Michael Savitsky

Michael Savitsky was a Russian hieroschemamonk of St Panteleimon Monastery, known as the monk Malachi, born in 1827 at Porechye, Smolensk province, in a merchant family. He reposed at over eighty and was buried in the brotherhood cemetery, in the time of Archimandrite Misail. He is venerated by the faithful, without a synodal canonization.

An enterprising merchant at Pskov, his heart was not in trade. In 1861, with his superiors' leave, he went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem and, reaching Athos, stayed at St Panteleimon, struck by the beauty of the place, the strict order of the monastery and its beautiful services. He was guided by the confessor Hieronymus and in 1862 was tonsured into the mantle with the name Malachi, then ordained. Because of the monastery's poverty he was sent to Russia, with high permission, to collect voluntary gifts and to buy necessities. For almost forty years he laboured at this obedience: he founded Rossikon metochia at Rostov-⁠on-⁠Don and Taganrog and a fish plant at Chumbur, which supplied not only the monastery but all Athos. But he regarded the obedience chiefly as spiritual work, sowing the word of God among the Russian people; he sent the monastery's books and pamphlets in large numbers to school libraries, almshouses and the army, and during the war with Japan even to Russian prisoners in the Far East. From his visits to Athos he always went back as an example of the rule: he entered church first and left last. His last five or six years were spent steadily on Athos, as a counciliar elder, watchful for the purity of Orthodox confession; in the library is kept his manuscript, a reply to an article by St John of Kronstadt on the Cross of Christ.