Prochorus of Yastreb

Holy Venerable Prochorus of Yastreb was, together with St Vassian, the founder of the abolished Yastreb monastery, in the Vladimir district. The page places them in the second half of the sixteenth century (in another place in the second half of the fifteenth).

Along the Moscow and Vladimir highways and the Old Patriarchal Road, Orthodoxy penetrated into the depths of the Meshchera forests, and missionary monks cut century-⁠old pines and raised churches and chapels in the place of pagan shrines and graveyards. On the river Yastreb, a right tributary of the river Sudogda, not far from the village of Zayastrebye, the monks Prochorus and Vassian settled and founded a hermitage called the Hermitage of Prochorus, in memory of Prochorus.

The monks earned their daily bread themselves: they worked in gardens and sowed rye. The surrounding forests, with mushrooms and berries, and the lakes and rivers of Meshchera, rich in fish, gave them extra food; beaver fat served to light the cells, and bee-⁠keeping gave them wild honey and wax for candles. By day they did their obediences and by night they prayed with fervour. From chronicles of 1627 it is known that the hermitage had two churches, one of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross and one in honour of St Alexis, metropolitan of Moscow. Already in the sixteenth century the village of Zayastrebye, with the hermitage, had been given by the boyar D. I. Godunov to the Ipatiev monastery of Kostroma. The memory of the holy places and of those who prayed there was kept especially in the nearby villages of Zayastrebye and Gladyshevo.

They are commemorated on 6 July (23 June in the old style) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Vladimir, and on 21 July, the day of the finding of the Kazan icon of the Mother of God, in the new style.