Ignatius of Lom

Venerable Ignatius of Lom was a monk and the founder of the Transfiguration Hermitage on the river Lom, in the Yaroslavl region of northern Russia. He reposed in 1591 at the Lom Hermitage, on whose site the village of Spas-⁠Lom now stands. He is commemorated by the old calendar on 23 May, in the Synaxis of the Saints of Rostov, and on 28 December.

His Life relates that the monks Ignatius and Joachim came to the place where the monastery now stands, but it is not known from where. Ignatius founded the hermitage near the town of Lomsk, while Joachim went farther, crossed the river Sara, a short distance from that monastery, and settled there. Near the monastery, on the bank of the river Darovitsa, a spring flowed out of the ground, to which people went for health, washing in its water and drinking it. The inhabitants of the village of Yakimovo in the nineteenth century linked it with Joachim: according to tradition, on his way along the Darovitsa he left woven bast sandals, and travellers left him bread in exchange.

The Life of the saint has been preserved in a manuscript of the first half of the eighteenth century, in the Description of the Russian Saints and in the Tale of the Russian Wonderworkers. The Life, the service and the Encomium were probably composed at the beginning of the 1660s, when the hermitage was governed by its builder John Neronov.

Ignatius died in 1591. According to one of the sources, his holy relics rest in the church of the Vyadozh Hermitage; the other source does not say where they lie.