Isaakios Lomsky

Holy Venerable Isaakios Lomsky (of Lom) was an ascetic of the Yaroslavl region, commemorated in the Synaxis of the Saints of Rostov and Yaroslavl and in that of the Saints of Vologda. Few things are known about him.

"Isaakios, who was beyond Lom" is mentioned in the "Description of the Russian Saints", known from copies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In some versions of it he is called "head of the monastery". It seems that he should be considered one and the same as Joachim, mentioned in the Life of Venerable Ignatius of Lom (early 1660s), who came with Venerable Ignatius to the place where Ignatius later built the Lom hermitage, in honour of the Transfer from Edessa of the Image of the Lord Jesus Christ Not Made by Hands. Ignatius stayed there, and Joachim went further, crossed the river Sara and, one poprishche (an old Russian measure of distance) from that monastery, began to live. Near the monastery, on the bank of the river Darovitsa, a spring flows from the ground, where people go for health, wash and drink its water. According to tradition, Joachim set on the path by the Darovitsa the bast sandals that he wove, and the locals took them and left bread in their place.

The commemoration of Isaakios is noted on 25 May in the Kaidalov calendar. According to it, the saint is buried in the Lom monastery, abolished in 1764. The Saviour church, formerly the monastery church and later a parish church (consecrated in 1827), was closed in the 1930s, reopened and closed again in 1948. At present the church is being restored. His canonization is to be reckoned as the inclusion of his name in the Synaxis of the Saints of Rostov and Yaroslavl, whose celebration was established in 1964. He is commemorated on 11 July (a movable day), in the Synaxis of the Saints of Vologda, in new style.