Varnava Merkulov

Varnava Merkulov, born Vasily Ilyich Merkulov, was a hieroschemamonk of the Russian Orthodox Church and an elder of the Gethsemane Skete of the Trinity-Sergius Lavra. He was born on 24 January 1831 in the village of Prudishchi, in Venevsky Uyezd of Tula Governorate in the Russian Empire. His parents, Ilya and Daria Merkulov, were serf peasants. Accounts of his youth describe a childhood shaped by parish worship, fasting, and an early attraction to monastic life, within the Orthodox peasant culture of central Russia in the second quarter of the nineteenth century.

In 1851, with his parents' blessing, he left home and entered the Gethsemane Skete, a monastic community founded in the 1840s with the support of Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow and attached to the Trinity-Sergius Lavra. He served there as a novice and was later tonsured a monk with the name Varnava, after the apostle Barnabas. He was ordained to the diaconate and priesthood and in time received the great schema, living as a hieroschemamonk. He did not become a bishop or the superior of a great lavra; his vocation remained that of a skete monk, confessor, and starets.

From the later nineteenth century until his death, Elder Varnava was sought by large numbers of pilgrims. Peasants, townspeople, clergy, monastics, and members of the nobility came to the Gethsemane Skete for confession and counsel. Memoirs and church tradition ascribe to him spiritual discernment, consolation of the afflicted, and a plain manner of speech. He belonged to the wider Russian tradition of eldership associated in that era with houses such as Optina, while remaining at the Gethsemane Skete near the Lavra. He lived through the emancipation of the serfs and the social changes of late imperial Russia without leaving the monastic enclosure for public office.

Varnava died on 17 February 1906 at the Gethsemane Skete and was buried there. Local veneration of his memory continued among the faithful. After the Soviet-era closure of the skete communities, the Russian Orthodox Church glorified him as a saint in 1995, with the title Venerable Barnabas of Gethsemane. His principal feast is 17 February on the Julian calendar used by the Russian Church (2 March on the civil calendar). He is also commemorated among the saints of the Trinity-Sergius Lavra and of the Moscow region. Orthodox writing presents his life as an example of hidden monastic holiness and of the starets as spiritual father rather than hierarch.