The life of St Zosima of Solovetsk
Seeking greater solitude than he could find near his own home, he traveled to the shore of the White Sea, where at the mouth of the Suma he met the hermit Germanus, who told him of a remote, uninhabited island where he himself had once spent six years together with a monk named Sabbatius. Around 1436 Zosimas and Germanus crossed together to that island, Solovki, and Zosimas remained there through his first winter largely alone, enduring hardship that tradition says was relieved only when two unknown visitors appeared and left him a store of bread, flour, and oil. As other hermits gradually gathered around him, Zosimas built a small wooden church dedicated to the Transfiguration, the true beginning of what grew into the Solovetsky monastery, and once established as its abbot he arranged for the relics of Sabbatius, dead some thirty years by then, to be brought back to the island the two founders had first envisioned together. Zosimas himself governed the growing community until his own peaceful repose on April 17, 1478, remembered since 1547 as a saint of the Russian Church alongside the companions who had begun the work with him.
