Elias of Yaroslavl

Blessed Elias of Yaroslavl, a fool for Christ, also called Elias of Danilov, is a saint of whose life little is known. The Azbyka page gives his death as 1592, with a question mark, and an old source says that he fell asleep in the year 7100 from the creation of the world, which is 1591 or 1592. He lived in Danilova Sloboda, today the town of Danilov in the Yaroslavl region.

The work "Description of the Russian Saints", known from copies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, calls him blessed and a fool for Christ who struggled in a monastery in Danilova Sloboda. A later copy adds that it was the monastery of the Mother of God of Kazan. According to local tradition, the blessed one ran extraordinarily fast. His grave lay, according to a 1908 work on the monasteries of the diocese, behind the altar of the church of the Holy Trinity in the former Kolesnikov Trinity hermitage, known from documents of the 1630s and 1640s. Scholars think that the hermitage was founded on the very place of his labours. The stone church was built in 1683 to 1687 through the care of Prochorus, the cellarer of the Trinity-⁠Saint Sergius Lavra. In 1680 a chapel was recorded over the grave with an icon of the Holy Prophet Elijah, and a green garment hung on the saint's tomb.

The hermitage was closed in 1764. In 1894 a women's community appeared here, which in 1901 became the Danilov convent of the Kazan icon of the Mother of God, closed in the winter of 1927 and 1928 and restored in 2003. At the beginning of the twentieth century the chapel over the grave still stood, but it has since been lost. People used to take earth from his grave for healing and blessing.

The Koryazhma calendar of 1621 records on 6 February "the holy and righteous Elias, fool for Christ, new wonderworker". In the Rostov calendars of the end of the seventeenth century his memory appears on 20 July, and on 6 February there appears a Joel, a fool for Christ honoured in Danilova Sloboda, whom Archimandrite Leonid (Kavelin) listed together with Elias among the saints of Yaroslavl. Scholars believe that Joel and Elias are one person. At the beginning of the twentieth century he had not been canonized, and memorial services were served at his tomb. Archbishop Sergius (Spassky) did not include him in his calendar of 1903. Scholars regard his canonization as his inclusion in the Synaxis of the Saints of Rostov and Yaroslavl, whose feast was established in 1964. The saint is commemorated on 5 June, in the new style, in this Synaxis.