Ignatius of Belozersk

Holy Venerable Ignatius of Belozersk, the Silent († in the first half of the fifteenth century), was a monk of the Dormition men's monastery of Cyril of Belozersk. He is commemorated on the third Sunday after Pentecost, in the synaxes of the saints of Vologda and Novgorod. The main information about the saint is in the Life of Venerable Cyril of Belozersk, composed by Pachomius the Logothete in 1462. Ignatius is numbered among the first monks who came to the monastery during the lifetime of its founder, Venerable Cyril (that is, between 1390 and 1427). On entering the brotherhood of the monastery he already had experience of the labour of silence. In the Life he is called a perfect man and great in virtue. The saint was distinguished by extreme non-⁠possession, strict fasting, and a rule of prayer which included a great number of prostrations; for thirty years he slept standing or slightly crouching, not lying on his sides. After Venerable Cyril, Ignatius was the most honoured elder of the monastery. Yet in the following years he was apparently forgotten: the ascetic's commemoration is not noted in the cellarers' service books of the monastery of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. An Ignatius is mentioned in the synodikon of Cyril's monastery after Venerable Cyril, Martinian and Ferapont of Belozersk and Nil of Sora, but identification with him is only hypothetical. The saint's name is not found in the menologia or in the Description of Russian Saints (known from copies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries). Most probably Ignatius was canonised as a local saint about 1831 in the Synaxis of the Saints of Novgorod (the feast confirmed in 1981). His name was also entered in the Synaxis of the Saints of Vologda, whose celebration was established in 1841.

He is commemorated on 11 July (new style, a movable day).