Matthew of Cherneevo

The Venerable Matthew of Cherneevo, abbot of a monastery near the town of Shatsk, was a Don Cossack and the first preacher of Orthodoxy in a pagan land. He died in 1573, on 5 October (18 October in the new style), aged sixty-⁠nine. Wishing to live like the ancient hermits, he settled in the forest, near the villages of the pagan Mordvins. He learned their language and gathered them around him, and Bishop Leonid of Ryazan blessed him to found a monastery. In 1573 he was tonsured a monk, ordained hieromonk and appointed builder of the monastery of Saint Nicholas, eighteen versts from Shatsk, also called Cherneevsky after the dense forest around it.

His preaching

The Don Cossacks helped him raise the first church, and he baptized almost thirty people. The Mordvins took revenge by robberies, burned his apiary and threatened the monastery, and the venerable man asked help of the tsar Ivan the Terrible. The tsar's order calmed them, and the abbot's kindness won their trust. His successors built in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries the cathedral of Saint Nicholas, a church of the Mother of God of Kazan and other buildings. The monastery was closed after 1917 and returned to the Church in October 1991; soon afterward the icon of Saint Nicholas began to stream myrrh.

He is commemorated on 23 June, in the Synaxis of the Saints of Ryazan, and on 10 August, in the Synaxis of the Saints of Tambov, in the new style.