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Biography

Short Description

Vasily Ilyich Merkulov, known in monasticism as Varnava (Barnabas) of Gethsemane, was born in 1831 in the village of Prudishchi in the Venevsky district of Tula Governorate, in the Russian Empire. He came from a family of pious peasants; his parents were Ilya and Martha Merkulov. Accounts of his youth, which are typical of later Russian hagiographical tradition rather than contemporary archival biography, describe an early inclination to prayer and pilgrimage. In 1851, as a young man of about twenty, he left home, visited holy sites including the Kiev Caves, and then entered the Trinity-Sergius Lavra. He was assigned as a novice to the Gethsemane Skete, a more secluded monastic house attached to the lavra and founded in the 1840s for a stricter common life.

At the skete he lived under the direction of older monks and was eventually tonsured with the name Varnava, in honor of the Apostle Barnabas. He was ordained first as a hierodeacon and later as a hieromonk. Over the later nineteenth century he became known as a starets, a spiritual elder to whom large numbers of laypeople and clergy came for confession and counsel. Pilgrims of every social rank visited the skete, from peasants to members of the imperial family; Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna was among those who sought his advice. He was reputed among the faithful to have gifts of discernment and consolation, though such claims rest on the memories of spiritual children and later lives rather than on independent contemporary documentation.

Besides his work as a confessor at Gethsemane, Varnava took part in the establishment of women’s monastic life. He is associated with the founding and early spiritual oversight of the Iveron (Iversky) Convent at Vyksa in the Nizhny Novgorod region in the 1860s. He remained based at the Gethsemane community—later known as the Chernigov-Gethsemane Skete—near the Trinity-Sergius Lavra for the rest of his life, continuing to receive visitors even in old age.

He died on 17 February 1906 at the skete and was buried there. After the suppression of monastic life in the Soviet period and the later revival of the Church, his grave again became a place of pilgrimage. The Russian Orthodox Church glorified him as a locally venerated saint of the Moscow diocese in 1995, during the patriarchate of Alexy II. He is commemorated on 17 February. His relics are kept at the Chernigov Skete. Surviving information about his childhood and the precise years of his tonsure and ordinations is limited, as is common for peasant-born Russian monastics of the nineteenth century; the outline given here follows the standard modern Orthodox accounts without adding unverified dates or miracles.

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