Nil Stolobensky

Nil Stolobensky, also known as Nilus of Stolobny or Venerable Nil of Stolobnoe (Russian: Nil Stolobenskii), was a Russian Orthodox hermit of the sixteenth century whose grave became the nucleus of the Nilo-Stolobenskaya Hermitage on Lake Seliger. Hagiographic tradition places his birth in the late fifteenth century at Zhabny (the Zhabenky pogost) in the Derevskaya Pyatina of the Novgorod Land, a district that by then belonged to the Muscovite state. No independent documentary source preserves a year of birth, the names of his parents, or any details of his childhood, and later popular dates sometimes attached to his nativity are not historically verified. He received the monastic tonsure at the Krypetsky Monastery of Saint John the Theologian in the Pskov region. After a period of cenobitic life he left the monastery in search of stricter solitude, following a pattern common among northern Russian hermits of that era.

According to his Life, he first settled in a forest hermitage near the Seremkha River in the Rzhev district and remained there for about thirteen years. In 1528 he moved to Stolobny Island on Lake Seliger, in the country around present-day Ostashkov in Tver Oblast. On the island he dug a cave-like cell, kept a small garden, and in time built a wooden chapel. He lived there for twenty-seven years without gathering a resident community of disciples, though he received visitors who came for spiritual advice. The most distinctive feature of his asceticism, constantly repeated in the later Life, in icons, and in the well-known wooden sculptures of the saint, is that he never lay down to sleep. He rested sitting, his arms supported on wooden crutches or pegs set into the wall and his head bowed. This seated posture became the canonical type for his image in Russian religious art.

He died on 7 December; church calendars and recensions of the Life give the year as 1554 or, in some accounts, 1555. He was found in his cell still in the seated position in which he had been accustomed to rest, and he was buried on the island. Local veneration began after his death. Toward the end of the sixteenth century the monk German (Herman) settled at the site and, around 1594, founded the monastery later known as the Nilo-Stolobenskaya Pustyn, or Nilova Pustyn, over the hermit’s grave. The house grew into a major monastery of the Tver region. The relics were uncovered on 27 May 1667 (some older notices give 1665) and were described as incorrupt; they were enshrined in the monastery church. The Russian Orthodox Church commemorates him on 7 December, the day of his repose, and on 27 May, the uncovering of the relics. He was never a bishop, patriarch, or pope, and there is no record of a wife or children; his life as presented in the tradition is that of a celibate monastic hermit.

Beyond this outline, almost everything known about Nil depends on a Life written down in the seventeenth century and on subsequent liturgical and popular tradition rather than on contemporary charters or chronicles. Wooden sculptures of the seated hermit became a widespread object of devotion in northern and central Russia. The monastery on Stolobny Island remained an important pilgrimage centre until it was closed in the Soviet period; monastic life there has since been restored. No historically secure list of formal patronages (of particular trades, illnesses, or towns) is attached to him in the way that medieval Western saints often acquired such titles; his cult is primarily local and monastic, centred on Lake Seliger and on the house that bears his name.