Vladimir of Belopesotsk

Holy Venerable Vladimir of Belopesotsk, also called Vladimir of Serpukhov, was the founder and first abbot of the Belopesotsk monastery near Kashira at the end of the fifteenth century.

He was born about 1450 at Rzhev and in the world was called Basil. According to tradition he was a boyar's son and devoted himself first to service as a voivode, probably in the service of the princes of Tver. The synodikon of the monastery, compiled in 1645, records his lineage, eighty-⁠eight names. At that time the monastic way was harder for a man of noble birth than for a peasant, since he met the resistance of his relatives and had to enter an alien environment. He was tonsured at the Varlaam-⁠Khutyn monastery near Novgorod and then set out to found a monastery of his own near Kashira. It is not known how long he wandered in search of the place. In his time a wooden church of the Holy Trinity and cells were built; there were no stone buildings, which shows that the monastery had no special means.

The year, day and hour of his death are unknown. The chronicle of the monastery of 1868 says that he lived seventy-⁠two years, and the land register of the Kashira district of 1578-1579 notes that "the founder and builder, the elder Vladimir" was buried "at the Trinity, under the porch". Local veneration existed at the monastery by the middle of the seventeenth century at the latest; in 1645 the archpriest of the Kashira cathedral, Mitrophan, gave a cloth for the tomb of the abbot. The veneration did not spread beyond the monastery. In 1998, on the five-⁠hundredth anniversary of the foundation of the monastery, with the blessing of Metropolitan Juvenal of Krutitsy and Kolomna, the saint was received into local veneration, and an icon, a troparion and a kontakion were written. His relics lie under the floor in the church of the Holy Trinity of the monastery.

The saint is commemorated on 15 July, his name day, in memory of Saint Vladimir the Equal of the Apostles, and, in the new style, on 5 September (movable) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Moscow.