Gerasimus of Irkutsk

Gerasimus of Irkutsk was a schemamonk and builder of the Ascension monastery of Irkutsk, in Siberia. He fell asleep on 20 January 1676. Our source does not say that he was canonized by the Church, only that the people of Irkutsk honour him as a saint.

Gerasimus came to Eastern Siberia with the company of Russians who founded the city of Irkutsk (at first the Irkutsk stockade). In 1672 the elder Gerasimus, with the blessing of Metropolitan Cornelius of Siberia, laid the foundation of the Ascension hermitage, later the Ascension monastery. Five versts from Irkutsk, downstream on the Angara, on its left bank, he built a wooden church of the Ascension of the Lord, with a side chapel of the Mother of God Hodegetria, made a wooden fence and built cells for the brethren.

On 20 January 1676 the elder Gerasimus departed to the Lord and was buried in the monastery enclosure, in a wooden coffin cut from a log. In 1802, when a ditch was being dug for the monastery wall, his coffin was found incorrupt and the gravestone was found. In the same year a two-⁠storey chapel, called Gerasimus' tower, was built over the grave of the builder of the monastery, and in 1840 a stone crypt was made in the cellar above the coffin. In the chapel were kept the portrait of the elder, his staff and lectern, whose height shows that the elder was tall.

The people of Irkutsk honour Gerasimus as a saint; from 1900 every Saturday after early liturgy a memorial service was served for the elder, and a litiya in the chapel. In 1933 all the church buildings, except the Dormition church, were pulled down by the Bolsheviks; the Dormition church, deprived of its domes, was defiled: it became a club, and the consecrated well was used as a public toilet. After the fall of the communist regime, from 1998 spiritual services were resumed in the Dormition church. Since then the clergy and Orthodox parishioners have been trying to restore the former greatness of the monastery.