Simon de Volomsk

Simon of Volomsk (in the world Simeon) belongs to the company of monastic founders of the Russian North in the early modern period. Church tradition records that he was born into a peasant household in the village of Oshchepkovo, near Totma in the Vologda lands, toward the end of the sixteenth century. No contemporary civil or ecclesiastical register of his birth has survived, and the year sometimes assigned in later compilations remains approximate. Orphaned of both parents, he disposed of his inheritance in alms and set out for the Solovetsky Monastery, the great island lavra of the White Sea that served as a school of Northern Russian monasticism.

At Solovki he received the monastic tonsure and the name Simon. He remained there for a period of years, living under the rule of the community and practicing the usual obediences and ascetic disciplines of the house. Moved by a desire for the eremitical life, he sought and received a blessing to leave the monastery and to settle in the interior forests. His wanderings brought him to the basin of the Voloma River in the Yarensk district, a sparsely populated region of the Russian North inhabited in part by Komi (Zyrian) people and still only lightly touched by settled monastic institutions.

There Simon built a wooden cell and a chapel in honor of Saint Nicholas. Other seekers of the monastic life joined him, and the hermitage developed into a small coenobium known as the Nikolaevsky Volomsky Monastery. Simon was ordained to the holy priesthood and became the first igumen of the community. He ordered the liturgical cycle, directed the brethren in fasting and prayer, and oversaw the labor of felling timber, tilling clearings, and providing for the material needs of the house in a harsh climate.

On 12 July 1641 a group of armed men—described in the sources as robbers or as local peasants in search of imagined monastic treasure—fell upon the igumen. They subjected him to torture in an effort to compel him to disclose hidden wealth. When none was forthcoming they killed him. Simon was buried at the monastery he had founded. Later generations reported that his relics remained incorrupt and that the sick who resorted to his grave received healing. Local liturgical veneration followed. The Russian Orthodox Church keeps his memory on 12 July. He is numbered among the saints of the Vologda region. The Volomsky monastery itself eventually ceased to function as an active community, yet the founder’s name continued in the calendars and in the pious memory of the North.