d. 1532
A disciple of Saint Alexander of Svir who founded a monastery on the Oredezha River near Lake Ladoga; reposed in 1532.
Our Venerable Father Macarius of Oredezh
Macarius of Oredezh was a sixteenth-century Russian monastic, remembered as a disciple of Saint Alexander of Svir, the noted ascetic of the Olonets and Lake Ladoga region. Drawn to the solitary life, Macarius is said to have left the Svir monastery with his teacher's blessing and to have settled on the Oredezh River, in the historic Novgorodian lands northwest of Novgorod, where a community gradually formed around him.
The hermitage he founded, dedicated to the Dormition of the Theotokos, lay near Lake Ladoga in territory now within the Saint Petersburg eparchy. He reposed in 1532 and is commemorated on August 9, and is also numbered among the assemblies of saints of Karelia and of Novgorod and Saint Petersburg.
Beyond his August 9 commemoration, Macarius is honored among the Synaxis of the Karelian Saints, kept on the Saturday falling between October 31 and November 6, and among the Synaxis of the Novgorod and Saint Petersburg Saints, observed on the third Sunday after Pentecost.
The place of his ascetic labors on the Oredezh lies in a region of the former Novgorodian north that now falls within the Saint Petersburg eparchy.