Job the Hermit of Bogdanesti

Job was a hermit of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, a monk of Bogdănești Monastery near Suceava, who lived more than forty years in the forests below Mount Pleșu and founded a small hermitage there. He is named in the Romanian Paterikon and venerated by the faithful, without synodal canonization; the sources available to us give no day of commemoration.

He took his vows at Bogdănești, where he laboured for some years at the end of the fourteenth century. Wishing to glorify God without ceasing, he withdrew into the nearby forests and lived in harsh asceticism, enduring, as the Paterikon says, great temptations. Word of him spread quickly. Tradition credits him with the gift of wonders: he is said to have driven evil spirits out of people by prayer and to have foretold things to come.

More than fifteen monks gathered around him, and so arose the hermitage long known as Job's Hermitage, and later as Poiana Iova, belonging to Bogdănești-⁠Râșca Monastery. The disciples' cells stood near his own, and in the middle was a small wooden church where they prayed every day. On feast days they served the Liturgy and received Communion.

Tradition keeps the memory of a confessor and teacher of prayer, to whom monks and laypeople came for prayer and a word of benefit. For centuries, almost to our own day, other hermits struggled in that place. The year of his repose is not known.