The life of St Sabbatius of Solovetsk
He moved on to Valaam, on Lake Ladoga, living for some years in the same discipline of prayer and labor that had marked the community there since its own founders, before hearing of a still more remote and uninhabited place far to the north, the island of Solovki in the White Sea. With the blessing of his abbot he set out, and there met Germanus, a hermit already living alone on the island, and the two crossed together by a small boat to settle it, reaching Solovki after three days at sea. Sabbatius remained there in ascetic solitude for years, until age and a fear of dying without receiving Communion, which he had not taken since leaving Valaam, drove him back to the mainland, where an abbot named Nathanael heard his confession and gave him the Mysteries not long before his death. He reposed in 1435; three decades later, Zosimas, who would go on to establish the full monastic community on Solovki that Sabbatius and Germanus had only begun, brought his relics back to the island that bore the fruit of his first solitary years there.
