Zachariah of Shenkursk

Blessed Zacharias of Shenkursk was a fool for Christ in the town of Shenkursk, on the Vaga river in northern Russia, at a time that cannot be fixed with certainty between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. He is numbered in the Synaxis of All Saints Who Shone Forth in the Russian Land and is commemorated in the Arkhangelsk and Kholmogory diocese on 18 January (31), together with Venerable Athanasius of Navoloka.

The sources are few. The "Description of the Russian Saints," in eighteenth-⁠century copies, says that the blessed Zacharias, fool for Christ, "reposed in the town of Shenkursk on the river Vaga in the year 7000, on 5 September." The year of death is evidently written incompletely. His commemoration on 5 September is attested also in an Old Believer calendar of the early nineteenth century and in iconographic sources, where his figure is likened to that of the prophet Zacharias, "a cap on his head." The date of death sometimes given, 1325, has no basis in the sources. Scholars have tried to determine the time when he lived (the fifteenth century, the sixteenth), but their guesses are not convincing.

Holy Martyr Nikodim Kononov, in the "Arkhangelsk Paterikon," spoke of a righteous priest Zacharias, whose veneration around Shenkursk was recorded in the nineteenth century. According to tradition, in the seventeenth century, in the Sloboda-⁠Annunciation parish, ninety versts from Shenkursk, the Novgorodians built a church dedicated to the righteous Zacharias, former priest of the parish, whose relics were in that church but were lost in a fire, because a parishioner did not allow them to be carried out, on the ground that holy relics cannot burn. Later the two were identified with one another.