Philaret of Ustyuzhna

Holy Venerable Philaret of Ustyuzhna was a friend and fellow in prayer of Venerable Gurias of Shaloch and Venerable Martyr Euphrosynus of Sinozero and laboured at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century.

Not finding the quiet he desired in the Tikhvin monastery, full of inhabitants and pilgrims, he left together with Gurias and Euphrosynus and settled in the Ustyuzhna region, where each of the hermits founded a small hermitage. Philaret settled in the midst of forests, on Pustynskoe lake.

The elders who lived alone in different places met at an appointed time, at appointed places, for conversation and common prayer. The meeting place of Euphrosynus and Philaret was the so-⁠called Horn Hill, a verst from the village of Chirets, on the road to Moden, at the turning to Lychno. In memory of the saints of Ustyuzhna a wooden cross with a copper crucifix was set up there. A second wayside cross, between the villages of Kortikha and Krasino, marked the place where Gurias and Philaret met.

Philaret founded his hermitage in places so remote and impassable that, when in the seventeenth century the Poles came and plundered the Sinozero and Shaloch hermitages, they were unable to find Philaret's among the forests and swamps. It is not known how many years the hermit laboured there, and the exact date of his death has not been preserved to our day.

His relics were long honoured by local people. In 1896, over the saint's grave, a wooden church dedicated to the Tikhvin icon of the Mother of God was built at the expense of the peasant Kyriak Fedotovich Serebryannikov. The holy treasures of the church were the relics and chains of the ascetic Philaret. In 1906 the Holy Synod established on the site of Philaret's ancient hermitage, in the Moden-⁠Plotichi district of the Ustyuzhna region, a community of nuns. On its grounds stood the wooden church and two two-⁠storey wooden houses for the sisters. After the revolution, in 1918, the community was closed. In 1919 the property of the hermitage was nationalized, and the state gave the church to a newly registered community of believers. In 1922 all valuables were removed from the church, in 1936 the reliquary with the relics of the venerable Philaret was opened, and on 7 June 1939 the church was closed.

Little of the monastery has survived: only the stones of the church's foundation. On the site of the destroyed church a small wooden cross was set up, and on the site of Philaret's hermitage a chapel was raised dedicated to the Tikhvin icon, with beside it a large worship cross in honour of Venerable Philaret of Ustyuzhna. Processions regularly go to the place of his struggle, and supplicatory services are served in the chapel.

The venerable one is commemorated on 11 July, a movable day, in the Synaxis of the Saints of Vologda.