Macarius of Boistea

Macarius was a hieromonk, a disciple of Joseph Mușat at Neamț, and founder of the nuns' hermitage of Boiștea, near Târgu Neamț, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. 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 had taken his vows at Neamț Monastery, when Joseph Mușat was abbot there (1373-1386). He received priesthood and became a skilled spiritual father. Abbot Dometian, knowing his goodwill, entrusted him with the dependency at Grași, near Târgu Neamț, where the monastery's cattle wintered. He carried this obedience for many years, guiding twenty monks and brothers, who lived in love and praised God day and night.

His name became known in the surrounding villages and many believers took him as spiritual father. Seeing his disciples multiply, he founded, by some accounts in 1449, a place of prayer in the nearby forests, the nuns' hermitage of Boiștea, with a church of the Nativity of the Mother of God, at first of wood and later of stone. He himself was the first confessor of the settlement, and its first residents were thirty nuns from the Neamț region. The monastery lived by the same rule as the great lavra to which it belonged. Prince Stephen the Great made gifts to his foundation.

The Paterikon describes him as gentle, humble and greatly advanced in prayer, with the gift of casting out unclean spirits, through whose prayers many were healed. He lived in this struggle for more than sixty years and fell asleep in Christ, leaving more than fifty nuns. Boiștea Monastery functioned for almost two centuries; then the nuns moved to Topolița, taking the icon of the Mother of God that, according to tradition, Metropolitan Joseph Mușat had given.