Cornelius of Padan

Venerable Cornelius of Padan lived in the sixteenth century and was a disciple of Saint Alexander of Svir and the founder of the Saint Nicholas hermitage of Verkhopadan. He is commemorated on 3 June, in the Synaxis of the saints of Karelia and in the movable synaxes of the saints of Saint Petersburg and Ladoga, and in the third week after Pentecost.

Venerable Cornelius was a disciple and cell attendant of Saint Alexander of Svir. In 1549, in the Vinnitsa churchyard settlement on the river Shoksha, a tributary of the river Padan, Cornelius founded the Saint Nicholas hermitage, which took the name Padan from the tributary. The land register of the Obonezh district for 1582 and 1583 says: at the monastery there is the cell of the hegumen Cornelius and seven more cells in which live eleven brother monks. Already in Cornelius' lifetime a wooden church of Saint Nicholas with a refectory was built in the hermitage.

In 1995, in the examination of the graves found when the foundation of the church of the Presentation of the monastery of Padan was cleared, there was found in one grave, at the base of the altar, an almost complete skeleton with partly preserved mummified soft tissue of a man who died at the end of the sixteenth or the beginning of the seventeenth century, aged about seventy. The experts confirmed the supposition that these relics belong to Venerable Cornelius of Padan.