Venerable Elisha of Suma

Life and Monastic Labor

Elisha lived as a monk at the Solovetsky Monastery, where by the seventeenth century the community numbered roughly 350 monks together with hundreds of servants, artisans, and peasants, making it a major religious and economic center of the Russian North. Within this community Elisha was occupied with the weaving of fishing nets as his principal obedience.

According to an account preserved in the hagiographic tradition, Elisha was once fishing at the Vyga River, some forty miles from the monastery, in the company of three fellow monks named Daniel, Philaret, and Sava. While they were at work mending nets, the monk Daniel foretold that the labor would be in vain and that death had come. Elisha's distress in this episode centered on his not yet having received tonsure into the Great Schema, the highest monastic rank, with no priest at hand to perform the rite; his fellow monks gave him spiritual comfort in his need. The tradition records that he did attain the rank of schemamonk before his repose.

Relics & Shrines

After his repose, miracles came to be associated with the saint. Beginning in 1688, miracles were reported at his grave, located in a crypt in the Church of St. Nicholas (the Nikolsk church) in the town of Suma, in the Arkhangelsk diocese.

Miracles & Traditions

Traditional Accounts: The synaxarion relates the episode of the foretelling of his death while fishing at the Vyga River and his concern over not having received the Great Schema. It also records that miracles began at his grave in the Nikolsk church at Suma from the year 1688. Surviving sources preserve only basic details, and this saint remains genuinely obscure, with very limited hagiographic documentation in English-language sources.