Saint Marina was born into the family of a pagan priest from the city of Antioch, in the center of the Roman Province of Pisidia in Asia Minor. She was raised by a wet nurse who lived on an estate owned by Marina's mother, who died when the Saint was still an infant. From the nurse or from an…

Saint Irenarchus of Solovki accepted tonsure at the Solovki monastery, and in his monastic life he zealously imitated the Monks Zosimus (April 17) and Sabbatius (September 27). In 1614, after the death of the igumen Anthony, Irenarchus became his successor. During these times the Solovki monastery…

Saint Lazarus the Wonderworker of Mount Galesius near Ephesus was born in Lydia, in the city of Magnesia. An educated young man who loved God, Lazarus became a monk at the monastery of Saint Savva, the founder of great ascetic piety in Palestine. He spent ten years within the walls of the…

Saint Nicholas, the last Russian Tsar, was born in 1868. As a child, he was very religious, guileless and free from malice. Nicholas II was crowned as Tsar in 1894, following the death of his father Tsar Alexander. He began his reign with lofty hopes for peace, urging other nations to reduce the…

Saint Leonid of Ustnedumsk lived in the Poshekhonsk district of Vologda, and he was a farmer by occupation. At age fifty, he saw the Mother of God in a dream, Who directed him to go to the River Dvina to the Morzhevsk Nikolaev hermitage. He was to take from there the HodÄ“gḗtria Icon of the…

The Sviatogorsk Icon of the Mother of God is from the Sviatogorsky Monastery in the province of Pskov. In the year 1563, during the time of Ivan the Terrible, in the environs of Pskov a “Tenderness” Icon of the Most Holy Theotokos appeared to a fifteen-year-old shepherd and fool named…