Euphrosynus of Kurzha

Venerable Euphrosynus of Kurzha († 1661-1662?) was a hermit of the Kurzha (Andoma) Hermitage, in the Kargopol district. He is numbered in the Synaxis of All Saints Who Shone Forth in the Russian Land, with commemoration on the second Sunday after Pentecost; he is honoured also in the Synaxis of the Saints of Karelia.

His veneration appears in the "Description of the Russian Saints," in copies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which mentions him among the saints of Kargopol: "the venerable father Euphrosynus the hermit, wonderworker of Kurzha, who reposed in the Andoga hermitage in the year 7160 (1652)." Several manuscripts name the place Andoma and call him "the beginner of the Andoma hermitage." It may be believed with high probability that from the mid-1650s he struggled, perhaps as builder, in the Kurzha hermitage for men, where he died. The hermitage lay on an island in Lake Kurzha, in the Vytegra district, ninety kilometres north-⁠east of the town, at the source of the river Andoma. At the turn of the 1660s and 1670s it was an important centre of the Old Believers, and for that reason, by order of Metropolitan Pitirim of Novgorod, it was destroyed in the autumn of 1671.

Important news of him is found in early Old Believer writings. One of their early teachers, Epiphanius, in his Life (composed between 1667 and 1676), says that he knew the venerable one, calls him "saint," "beloved friend, brother and father," and tells that Euphrosynus fled "from the Nikonian heresy" to the Andoma hermitage and there "reposed in Jesus Christ." Epiphanius lived a year in the same cell with him and they said their rule together; "he was a man who loved Christ greatly, loved stillness much." A wandering monk, Barlaam, stayed with Euphrosynus over a year, until his death, and later told Epiphanius of it, calling the venerable one "saint" and "a wonderful man, lover of stillness," who after death "works glorious miracles by the grace of the Holy Spirit." Grieved at the death of his "heart's friend," Epiphanius called on him often in prayer and had an appearance in which the venerable one told him to pray zealously to the Mother of God. His death therefore falls after 1659-1660. Vyg writers of the eighteenth century, such as Andrei Denisov and Ivan Filippov, preserved his veneration.