Elias Troitsky

Holy Venerable Elias Troitsky (Elias of the Trinity), the cellarer, was one of the first disciples of Saint Sergius of Radonezh. He is thought to have settled in the monastery of the Holy Trinity after 1354, when Sergius became abbot, and he remained faithful to the place of his tonsure to the end. He had weight among the brethren, so when the rule of common life was introduced into the monastery he was appointed cellarer, that is, overseer of the monastery's household. He may have been among the monks who asked for their abbot to return when he withdrew to the Annunciation monastery at Kirzhach.

His name is tied to the events of the autumn of 1380. Soon after the victorious return of Grand Prince Demetrius Donskoy from Kulikovo, Moscow was seized by new disquieting news: the Lithuanian army of Prince Jagiello was advancing on the city, and on the side of the Lithuanians stood Demetrius's enemy, Prince Oleg of Ryazan. The news was brought to Saint Sergius on 21 September 1380, at the request of Prince Demetrius, by Archimandrite Theodore of the Simonov monastery, the elder's nephew. The saint at once sent his cellarer, the second man in the monastery after the abbot, to Oleg of Ryazan with the charge to stop the invaders. That same day Isaac Andronikov also arrived from Moscow, probably a monk of the Andronikov monastery, a spiritual offshoot of the Trinity, who, not knowing of Theodore's mission, thought it his duty to say the same. A note in the margin of an old book of the monastery, a Stichera book of 1380, keeps the hurried jottings of a scribe made under the impression of that day: Simonovsky came, the cellarer went to Ryazan, Isaac Andronikov reached us, word came that Lithuania is coming with the Tatars.

The prince of Ryazan received Elias and did not dare disobey the abbot of the Trinity. Oleg persuaded Jagiello to turn back. He himself, however, did not make peace: many times he allied himself with Mamai and Tokhtamysh and moved against Moscow.

The second and last time the cellarer Elias is named is in the chronicle of the Trinity under the year 1384: the elder Elias, cellarer of the monastery, good and obedient, passed to the Lord in the week of Pentecost, after the feast of the Holy Trinity, which that year fell on 29 May. A year later Saint Sergius himself went on foot to Ryazan, at the request of Demetrius Donskoy, to ask Oleg to end the quarrels. He persuaded him, humbling his pride by the lack of pride in his own heart, and the reconciliation of Ryazan with Moscow was later sealed by the marriage of the princes' children.

The name of Venerable Elias was entered in the short list of the first inhabitants of the monastery in its synodikon. The news of him, kept in a chronicle of the Trinity of 1408 or 1409 which has not survived, passed into the Rogozh Chronicle of about 1440 and into the Simeon Chronicle of the late fifteenth century, which calls him a monk, the cellarer of Abbot Sergius, good, obedient, living a holy life in obedience to the holy elder, obedient to death.

The Church commemorates him on 19 July, in the Synaxis of the Saints of Radonezh, in the new style, and on the movable day of the Synaxis of the Saints of Moscow.