Synaxis of the Saints of Optina Pustyn

Commemorated today are our holy fathers Moses, Antony, Leonid (Lev), Macarius, Hilarion, Ambrose, Anatolius I, Isaac I, Joseph, Barsanuphius, Anatolius the Younger, Nectarius, Nikon the Confessor, and Hieromartyr Isaac the Younger. Hieromartyr Isaac was shot by the Bolsheviks on 26 December 1937.

This feast commemorates a few of the holy Fathers who made the Optina Hermitage (Pustyn) a focus for the powerful renewal movement that spread through the Church in Russia beginning early in the nineteenth century, and continuing up to and even into the atheist persecutions of the twentieth century. Saint Paisius Velichkovsky was powerfully influential in bringing the hesychastic tradition of Orthodox spirituality to Russia in the eighteenth century, and his labors found in Optina Monastery a ‘headquarters’ from which they spread throughout the Russian land.

With the onslaught of the Russian Revolution in 1917, the monastery was officially closed, but some of the Fathers were able to keep it running for a time as an ‘agricultural farm’. Over the years, most of the Fathers were dispersed, to die in exile, in prison camps, or by firing squad. Many of them are known to have continued to function as startsi to their spiritual children, despite great danger and hardship, for the remainder of their time on earth.

Commemoration of the Optina startsi was approved by the Synod of the Russian Church Abroad in 1990 and by the Moscow Patriarchate in 1996. The Optina Monastery itself was officially re-established in 1987.

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