Mark of Belavino

The Venerable Mark of Belavino was tonsured a monk and began his labours at the Elijah monastery in the city of Vologda. From love of solitude and hermit life, in 1630 he asked the blessing of Barlaam, archbishop of Vologda and Great Perm, to leave the monastery in the city and retire to the wilderness for silence. The archbishop agreed and gave him a letter of blessing for the building of a hermit's cell.

In the archive of the spiritual consistory the venerable man's original petition has been kept. In it Mark, a monk tonsured at the Elijah monastery, calls himself a poor man and a man of prayer of the tsar, and asks to be allowed to set a little cell on the island of Lake Belavino, near the village of Zadnee in the Vologda district, and to endure there for God. Where Mark came from and of what family is not known; because in the petition he points to a small island of the little-⁠known Lake Belavino, far from the city and from the great roads, nearly unknown in Vologda, it is supposed that his homeland too was near the lake, in one of the surrounding villages.

The blessed elder made a cell on the island and struggled there in complete silence until his death and was buried at the place of his labour. Later, at the place sanctified by his labours, people who revered his memory built a small church of the Theophany, and in time a monastery formed there. In the list of the saints of Vologda by Metropolitan Eugene it is said that the hermit Mark died in 1492, but this is an evident error; the Venerable lived after 1630. In an ancient synaxarion of the Filimonov library, in the book called "Description of the Russian Saints", his memory is marked on 8 October.

He is commemorated on the movable day around 11 July, in the new style, in the Synaxis of the Saints of Vologda.