Athanasius of Rostov

Blessed Athanasius of Rostov (Stachys), fool for Christ, died before the year 1690. He is mentioned in the "Description of Russian Saints" (copies of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) and in an eighteenth-⁠century manuscript canonarion from Rostov, which gives brief notes on the saints of Rostov. He is commemorated on 26 August, together with Saint Pimen the Chain-⁠Wearer.

No life of him was composed; a few reports of the saint were kept in the oral tradition of the people of Rostov, among whom his veneration was great. Athanasius, called Stachys in some manuscripts, lived in the Abraham monastery of the Theophany in Rostov while Jonah Sysoevich (1652 to 1690) was Metropolitan of Rostov. Metropolitan Jonah loved and honoured him greatly, and Athanasius was often present at the hierarch's table. One day the metropolitan, who was occupied with the building of churches and structures of the Rostov Kremlin, was very distressed that the works he had ordered had not been carried out. Athanasius said to him: "Ah, Jonah, Jonah, why do you fuss? In your buildings and churches only sparrows will live in time to come." Indeed, in the nineteenth century the Rostov Kremlin lay in great neglect, and its churches were saved from complete destruction only by the restoration works begun in 1890.

The burial of the blessed one was performed by Metropolitan Jonah, and this is how the time of his death is known. He was buried behind the altar of the cathedral of the Theophany monastery, beside the grave of Saint Pimen the Chain-⁠Wearer, a recluse of the Theophany monastery (died after 1618). An icon painters' manual of the late eighteenth century notes under 26 August that Athanasius and Saint Pimen lie side by side at Rostov, in the Theophany monastery, behind the altar, in a small chamber.

A wooden chapel was built over the graves of Athanasius and Pimen. At the end of the eighteenth century the first mayor of Rostov, N. A. Khlebnikov, built a stone chapel in thanks for his healing from a grave illness after a memorial service served at the burial place of the two ascetics. From 24 July 1855 memorial services were served continually in the chapel, and on its inner west wall were painted the images of Athanasius and Saint Pimen.

The chapel kept two jug-⁠shaped iron weights of about sixty-⁠five kilograms each, and an iron jerkin of about twenty-⁠four kilograms, which according to tradition belonged to the ascetics. Pilgrims who visited the chapel would take a weight in hand or put on the iron jerkin and walk three times around the chapel, praying to Athanasius and Saint Pimen. The blessed one's local canonization took place in 1964, in the Synaxis of the Saints of Rostov and Yaroslavl.