Artemy of Verkola

Artemy of Verkola (also called Artemius of Verkola, or the Righteous Youth Artemy) is a child saint of the Russian Orthodox Church. He was born in 1532 in the peasant village of Verkola on the Pinega River in the far north of Russia, in the region that is now Arkhangelsk Oblast. His father was a farmer named Cosmas (Kosma). Hagiographical tradition presents Artemy as unusually meek, obedient, and pious from early childhood: he preferred prayer and work to the games of other children and helped his parents in the fields. He was a lay peasant boy, not a monk, and died before adulthood.

On 23 June 1545, when he was about twelve or thirteen, Artemy was harrowing a field with his father when a thunderstorm broke. Lightning struck and killed him. In the local popular understanding of the time, death by thunder was often taken as a mark of divine wrath, and the villagers therefore refused him a Christian burial. His body was left in a forest clearing near the village, covered only with brushwood, and remained unburied for more than thirty years.

In 1577 a deacon of the village church of Saint Nicholas, named Agafonik, found the body still incorrupt. The relics were brought to the church and placed on the porch. Reports of healings and other miracles associated with them soon followed, and a chapel and later a dedicated church were built to house the remains. In the seventeenth century, with support from Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, the Artemievo-Verkolsky Monastery was founded at Verkola around the cult of the youth. Pilgrims from northern Russia visited the relics, which became the centre of a regional cult later recognized more widely in the Russian Church.

The Orthodox Church commemorates Artemy on 23 June, the traditional day of his death, and on 20 October, associated with the uncovering or translation of his relics (dates as given in the Julian menologion). He is venerated as a righteous youth and wonderworker. After the Bolshevik Revolution the monastery was closed and the relics were desecrated; the monastery was later revived in the post-Soviet period. Surviving information about his life is almost entirely hagiographical and local, and little can be verified beyond the traditional dates, place, and outline of the relic cult.