Russia

Feast Day/Commemorated: December 20 Saint John of Kronstadt was born in 1829 to a poor but deeply pious Russian family. Though he initially struggled so severely with his studies that he could not remember his lessons, a pivotal moment of fervent prayer...

Feast Day/Commemorated: September 24 Saint Silouan of Athos was born Simeon Ivanovich Antonov to a peasant family in the Tambov Governorate of Imperial Russia. In his youth, he worked as a carpenter alongside his brother, but his spiritual path was...

Feast Day/Commemorated: July 18 The life of Saint Elizabeth Feodorovna began in the highest echelons of Russian nobility as the sister of Tsarina Alexandra and wife of Grand Duke Sergius. After converting to Orthodoxy by her own choice, she rejected the...

Feast Day/Commemorated: April 17 & September 27 The Founders of the Northern Thebaid The spiritual foundation of the Solovetsky Monastery began with Saint Sabbatius, a monk of the Kirillo-Belozersky Monastery who sought a life of absolute solitude...

Feast Day/Commemorated: January 2 Saint Seraphim of Sarov was born in Kursk in 1759 and demonstrated a connection to the divine from his childhood. At the age of nine, he suffered from a severe sickness but was miraculously healed after the Mother of...

This beautiful and finely detailed icon is the work of our own Kyriakos Kosova. Kyriakos Kosova is a master iconographer who spent much of his life in Albania, Greece and Italy. He is now in the US to continue his work in Orthodox Churches to the glory...

Feast Day/Commemorated: January 24 Saint Xenia Grigorievna Petrova, an eighteenth-century Russian saint, embarked on an extraordinary path of "foolishness for Christ" after the sudden death of her husband, Major Andrew Petrov, when she was just...