Joel of Ozeryany

Venerable Joel of Ozeryany was an archimandrite of the Russian Church, a venerable confessor, and is venerated as a local saint of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. He came of the Cossack people of the village of Ozeryany and struggled in the hermitage of the Holy Mountains.

Around 1663, with several monks of the Holy Mountains, he laid the foundation of the Kuriazh monastery, at the call of Hryhoriy Donets, captain of the Kharkiv Sloboda regiment. After some time he was forced to leave the monastery and returned to the hermitage of the Holy Mountains. In charters of 1679 he already appears as abbot of the Holy Mountains monastery. In 1679 he laid the foundation of the church of Saints Peter and Paul.

At that time the monastery was small and poor, with a brotherhood of no more than thirty, and much of its strength went into arranging it. For the needs of the monastery he wrote many petitions to the tsars of Moscow. His letter to the tsar of Moscow in 1679 contains the first description of the history of the Holy Mountains monastery. In the seventeenth century the monastery often suffered Tatar raids. In November 1679 the Tatars plundered and ravaged the monastery and took Archimandrite Joel and the brethren prisoner. They spent about two years in captivity, and in that time the monastery was governed by the hieromonk Joachim, appointed as administrator.

In the nineteenth century, after a collapse in a crypt of the brotherhood cemetery, his relics, like those of Archimandrites Thaddeus and Raphael, were found incorrupt. It was decided to leave the relics where they had been. Because of rebuilding and the demolition of the cemetery in Soviet times, the exact place of his burial is not known today.

On 8 May 2008 the Holy Synod of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church decided on his local canonization in the diocese of Donetsk, in the Synaxis of the Saints of the Holy Mountains. The glorification service took place on 12 July 2008, during the visit of Metropolitan Volodymyr of Kyiv to the Holy Mountains Lavra, in the Dormition cathedral. He is venerated only locally.