Sabbatius of Tver

Venerable Sabbatius of Tver was a Russian monk and the founder of the Sabbatius hermitage, near Tver. The Russian Church remembers him on 2 March (15 March on the new calendar). The year of his death is not known for certain: some sources say he died no later than 1409, others no later than 1434.

Life

Of his childhood and life in the world almost nothing survives, and the other reports of him are scanty and fragmentary. His homeland is taken to be the Tver region, but where exactly he was born, whose son he was and from what age he gave himself to monastic labours is not known. It is known only that, before settling in the wilderness, Sabbatius made a journey to Jerusalem and brought back from there a particle of the Life-⁠giving Cross of the Lord. Before the journey and for a time after his return from Jerusalem he was a monk of the Orsha monastery near Tver.

The Sabbatius hermitage

Wishing for stillness, he withdrew to a deserted place a few kilometres from the Orsha monastery, nearer to Tver, and made himself a small cell with his own hands. In time other monks began to settle around him, a church was built and the Sabbatius hermitage was founded, which, by the strictness and holiness of its founder's rules, became so well known that the venerable Cornelius of Komel and Joseph of Volokolamsk and other prominent religious figures of the time came there to learn the monastic life.

Father Sabbatius served all as an example, by his labours and fervent prayer: he was tireless in work, wore out his body with strict fasting and abstinence and wore heavy iron chains on his body. The chains attributed to the venerable father were sent to the Holy Synod in 1848 and kept in its archive.

Relics and the fate of the monastery

The relics of the venerable father Sabbatius, found in 1483, were laid beneath the floor in the Sabbatius monastery. Later the monastery was abolished and turned into the parish church of the village of Savvatiyevo, and after the October revolution many of its buildings were destroyed by the Bolsheviks, among them all the old churches and the venerable father's cell, a dugout in the forest. Work is now under way to restore the hermitage.