Lazarus of Murom

Venerable Lazarus of Murom (also called Lazarus of Murmansk) is the founder of the Dormition monastery at Murom on the eastern shore of Lake Onega, and is venerated by the Russian Church among the venerable. The Church commemorates him on 8 March, by the old calendar. According to tradition he died in 1391.

In the text of his spiritual testament Lazarus calls himself a native of Rome, tonsured at the Vysokogorsky monastery. According to the researcher Oleg Ulyanov, he set out for Rus from the Greek monastery of Santa Prassede in Rome. The Serbian source, however, says that he was born in 1286 at Constantinople, where he became a monk when young. The Russian source gives his birth in 1286, with a question mark, and rests its statement of Roman origin on the testament; the two sources disagree about his birthplace.

He lived in the Novgorod monastic community of Bishop Basil of Murom. According to the Serbian source, he was sent by his bishop to Novgorod to describe the holy places of Novgorod and, having finished the obedience, stayed to live there. In 1352 he moved to the uninhabited peninsula of Much on Lake Onega, where he enlightened the Lapps with the Gospel, and some of them took monastic vows in the monastery he founded. Even amid the troubles and sufferings he endured from the inhabitants of the region, he succeeded in baptizing many and bringing them to Christianity.

He died in 1391, at the age of one hundred and five, and was buried in the monastery he founded. According to tradition, Venerable Lazarus built with his own hands a small wooden church, which survives to this day. In 1959 it was moved from the Murom monastery to the island of Kizhi and became part of the museum-⁠reserve there. The church of the Raising of Lazarus is considered the oldest of the surviving wooden churches of the Russian North.