Macarius of Kalyazin

Macarius of Kalyazin (also called Macarius of Kolyazin; in the world Matthew Kozhin) was a Russian Orthodox monk of the fifteenth century and the founder of the Trinity Monastery on the Volga associated with Kalyazin. He was born in the early fifteenth century in the village of Kozhino in the Kashin district, in the lands of the Tver principality, to a boyar family. His father is named in the hagiographical tradition as Vasily Kozhin and his mother as Irina. The Life presents him as receiving a pious upbringing. In youth he married Elena, described as the daughter of a Kashin boyar. The marriage lasted only a few years; after her death he chose the monastic life. No independent archival birth year survives, and later compilations that print 1400 or 1402 are not treated here as established fact.

He received the monastic tonsure with the name Macarius at the Klobukov Monastery of Saint Nicholas in Kashin. Seeking a stricter and more solitary discipline than the town monastery afforded, he left that community and settled in a forested, thinly inhabited stretch of the right bank of the Volga near the settlement later known as Kalyazin. Other monks gathered around him. A church dedicated to the Holy Trinity was built, and the settlement of brethren became the Trinity Monastery, subsequently often called the Makariev or Kalyazin Monastery. Macarius was its first abbot. Accounts of his rule stress humility, shared manual labor, and the spiritual direction of monks and lay visitors. The house obtained lands and princely privileges and grew into an important religious center on the Upper Volga in the later fifteenth century.

Macarius died on 17 March 1483 and was buried at the monastery he had founded. In 1521 his relics were uncovered and reported incorrupt, which strengthened local veneration. He was numbered among the saints at the Moscow Council of 1547, held during the metropolitanate of Macarius of Moscow, when a large group of Russian wonderworkers received formal, church-wide canonization. In the Russian Orthodox calendar his principal commemorations are 17 March, the day of his repose, and 26 May, the uncovering of the relics; he is also remembered in the Synaxis of the Saints of Tver and among saints associated with the Radonezh monastic tradition.

The Trinity-Makaryev Monastery remained a pilgrimage site into the imperial period. In the Soviet era the monastic complex was closed and, in the late 1930s, the original riverside site was lost to the filling of the Uglich Reservoir. The relics had been removed before the flooding and were later kept in churches of the Tver diocese connected with Kalyazin. Veneration of Macarius has continued in the Russian Orthodox Church as that of a monastic founder and local wonderworker of the Upper Volga, without a separately documented list of specialized patronages of trades, illnesses, or causes.