Irinarkh of Solovki

Venerable Irinarkh, abbot of Solovki, governed the Solovki Monastery from 1614 to 1626 and fell asleep on 17 July 1628. He is venerated among the venerable, and the Church commemorates him on 17 July by the old calendar.

No reports have survived of his early years. In 1614, by the will of Tsar Michael Feodorovich, he became abbot of the Solovki monastery. During his abbacy he did much for the well-⁠being not only of his monastery but of the surrounding region. This was so although in the time of the war with the Swedes he was forced to renew the monastery's fortifications and to maintain a force of more than a thousand men. In his time Eleazar of Anzer founded the Holy Trinity skete on the island of Anzer.

His life was composed by a monk of Solovki, later abbot at Kalyazin, named Hilarion. Venerable Irinarkh is depicted in the icon Synaxis of Russian Saints of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, in the painting of the church of the Annunciation of the Solovki monastery from the second half of the nineteenth century and, together with Eleazar of Anzer, in a chromolithograph of 1897.