Longinus of Yarensk

Venerable Longinus (Loggin) of Yarensk was a blessed one, a man unlettered, who laboured at the Solovki monastery in the days and under the guidance of the holy abbot Philip, and died drowned together with the blessed John on 29 October 1561. He is venerated in the Russian Orthodox Church. The record gives several days of commemoration (3 July, 21 May, 9 August, 16 October), which the sources do not support; they give no day of commemoration.

Very little is known of his worldly life. Returning together with the blessed John, in 1561, to the monastery in boats loaded with building materials, they were caught by a strong storm and sank. Their bodies were found incorrupt on the Karelian shore, 120 kilometres from the Solovki monastery, at the mouth of the Sosnovka, and were laid in the settlement of Yarenga. The miracles worked at their relics drew a few monks to the settlement of Yarenga, and so a monastery arose there.

In 1625 the monk Ilya Telov reported to Patriarch Philaret on the miracles worked at the relics of these righteous ones, after which Metropolitan Macarius of Novgorod ordered Hegumen Gerasim of the Saint Nicholas monastery of Korelia, together with Solonov, a boyar's son of the metropolitan's house of Saint Sophia, to make a detailed investigation into the time of the finding of the relics and the miracles of the blessed John and Loggin. It was clarified that the miracles at the relics of these saints had been taking place for more than sixty years. In 1635 the Yarenga monastery, with all the holdings and lands of the settlement of Yarenga, was given, at the request of Patriarch Joasaph, by a charter of Tsar Michael Fyodorovich, into the charge of the Solovki monastery. On 2 June 1638 the relics of the righteous ones were moved into a newly built wooden church and laid: those of the blessed John on the right side, those of the blessed Loggin on the left. The Yarenga monastery remained under the government of Solovki until its closure in 1764, when it was turned into a parish church.