Elias Chebotarev

Holy Venerable Elias Chebotarev, a schemamonk, was born in 1829 in the city of Kursk, in a simple and devout family. From childhood he loved going to church and listening to holy books, above all the lives of the ascetic saints. He learned to read and to write a little at home, with his parents' help. At Holy Baptism he had received the name John.

Kept from sinful habits and amusements, he bore from an early age a burning desire to leave the world and give himself to the monastic life. He chose Valaam, the strictest and most remote monastery, and arrived there on 4 January 1862, aged 32. He was received at once as a novice and given an obedience in the monastery, and on 13 January 1864 he was admitted to the brotherhood. With the monastic habit he increased his labours: with the blessing of his spiritual fathers he made every day thousands of small prostrations and hundreds of full ones, though he was ill and his body was growing weak. On 16 January 1892 he was tonsured into the schema with the name Elias, exactly thirty years after he came to Valaam.

Prayer and the spirit of prayer were his chief labour. But he was also adorned with bodily labour: there was no bed in his cell, and it was learned later that he slept on firewood in the entryway. He dressed very plainly and lightly, even in cold weather. The priesthood was offered to him, but out of humility he refused it so as not to leave the life of the wilderness. Soon he moved to the still stricter skete of Saint John the Baptist on the island, where all conditions were those of the desert and the rule was one of fasting. There the elder was constantly absorbed in spiritual work and guarded against wasting time.

Near the end of his life, at the close of 1893, the Lord moved him from Valaam to Siberia, to the Saint Nicholas monastery in Verkhoturye. The Holy Synod had decreed on 4 October 1893 that the monastery should pass to the common-⁠life rule, and to establish the new order the hieromonk Job of Valaam was appointed abbot and raised to archimandrite. He asked for several experienced Valaam monks, among them the schemamonk Elias. At Verkhoturye he kept seeking complete solitude, but he had to receive crowds of pilgrims.

At the end of 1900 his illness grew so severe that he almost stopped receiving visitors and communed often of the Holy Mysteries. On 30 November 1900 he listened calmly to the prayer for the departing soul and passed away peacefully like a righteous man, before the brethren, aged 70, after 38 years of monastic life. He was buried behind the altar of the monastery cemetery church of the Holy Martyr Neophytus, on the south side. Today his venerable remains rest in the Transfiguration church of the monastery. The saint is commemorated on 11 February, in the new style, in the Synaxis of the Saints of Yekaterinburg.