Pimen of Rostov

Holy Venerable Pimen of Rostov, recluse and chain-⁠wearer, lived in the seventeenth century, and almost nothing is known of his life. His ascetic labour was enclosure in his cell and the wearing of chains.

He is mentioned in a charter of Tsar Michael Feodorovich of 1618, addressed to Archimandrite Joseph of the Epiphany Monastery of St Abraham the Wonderworker in Rostov and to “the recluse elder Pimen”. That his name stands beside that of the abbot shows how great his importance was in the life of the monastery.

In the eighteenth century, after Venerable Pimen appeared together with Athanasius (Stachys), the holy fool for Christ of Rostov, a merchant was healed by a miracle. In gratitude he built over the burial place of the two a chapel in the monastery of St Abraham, where from the middle of the nineteenth century memorial services were served every day and the icons of the ascetics were kept. There too were kept the witnesses of their struggle: an iron shirt weighing one pood and nineteen pounds and two jug-⁠shaped weights of four poods each. The chapel was taken down soon after the monastery was closed, in 1929.

He is commemorated on 5 June in the Synaxis of the Saints of Rostov and Yaroslavl, in the new style.