Cassian Solomensky

Holy Venerable Cassian Solomensky was the founder of the Peter and Paul hermitage at Solomenskoye, in the land of Karelia. He is a locally venerated saint of the Petrozavodsk and Karelian metropolis and is commemorated on 11 July (new style, a movable day), in the Synaxis of the Saints of Novgorod.

No news has been preserved of the time and place of his birth. Historians before the Soviet era supposed that he was one of the disciples of Venerable Alexander of Svir. It seems he founded the monastery in the second half of the 1580s. He raised his solitary cell on the bank of a narrow strait linking Lake Onega with Logmozero, on lands in the Nikolsky Shuisky district. The earliest mention of the saint's name is in the charter of Metropolitan Varlaam of Novgorod, given in 1592 to the Solomenskoye hermitage: the elders were exempted from the heavy dues to the metropolis and received judicial concessions. Earlier they had complained to the metropolitan of their hard condition: they had no ploughland or holdings, received no stipend from the tsar and "fed on the name of Christ".

In Cassian's time, with the blessing of Metropolitan Alexander of Novgorod, the first church of the monastery was consecrated, built in honour of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul in 1589/1590. The elder obtained for the monastery from the tsars Feodor Ivanovich (1596) and Vasily Shuisky (1608) a small estate including several empty villages nearby. Venerable Cassian, builder of the hermitage, is mentioned in the cadastral book of 1628-1631, in the description of the buildings and holdings of the monastery, which states that "all the ancient building of that hermitage is of the builder, the elder Kasyan". By the end of its founder's life the small monastery for men had all that it needed: a sound church with vestments and vessels, cells for the brethren, ploughland and holdings. Cassian chose a good place on an important trade route linking the White Sea coast with Great Novgorod. He may have met the wandering scribe monk Jonah of Solovki, who in the winter of 1599/1600 made his way to Tikhvin and passed through the "Peter's monastery at Solomeni".

In 1959 participants of an expedition of the Russian Museum, E. S. Smirnova and S. F. Konenkov, took from the Peter and Paul church an ancient icon of Saint Nicholas, dated to the fifteenth or sixteenth century. Most probably it had belonged to the hermitage and, quite possibly, Venerable Cassian prayed before it.

Veneration

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the peasants of the Solomenskoye parish, formed on the site of the monastery abolished under Catherine II, remembered Venerable Cassian, though they held no special celebrations. The saint was commemorated by memorial services in the parish church. In our day the name of Venerable Cassian is included in the service for the Synaxis of the Karelian Saints of the Diocese of Petrozavodsk and Karelia, though he is not in the official Orthodox calendar.