Paul of Rostov

Venerable Paul of Rostov was the founder of the Monastery of Saints Boris and Gleb near Rostov and died around 1409 (our record gives entirely different dates, 1400 and 1500, which do not fit). He is commemorated on 22 October together with Venerable Theodore, with whom he founded the monastery, and in the Synaxis of the Saints of Radonezh. In icon painters' guides the two are entered on 8 November. Almost nothing has been preserved of his life in the world.

In the second half of the fourteenth century Theodore of Rostov came from the land of Novgorod and settled in the forest near the great road from Kargopol and Belozersk to Moscow and Rostov. For three years he lived on alms. He hung a basket on a tree beside the road, and all that he found in it he shared with the poor who visited him. According to the Serbian source, he had first distributed all his property to the poor. When Paul settled beside him, they decided to build a monastery on that place.

Saint Sergius of Radonezh, who arrived in Rostov at that time, showed them, at their request, a place for the monastery on the bank of the river Ustye. Encouraged by Father Sergius's blessing and by an appearance of the holy Great Martyrs Boris and Gleb, Theodore and Paul built in 1363 a wooden church and cells, then gathered brethren and received in possession various lands and fishing places on the White Lake, for their food.

Theodore, who longed for solitude, soon handed the abbacy to Paul and left the monastery. He founded in the wilderness the Kovzha monastery of Saint Nicholas and, feeling that his end was near, returned to the Boris and Gleb monastery, where he died on 22 October 1409. After Theodore's death all care of the monastery fell on Paul's shoulders, but he did not long outlive his friend.

No written life of them has been preserved. Its absence is made up by the tale of the Boris and Gleb monastery itself, written on the spot at the beginning of the second half of the sixteenth century and preserved in a collection of the Trinity Lavra of Saint Sergius.