Macarius the Roman of Novgorod
Our Venerable Father Macarius the Roman, Founder of the Hermitage on the Lezna in the land of Novgorod
Venerable · b. late 15th century, Rome — d. 15 August 1550, the hermitage on the Lezna
Commemorated 19 January — Name-day commemoration with Macarius the Great, 15 August — Repose at his hermitage on the river Lezna, on the day of the Dormition
Macarius the Roman was a Westerner — by the tradition a young man of a wealthy Roman family, born towards the end of the fifteenth century — who left Italy in search of the Orthodox faith, made his way north into Russia, was received into the Church and tonsured in the land of Novgorod, and spent the rest of his life as a hermit in the marshes at the head of the river Lezna, some seventy kilometres east of the city. Disciples gathered to him against his intention, and about 1540 they raised a wooden church of the Dormition of the Mother of God, from which the community took its life; he was made its abbot by the metropolitan of Novgorod. He reposed on 15 August 1550 — the feast of the Dormition, and therefore the patronal feast of his own church — and was buried beside it. The hermitage that grew round his grave, the Makaryevskaya Pustyn, survived Swedish sack, Catherine II's suppression and a nineteenth-century revival before it was closed by the Soviet authorities in 1932 and destroyed in the war; it is being rebuilt.
From Rome to the Novgorod land
The core of the tradition is that Macarius was a Roman and a convert. He is said to have been born at Rome towards the end of the fifteenth century, into a family of substance, and to have become convinced — the sources do not explain how — that the faith he was looking for was to be found in the Orthodox East. He left the city secretly, so that his family should not prevent him, and travelled north and east until he reached the territory of Great Novgorod.
His epithet Rimlyanin, "the Roman," is the whole of what the Russian record preserves of his origins, and it was evidently what struck those who knew him: he is the Roman, the foreigner, the man from the other end of Christendom. Such figures are rare but not unexampled in Russian hagiography — Antony the Roman of Novgorod, four centuries earlier, is the obvious comparison, and the two are sometimes confused for that reason.
In the Novgorod land he was received into the Orthodox Church and tonsured a monk. The tradition as the Orthodox Church in America prints it names his receiver as Alexander of Svir (†1533), at the monastery of the Holy Trinity on the river Svir — which, if correct, places Macarius's arrival in Russia before 1533 and sets him in the most influential ascetic school of the northern forests, the circle out of which a whole generation of hermit-founders came.
The hermitage on the Lezna
Seeking solitude, Macarius withdrew into the wilderness of bog and forest that lay between Novgorod and the Neva, and settled on a dry island in the marshes at the head of the river Lezna — the place is in the Tosno district of what is now Leningrad oblast, and the bog still carries his name. The distance from Novgorod is given in the sources as about forty-five miles; the point of the detail is that it was far enough to be genuinely uninhabited.
What follows is the classic pattern of the Russian northern hermit, and it happened to Macarius exactly as it happened to his elders: he went out to be alone, and his solitude drew a monastery to him. Men came asking to live near him, and about 1540 they built a wooden church dedicated to the Dormition of the Most Holy Theotokos — the choice of dedication is worth noticing, and it would determine the shape of his own memory. The metropolitan of Novgorod, Macarius, his namesake and later metropolitan of Moscow and the presiding figure of the canonisation councils of 1547 and 1549, appointed him abbot of the new community. Nothing of the internal life of the house is transmitted: no rule, no sayings, no miracle stories of the founder's lifetime.
Repose
Macarius reposed on 15 August 1550, the feast of the Dormition. His disciples buried him beside the church he had founded, on its north side. That his death should fall on the patronal feast of his own church is the one thing the tradition dwells on, and it fixed his commemoration: he is kept on August 15, wholly overshadowed by the Great Feast, which is precisely the position the Church has always thought fitting for a hermit.
The hermitage after him
The Makaryevskaya Pustyn on the Lezna outlived its founder by nearly four centuries. A second wooden church, of Sabbatius of Solovki, was added soon after his death from the offerings of pilgrims. In the Time of Troubles the Swedish forces of Jacob De la Gardie devastated the place twice, in 1611 and 1615, killing monks and burning the library — which is the likeliest reason so little of Macarius's own life survives. The community rebuilt, but declined; by the eighteenth century it was a dependency of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra, and Catherine II's secularisation of 1764 suppressed it altogether, the church continuing as a parish chapel over the grave.
It revived in 1894 as a missionary house, and was still functioning in February 1932 when the brotherhood and its superior, Bishop Macarius (Vasiliev), were arrested; the buildings were destroyed in the fighting of 1942. Restoration began in 2005. Through all of it the grave remained the point of the place, and the relics of the founder are venerated there.
Feast and commemoration
August 15 (church date; New Calendar civil August 15, Old Calendar civil August 28), the day of his repose — which is also the Dormition of the Theotokos, so that in practice his service is entirely displaced by the Great Feast and he is commemorated by name only, or at the parish of his own hermitage. A second commemoration falls on January 19, his name-day, kept with Macarius the Great of Egypt. He is numbered among the Synaxis of the Saints of Novgorod and, in the reckoning of the modern Petersburg diocese, among the saints of the Saint Petersburg land. His veneration is Russian and local; he is not on the Greek or Antiochian calendars.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 8
In thee, O Father, was the divine image preserved without blemish, for taking up the Cross thou didst follow after 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 Macarius, thy spirit rejoiceth together with the angels.
Original translation from the Slavonic
Iconography
No pre-1900 icon of Macarius the Roman of Novgorod could be located in any accessible public-domain collection, and none is stored with this entry. He is painted in the Russian manner of a venerable father of the northern forests: an elderly monk in the dark mantle and paramandyas of the great schema, hair and beard long and untrimmed, one hand raised in blessing or held to the breast and the other holding an unrolled scroll. Where he is shown as a founder — the usual form for a hermit whose grave became a monastery — he holds a model of his wooden church, and the marsh and forest of the Lezna are indicated behind him. He appears also as one figure among many in the composite icons of the Synaxis of the Saints of Novgorod, in which the saints of the city and its territory are ranged in tiers before the Theotokos of the Sign; those compositions are the likeliest place a pre-modern likeness will eventually be found.
Disputed questions
Not to be confused with Macarius the Roman of Mesopotamia, commemorated on October 23 (no entry in this collection yet): an ascetic of the ancient East whose cave, according to his life, was found by three monks of the monastery of Saint Asclepius who had set out to wander the world. The two share an epithet and nothing else — one is a hermit of late antique Mesopotamia known only from a legendary vita, the other a sixteenth-century Italian convert in the Russian north — and Russian usage distinguishes them as Rimlyanin, Novgorodskii and Rimlyanin, Mesopotamskii. He is also distinct from Antony the Roman of Novgorod (†1147), the other Italian-born saint of the same city.
The record of his life is thin and late, and the entry does not pretend otherwise. Nothing independent confirms the Roman birth; the burning of the monastery's library in the Swedish raids destroyed whatever documents the house possessed; and the details that survive — the flight from Rome, the tonsure by Alexander of Svir — reach us through the later synaxaria rather than through a contemporary vita. What is firm is the foundation, the dedication of its church, the date of the repose and the continuity of veneration at the grave.