Auxentius of Vologda

Venerable Auxentius of Vologda (also called Auxentius of Pertsova or Pertsovsky) was a Russian ascetic of the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century, honoured by the Russian Church among the venerable fathers. His commemoration is on 12 June (25 June by the new calendar) and on the third Sunday after Pentecost, in the Synaxis of the Saints of Vologda. Our record gives the years 1500 and 1600, which do not fit the sources.

Almost nothing has been preserved about his childhood and life in the world, and the other reports are very few and fragmentary. In 1499, together with his friend and companion Onuphrius, he settled in a dense forest thirty-⁠five versts from the city of Vologda, where they founded the Holy Trinity hermitage of Pertsova. With humility they bore many wants and hardships of every kind and so performed the labours of monastic life.

In 1588 the Pertsova hermitage was still assigned to the Cornelius monastery of Komel, which was turned into a parish church in 1764, after the monastery itself was abolished. The exact day of the venerable one's repose is not known, but according to accounts, in the second half of the sixteenth century his relics, which gave healing, already rested beneath a slab in the main church of the hermitage. Today the church is destroyed, but services of prayer are held on its site. In 1999 celebrations were held for the five hundred years since the founding of the hermitage, and the festal moleben on the day of the commemoration of the venerable fathers, on 12 June 1999, was served by the abbot of the Spaso-⁠Prilutsky Monastery, Hegumen Dionysius (Vozdvizhensky).