The Righteous Man
In times long past there lived this righteous man and ascetic; little reliable information about him has survived, and the buried relics have vanished without a trace. Yet to this day one of the most vibrant and beloved popular celebrations remains "Varnava's Year" — a festival observed each June in the modest district settlement of Varnavino, perched on a high green bluff above the mirror-bright Vetluga River.
The Vetluga people, dressed in their finest, gather on Krasnaya Gora (Red Hill), commemorate the holy hermit with ancient songs and round dances, pray before the crosses of a recently built church, and light candles before icons that heal the soul. And so it has been done for more than one century already. According to tradition and the scanty records that remain, Varnava came to the Vetluga region — a wild, forested land — from Veliky Ustyug, where he had served as a priest in a church. The newcomer condemned himself to a hard life for the sake of the Christian faith, which he intended to spread through wilderness still untouched by man. Warlike Cheremis tribesmen appeared in the area and visited Varnava more than once, but his humble bearing and friendliness quelled their anger, and they left the fearless newcomer in peace. What harm could there be in him, when birds alighted on his palm and the brown bear, master of the forests, left him unharmed? In the storied "Old Book," and later in the "Manuscript Life of Varnava the Vetluga Miracle-Worker" — which disappeared under the Bolsheviks — it was written how the venerable Father Varnava settled "on the riverbank, on Krasnaya Gora, in a wild wilderness, where he dwelt for many years, serving God in psalmody and prayer, feeding on grasses and the tops of oak trees, for he had no bread owing to the remoteness of that wilderness from human habitation — a hundred versts and more." The time when Varnava withdrew into the forests was the early fifteenth century; he spent twenty-eight years as a hermit, having built himself a cell. The borderlands of the Russian territories were restless. Raids, bloody battles, and fires disrupted peaceful life, reducing all that had been built to ash and dust. By retreating into the Vetluga wilderness, Varnava sought, through his life of ascetic endeavor, his ceaseless prayers, and his miraculous healings of the ailing, to ward off misfortune and calamity from his native land, to draw good ploughmen and beekeepers to settle the uninhabited places, and to found a holy monastery on the Vetluga. This is how he is described in the "Manuscript Life": "…Tall, adorned with comely gray hair and a moderately long, well-proportioned beard, a priest by rank, exceedingly gracious in manner, sweet-spoken in words, and adorned with every spiritual virtue…" After Varnava's death, monks and disciples built two churches on Krasnaya Gora: one in the name of the Life-Giving Trinity and one above the elder's tomb in the name of St. Nicholas the Miracle-Worker; they founded a monastery called the Varnava Wilderness of the Trinity. Here, at the grave of the Vetluga ascetic, miraculous healings of the sick began to occur, and word spread throughout all of Rus. In 1638 Patriarch Ioasaph also learned of the miracles. The abbot of the Zheltovodsky Monastery, Pafnuty, whom the patriarch sent to the Vetluga, confirmed the truth of the miracles. The following year Varnava was canonized and numbered among the Russian saints. Pilgrims began making their way to Varnava's tomb, housed in the Church of St. Nicholas, from the lands of Kostroma, Vyatka, Vologda, Nizhny Novgorod, and elsewhere. The faithful gathered in the church on the eve of June 11 (Old Style) — the feast day of the venerable saint. In 1908 the writer Mikhail Prishvin also visited the place. This is what he saw: "It grows dark inside the wooden church… A small flame flickers above Varnava's tomb. The faces of pilgrims bow over it in an unbroken stream, lit up by a red glow. The church is full. People sit on the floor with their bundles, waiting for the reading of the saint's life. They have come from far away, weary and wet; all night until dawn they will struggle against drowsiness. Someone in a black kaftan with a large book comes up to the light and reads the life… The reading goes on all night. Long, long ago, all across Rus, such lives were read like this, in every church. This is how ancient Rus was raised." In the years when militant atheism was gathering force, the churches in Varnavino were destroyed, and the relics of St. Varnava of Vetluga were taken from the tomb. They would surely have been destroyed had not the last Varnavino priest, Pavel Megalinsky — who was shot in 1937 — secretly carried them away and committed them to the earth somewhere in the old cemetery. One must hope that the time will come for these incorrupt relics to be revealed.