Arcadius of Torzhok

Venerable Arcadius of Torzhok (Arcadius of Novotorzhsk) was a monk, disciple and companion in ascetic labour of Venerable Ephraim of Novy Torg (Torzhok). He died around 1077 and is venerated in the Russian Church among the venerable saints, but not through a general canonization: the sources speak of a local canonization in the sixteenth century.

Ephraim was in the service of Prince Boris. When Svyatopolk the Accursed killed Boris, Ephraim went to the north of Russia and founded in Torzhok, also called Novy Torg, a church for the reception of strangers, that is, travellers. Later, on the bank of the river Tvertsa, he raised with Arcadius a church and then a monastery dedicated to the holy martyr princes Boris and Gleb.

The service to Arcadius, preserved in copies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, says that he received monastic tonsure in his youth, in the monastery of Venerable Ephraim and from him, and grew spiritually there, following the example of his teacher. He was buried in the porch at the west doors of the cathedral of Boris and Gleb in their monastery at Torzhok.

His canonization for local veneration took place, apparently, in the years 1584 to 1587, when Ephraim too was canonized for local veneration. On 11 July 1677, with the blessing of Metropolitan Cornelius of Novgorod and Velikie Luki, in the time of Archimandrite Eustathius, his incorrupt relics were solemnly found. On 21 July 2019 particles of his relics were given to the Boris and Gleb monastery in Torzhok by Patriarch Kirill of Moscow.

At the end of the seventeenth century his veneration merged with that of Venerable Arcadius of Vyazma (died 1592), and icons appeared with the inscription Venerable Arcadius, Wonderworker of Vyazma and Torzhok. Out of this union Arcadius of Novotorzhsk and Vyazma was entered in the Synaxis of the Smolensk Saints, established in 1984. Our sources do not give a certain day of commemoration.