Irinarh Roseti

Irinarch Roseti, born in 1771 at Focșani, was an archimandrite, printer, hermit and the founder of Horaița Monastery; he lived his last sixteen years on Mount Tabor and fell asleep there on 26 December 1859. He is named in the Romanian Paterikon and venerated by the faithful, without synodal canonization.

He came from the Moldavian family of officials, the Roseti, and his parents, Nicholas and Pelagia, raised him in the fear of God and gave him Romanian and Greek schooling. At twenty, when they wished to marry him off, he left at night, in secret, during a wedding, for Neamț Monastery to become a monk. It is told that on the way he dozed a little at the edge of the forest and in a dream a young man appeared, showed him a mountain and told him to climb it, which he later understood as Mount Tabor. After three years of humble obediences he was tonsured and given as assistant to the monastery printing house, founded in 1807, where he became a skilled printer and worked on printing the Lives of the Saints. When his father died, he received the inheritance sent by his mother, two hundred gold coins, and handed it at once to the abbot for the monastery's needs.

Wishing to follow his spiritual father, the hieroschemamonk Joseph the Hermit of Văratec, he left Neamț and lived twelve years as a hermit in the forests around Nechit Skete, eating once a day bread and water at sunset. In 1823 he set out for Athos, but Metropolitan Gregory stopped him at Bucharest to organize his printing house, where he stayed three years. In 1826 he went to the Holy Mountain, where he stayed two years, then returned to Moldavia, in 1829, and became a hermit on Horaița Mountain.

In 1830 Metropolitan Veniamin Costachi made him, against his will, a priest and archimandrite and gave him blessing to build a church. In 1831 he founded Horaița Monastery, was its first abbot until 1843 and gathered more than seventy monks. Then he left a disciple as abbot and went to the Holy Places with the hierodeacon Nectarie Banul, settling on Mount Tabor, where they lived sixteen years in hermit life, enduring many temptations. In 1859 he began a large stone church on Tabor, in honour of the Transfiguration, but did not live to finish it. He died on 26 December 1859, mourned by his spiritual children, and was buried in the church begun by him and finished by his disciple. After a few years his bones were moved to the southern side, beside his foundation.