre-1900 icon of him alone has been located for this collection.
Disputed questions
- The record. There is no Life, no acts, and no proper office; the entry rests on the calendar notices and on his place in the Svir tradition. Nothing here is asserted beyond what they carry.
- The site. The location of the Makaryevskaya Hermitage on the Oredezh, and its later history, are not securely documented in the sources consulted; the American notice's "near Lake Ladoga" is a loose designation, and the point is flagged rather than resolved.
- Not to be confused with the other Russian monastics of the name — above all Macarius of Kalyazin, Macarius of Unzha and Zheltovodsk and Macarius the Roman of Novgorod — nor with Macarius the Great of Egypt, in whose honour all of them were named.