The life of St Joseph of Zaonikiev Monastery
In 1588, following what he took to be a revelation from Cosmas, he made his way to a swampy clearing in the forest where an icon of the Mother of God stood, and there his sight was restored.
Grateful for what had happened to him, he cleared the ground around that spot, built a small chapel to house the icon, and settled nearby himself, taking monastic vows under the name Joseph. A community gradually grew up around his labors there, and with a bishop's blessing it became a full monastery. Local tradition holds that its name recalled a robber who had once made his home in those same woods, though the exact origin of the name is not certainly established. As the brotherhood grew, Joseph turned aside the leadership himself and asked that another be chosen abbot in his place. He kept his own severe discipline so well hidden that many around him took him for a simple fool rather than an ascetic, praying standing through whole nights in his chapel and walking barefoot through the harshest winter cold. He reposed in 1612 at the age of eighty-three and was buried within the monastery his healing had given rise to.
