Arcadius of Dorogobuzh

Holy Venerable Arcadius of Dorogobuzh struggled, according to tradition in the sixteenth century, at the Gerasim Monastery in Boldino and was buried there. Archbishop Filaret Gumilevsky considered him a disciple of Venerable Gerasim of Boldino, who departed to the Lord in 1554. No certain facts of his life are known.

The memory of the venerable one is found in the Description of the Russian Saints, preserved in copies from the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In one manuscript of this work he is called Father Arcadius the recluse, wonderworker of Dorogobuzh. His veneration was kept at the monastery in Boldino until the first half of the nineteenth century, but by 1900, according to the testimony of the abbot, Archimandrite Macarius, the commemoration of the venerable one and the place of his grave had been forgotten. For this reason some writers of saints' lives at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century even doubted that he had existed: Archbishop Dimitry Sambikin denied him, as did the Vyazma local historian I. P. Vinogradov, and Archimandrite Leonid Kavelin identified him without ground with Venerable Arcadius of Vyazma.

Venerable Arcadius of Dorogobuzh was entered in the Synaxis of the Saints of Smolensk, established in 1984 on the initiative of Archbishop Theodosius Protsyuk of Smolensk and Vyazma. He is commemorated on 8 August.