Makary

Makary of Unzha, also known as Macarius of Unzha and Yellow Waters (Zheltovodsky), was a Russian Orthodox monk and monastic founder of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, venerated as a saint and wonderworker in the Eastern Orthodox Church. According to his Life, he was born in 1349 in Nizhny Novgorod to a pious family. At the age of twelve he left his parents’ home and received the monastic tonsure at the Caves (Pechersky) Monastery of Nizhny Novgorod, then under the igumen Dionysius, later Archbishop of Suzdal. The young monk devoted himself to fasting, prayer, and the reading of Scripture and the Fathers. When his parents discovered his whereabouts they sought to bring him home, but he remained steadfast in his vocation. After their death he left the monastery in search of greater solitude.

He lived for a time as a hermit in the region of the Lukh River before settling at the Yellow Waters (Zheltye Vody) on the Volga, some distance from Yurievets. There he established a monastic community that became the Zheltovodsky Makariev Monastery. In 1439 the monastery was attacked and destroyed during a raid associated with the Kazan Tatars. Makary was taken captive together with other monks and laypeople. Traditional accounts relate that the Tatar ruler, struck by the elder’s holiness, released him and, at his intercession, also freed the other captives, on condition that he not rebuild the monastery on the same site. Makary then led the survivors northward to the Unzha River, in the Galich region, where he founded a new monastery dedicated to the Holy Trinity. He spent his final years there and died on 25 January 1444.

He was buried at the Unzha monastery. His relics were later reported incorrupt, and a cult of veneration developed, especially in the Volga and Unzha regions. He became known as a wonderworker both in life and after death; the hagiographical tradition attributes to him miracles of healing and, in particular, aid to those held in captivity, a theme connected with his own experience of imprisonment. Towns and monasteries bearing his name—most notably the Makaryev Unzhensky Monastery in present-day Kostroma Oblast and the rebuilt Makaryev Zheltovodsky Monastery in Nizhny Novgorod Oblast—preserved his memory. The Makaryev Fair, long one of the most important trade fairs in Russia, originated at the Yellow Waters monastery associated with him.

The Russian Orthodox Church commemorates Saint Makary on 25 January, the day of his repose, and on 25 July. He was locally venerated soon after his death; his relics were examined in the early seventeenth century, in the reign of Tsar Michael Romanov, and his name was entered in the church calendar for wider liturgical observance. He is invoked as a heavenly patron of the Unzha country and of those in bondage or imprisonment. Precise details of his early life rest largely on later monastic vitae rather than contemporary documents, but his role as a monastic founder on the Volga and Unzha in the late medieval period is firmly established in the tradition of the Russian Church.