Andrew of Solovki

Venerable Andrew of Solovki, a hermit (died after 1606), lived in the wilderness of the Solovki islands. The "Tale of the Hermit Andrew" is known from two copies of the early nineteenth century. He is commemorated on 22 August, in the Synaxis of the Saints of Solovki, and on 11 July, in the Synaxis of the Saints of Novgorod.

The Tale says that he came to Solovki Monastery in the time of Abbot Barlaam Rogov, later Metropolitan of Rostov. At first he did the common obediences with the labourers, then was sent to the saltworks at Sosnovaya. In 1575 he hid in the depths of the island and settled in a cave he dug himself. There he endured heavy spiritual and bodily temptations: "he fought with thoughts as with fierce beasts". Several times he wished to return to the monastery, but each time unexpected circumstances stopped him: thunder, lightning, rain or hard frost. When he resolved not to leave the wilderness, a gentle, cool and warm wind, tempered air and a bright shining sun calmed the ascetic. After three years an angel appeared to him and blessed grass as food, and ordered him to take water from the lake; so the hermit lived another twenty-⁠eight years (the Tale says, evidently in error, fifty-⁠eight), grass and water being his only food.

As the Tale testifies, he himself told the story of his hermit life to the monk Basil of Kenozero, who, having lost his way, came upon Venerable Andrew's cave and saw in his dwelling "two troughs, in one grass soaking, in the other water". Basil told what he had heard to his spiritual father, the hieromonk Isidore of Novgorod, and described the hermit's appearance: "He was naked all over, of middle height, with a sparse beard, his body black as earth and dry as a dead man's". In the monastery word of the hermit got about, but to no one else was the place of his labours revealed. It is not known whether in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a local canonization of Venerable Andrew of Solovki took place, as of other hermits of Solovki, but in the early nineteenth century his name was entered in the "True and Brief Enumeration of the Venerable Fathers of Solovki", and in the early twentieth century in the Arkhangelsk Paterikon. Local glorification took place with the establishment, in 1993, with the blessing of Patriarch Alexy II, of the Synaxis of the Saints of Solovki.