Dorotheus of Yug

Venerable Dorotheus of Yug was a schemamonk and the founder of the Yug hermitage in the Yaroslavl governorate. He died in 1622. His veneration is largely local, in the Russian Church. Almost nothing has survived of his childhood and life in the world, and the other reports are few and fragmentary, taken mostly from the "Tale of the Miraculous Icon of the Mother of God of Yug" (about the eighteenth century) and from a manuscript called "Description of the Yug Dorofeev Cenobitic Hermitage".

According to the surviving reports, Dorotheus was born in the village of Nizhne-⁠Nikulskoe. He received monastic tonsure and the schema at the Caves monastery of Pskov, where he spent his time in fasting and prayer.

On 5 May 1615, shortly before the siege of Pskov in the Russo-⁠Swedish war, at the morning service Venerable Dorotheus heard a voice that commanded him to take an icon of the Most Holy Mother of God and go with it to his native places. Going round the monastery, he found a wonderworking icon of the Mother of God. With the blessing of the abbot of the Caves monastery, Archimandrite Joachim, Dorotheus left the monastery and in the same year founded the Yug hermitage in the diocese of Yaroslavl. In memory of its founder the hermitage was later given the name Dorofeev.

Saint Dorotheus died in 1622 and was buried in the church he founded.

The commemoration of the venerable one is kept in the fourth week after Pentecost, in the Synaxis of the saints of the Pskov Caves, on 23 May, in the Synaxis of the saints of Rostov and Yaroslavl, and on 5 June, locally, in the dioceses of Yaroslavl and Rostov.