Sarra Potemkina

Schemanun Sarra (in the world Nadezhda Alexandrovna Potemkina) was a well-⁠known elder of holy life at the Spaso-⁠Borodino Monastery. She was born in 1812 in Smolensk province and died in 1908. The sources in our record do not say that she has been canonized, so she is not officially numbered among the saints, and we present her as an elder of devout life, honoured by the people.

She came from the noble Potemkin family. Her parents owned an estate in the village of Belomir in Smolensk province. In the family of Alexander Ivanovich (1780 to 1838) and Anna Mikhailovna (born Lykoshina) there were two sons and five daughters, and Nadezhda was the fifth child. Her father was in 1811 stripped of rank and nobility and given to the army for forging a document and receiving on the basis of it 57,890 roubles from the Moscow guardianship council. In 1827 his noble rights were restored. After the death of both his sons he gave away his property and became a monk at the Mitrofanievsky Monastery in Voronezh.

Around 1826 a relative of the family, Elder Zosima, came to visit the Potemkins. Nadezhda was sent with him to the women's community he had founded in honour of the Smolensk icon of the Mother of God "Hodegetria". After her mother's death she had to return home, but the elder persuaded her father to let her go to the monastery. At the end of 1832 the elder himself took her to the Spaso-⁠Borodino community, founded by Margarita Tuchkova on the spot where her husband had fallen in the battle of Borodino.

After Elder Zosima's death in 1833, Nadezhda remained for a time at Spaso-⁠Borodino. On 10 April 1837 Metropolitan Philaret wrote to the abbess that the girl was not entirely well and that she should be taken to the relics of Saint Mitrophan. Taken to Voronezh, she was healed beside the relics of Saint Mitrophan. But, going against the elder's will and settling in the Hodegetria hermitage, she fell ill again. After the hermitage was confirmed in 1841 as a community, she was tonsured a rassophore with the name Zosima. During her illness the Most Holy Theotokos appeared to her in a vision. In 1846 she had to leave the hermitage, whose sisters, as she herself said later, did not love her, perhaps because she deserved it.

With the blessing of Metropolitan Philaret she was received again at Spaso-⁠Borodino, where an illness appeared in her legs, which finally were drawn up so that her feet pressed against her back. From 1857 she no longer left her cell.

In the 1870s she was tonsured into the great schema with the name Sarra by Hieromonk Adrian of the Luzhetsky Monastery. Confined to her chair, she spent days and nights in prayer and in reading spiritual books. Her obedience was to receive for conversation the people who came to the monastery. There are many testimonies to her discernment. In the last five years she tried to keep silence, and gave counsel very briefly to those who came. She foretold that another elder of Borodino, Rachel (1833 to 1928), would stand above her.

She died in 1908 and was buried behind the altar of the monastery church. The exact place of the grave is no longer known.