Synaxis of the Saints of Solovki
The Synaxis of All the Venerable Fathers and Saints who shone forth in the Solovetsky Monastery
Venerable · Hieromartyr · New Martyr · Bishop · Wonderworker
Commemorated 9 August — Synaxis of all the saints of the Solovetsky Monastery
The Synaxis of the Saints of Solovki gathers on one day all the saints of the Solovetsky Monastery on the White Sea — the founders Sabbatius, Zosimas and Herman, the abbot Philip who became Metropolitan of Moscow and was strangled for rebuking Ivan the Terrible, and the long line of hermits, elders, wonderworkers and martyrs of the archipelago and its dependent sketes. It is a modern commemoration: established by resolution of Patriarch Alexy II of Moscow on 3 April 1993, as the monastery was returning to monastic life after seven decades in which it had been a prison camp, and appointed for 9 August — the day after the translation of the relics of Zosimas and Sabbatius, within the monastery's own patronal cycle of the Transfiguration.
The monastery
Solovki — the Solovetsky archipelago, six islands in Onega Bay at the western end of the White Sea, sixty-five miles from the Arctic Circle — was uninhabited when the hermit Sabbatius, a monk of Valaam and then of Kirillo-Belozersk, crossed to it about 1429 with the elder Herman. Sabbatius died on the mainland in 1435; Herman returned to the island with the young Zosimas in 1436, and from their cell grew the monastery that became the greatest religious and economic power of the Russian north: a stone fortress with walls of boulders, salt-works, fisheries, a fleet, a library, and a dependency of sketes and hermitages scattered over the islands and the Karelian coast.
Its saints are of every kind the monastic north produced. There are the founders and the abbots. There are the desert-dwellers of Anzer and the outer islands — Job of Anzersk, in the great schema Jesus, founder of the Golgotha-Crucifixion skete. There are the hierarchs who went out from the brotherhood, above all Philip, abbot of Solovki and then Metropolitan of Moscow, put to death in 1569 for withholding his blessing from the Oprichnina. There are the martyrs killed on missionary or economic journeys — John and Longinus of Yarenga, whose bodies came ashore on the Summer Coast, Job of Ushchelye, killed by brigands on the Mezen. There are the fools for Christ and the silent ones, and the recluses like Irenarchus and Elisha of Suma, whose whole record is a paragraph.
The roll settled in 1993 numbers fifty-two. Some of its names carry full Lives; many are known only from the monastery's own synodicon — Basil the cellarer, Gerasimus the hermit, Januarius, John the deacon, Macarius the fisherman, Onuphrius the hermit and the rest — men whose sanctity the house remembered and the wider Church never had occasion to write down. Precisely this is what a regional synaxis exists to do: to keep in the calendar those whom no single feast would ever have carried.
The establishment of the synaxis
The commemoration is new, and its date is deliberate. Solovki was closed in 1920 and became, from 1923, the SLON camp — the Solovetsky Camp of Special Designation, the prototype and the seed of the whole Soviet camp system, where bishops, priests and monks died in numbers that have never been fully counted, and where the imprisoned hierarchs issued in 1926 the Solovki Memorandum on the relations of Church and state. The monastery was returned to the Church in 1990 and monastic life resumed; the relics of Zosimas, Sabbatius and Herman came back to the islands in 1992. In the following spring, on 3 April 1993, Patriarch Alexy II established by resolution a Synaxis of the Saints of Solovki, to be kept on 9 August (22 August civil, Old Calendar).
The date sets the synaxis inside the monastery's own festal week. The patronal feast of the great cathedral is the Transfiguration, August 6; August 8 is the translation of the relics of Zosimas and Sabbatius into the Transfiguration cathedral, made in 1566 while Philip was abbot, and repeated in 1992 with Herman; and August 9 follows immediately, so that the whole company is commemorated on the last of the monastery's own days. The neighbouring Russian synaxes are ordered on the same principle.
Feast and commemoration
August 9 (church date; Old Calendar civil August 22), within the afterfeast of the Transfiguration and within the Dormition Fast. A Russian commemoration, kept by the Moscow Patriarchate and by the Orthodox Church in America, and observed with especial solemnity at Solovki itself, where it closes the cycle that begins with the Transfiguration on August 6 and the translation of the relics on August 8. The Greek books do not carry it.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 8
O ye who upon the sea-girt rock made the wilderness a garden of prayer, fathers and martyrs of Solovki, who shone forth in fasting and in patience and in blood: entreat Christ our God, that He may grant to our land steadfastness in the faith, and to our souls great mercy.
Original translation from the Slavonic
Iconography
The synaxis has the standard form of the Russian regional sobor icon, a type worked out in the seventeenth century and revived in the twentieth: the monastery itself is painted at the centre or at the foot of the panel — for Solovki, unmistakably, the white cathedral of the Transfiguration within its walls of grey boulders, ringed by the sea — and the saints stand in ranks on either side and above, turned inward and upward towards Christ or the Saviour Not-Made-by-Hands blessing from the segment of heaven. The three founders stand foremost, Zosimas and Sabbatius flanking the monastery in the ancient pairing, often holding a model of it between them, with Herman beside them; Philip is placed among them in the sakkos and omophorion of a metropolitan of Moscow, and is the one figure in hierarchical vesture in a composition otherwise entirely of black mantiya and schema.
The founders' pair-icon — Zosimas and Sabbatius holding the monastery — is much older than the synaxis, and is one of the most widely copied of all Russian monastic images; because Zosimas is the patron of beekeepers, versions of it were kept in apiaries all over Russia. No pre-1900 icon of the Synaxis as such can exist, the commemoration dating from 1993, and the modern painted versions are the work of living iconographers and are not storable here. The older founders' icons would be storable in principle and belong properly to the entries for Zosimas and Sabbatius.
Disputed questions
- The new-martyrs of the camp. The Synaxis as constituted in 1993 is a synaxis of the monastery's saints, and the new-martyrs and confessors who died at Solovki in the camp years are commemorated with the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia (movable, the Sunday nearest 25 January) rather than here; a number of them are also numbered among the Solovki saints individually. Where the two rolls overlap, and whether the camp's dead belong to this day as such, is a question of Russian calendar practice on which the published lists are not uniform.
- The roll. Fifty-two names are given in the resolution of 1993, but the Solovetsky synodicon carries more, and the regional synaxes of Karelia, of Novgorod and St Petersburg and of the saints of Archangel overlap it heavily; several Solovetsky saints appear in three or four such synaxes. No two printed lists agree exactly. This entry names only those members who have their own entry in this collection, and does not attempt a definitive roll.
- Not a fixed-day feast of the New Martyrs. The synaxis is fixed to 9 August and is not movable; it should not be confused with the Sunday-based synaxes of Karelian or Novgorod saints in which several of the same men are also numbered.