Longinus of Koryazhma

Saint Longinus (Loggin) of Koryazhma (died 1540) was a monk of the Pavlo-⁠Obnorsky monastery and founder of the Saint Nicholas monastery at Koryazhma, near Solvychegodsk. He is commemorated on 10 February and 16 October (Old Style). The sources do not give the date of canonization; in 2018 he was entered in the Synaxis of the Saints of Arkhangelsk.

Life

In the first half of the sixteenth century he struggled at the Pavlo-⁠Obnorsky monastery, where he had come young and where he enjoyed particular honour as an elder experienced in monastic life. Fleeing human glory and weary of the crowd of the community, he withdrew with his friend, the monk Simon of Soyga, from the Cornelius monastery, to the bank of the river Koryazhemka, in a deep forest fifteen kilometres from Solvychegodsk. They cut down part of the forest, cleared the place, made a small cell and a chapel, and gave themselves to monastic labours, living by the work of their hands.

Blessed Simon soon left him and withdrew to the river Soyga, sixty versts away. News of Longinus spread and brothers began to gather to him, wishing to share in his hermit's labour, and so the Koryazhma monastery arose, of which he himself was the first abbot. He built the church of Saint Nicholas, a refectory and other rooms. He did not live long in the new monastery: he reposed at a great age, on 10 February 1540, in the time of Archbishop Dositheus of Rostov, and was buried, as he had commanded, "by the porch stairs".

Relics and veneration

In 1557, at the urging of the governor of Ustyug, Prince Vladimir, whom the saint had healed of a grave illness, his coffin was moved to a new grave near the north wall of the church. On 9 May 1665, in place of the wooden church he had built, Bishop Alexander of Vyatka laid the foundation of a stone church of the Annunciation, with a side chapel of Saint Nicholas, consecrated in 1671. The grave came to lie inside the church, by the north wall, and over it a shrine was set up, which an order of 1821 allowed to be adorned with gilded carving, icons and a canopy. Bishop Onisiphorus of Vologda allowed a molieben to be served in place of memorial services. On 18 March 1872, after the old church was dismantled, the shrine was moved to the heated Saviour church, near its north wall behind the left choir. His service was composed by Bishop Alexander. In 1863 the monastery was attached to the Entry monastery at Solvychegodsk, but in 1896 it again received its own administration, with the rule of the Sarov hermitage. In 2018 Longinus was entered in the Synaxis of the Saints of Arkhangelsk.