Ferapont of Monza

Venerable Ferapont of Monza was a Russian monk and hermit, tonsured at the Exaltation of the Cross monastery in Kostroma, who struggled on the river Monza, in the Galich district, and died around 1597. He is remembered on 27 March and on 12 December, the day of his repose, and in the synaxis of the saints of Kostroma. Our calendar also gives 27 May.

Life

Of his childhood and life in the world almost nothing survives, and the other news of him is scanty and fragmentary. It is known that he received monastic tonsure at the Exaltation of the Cross monastery in Kostroma, apparently at an advanced age, for he lived in monastic life only sixteen years, and before his death, according to a contemporary, was "old in years". It is said that before becoming a monk he lived in Moscow, near the "house" of the blessed Basil, and so he liked to call himself "neighbour of Basil in Moscow". At the Kostroma monastery he soon showed himself a great ascetic and stirred deep respect from the abbot and the brethren, and in the town open veneration from the voivode and the inhabitants.

Avoiding too much attention, he went away in secret to a deserted place, surrounded by marshes and forests, on the river Monza (in the Galich district), and gave himself here to "new labours". The old life says that after a time he began to appear wonderfully, waking and in dreams, to various persons, urging them to good deeds and remaining unknown. So he put into the heart of Venerable Adrian, who had settled with a few brethren in the deserted monastery of the Annunciation, the intention of moving the monastery to the place of his labours on the river Monza. When the monastery was built in the new place, Ferapont came into it as a wanderer and, at the request of the abbot and the brethren, stayed to live there. Little by little the monks and visitors of the monastery recognised in him the elder who had appeared wonderfully to them, and began to honour him as a saint. He lived in the monastery until his death two and a half years, spending almost all his time in solitary prayer in the forests on the other bank of the Monza, foretelling the future to those close to him, healing the sick and working other miracles, which did not cease after his death.

The year of his death and relics

Our sources do not agree on the year of his death. The Brockhaus and Efron encyclopaedic dictionary gives 1591, probably wrongly. Nikolai Tuberozov, in the Russian Biographical Dictionary, writes that he died "in all probability in 1598 or 1599", but the Orthodox Calendar says that, having foreknown the day of his death, the saint took leave of the brethren and fell asleep in peace on 12 December 1597. His relics lie beneath the floor in the church of the Annunciation of the now abolished Monza monastery.