14th century (reposed 1379)
A monk in the tradition of St Sergius of Radonezh who withdrew into the wilderness of the Obnora River, where he gathered a brotherhood; a contemporary of St Alexis of Moscow.
Our Venerable Father Sylvester, Abbot of Obnora
Sylvester of Obnora was a fourteenth-century Russian monastic ascetic, remembered as a disciple of Saint Sergius of Radonezh and a contemporary of Saint Alexis, Metropolitan of Moscow. Drawn from his youth to solitude, he received his teacher's blessing and withdrew into the forest wilderness on the bank of the Obnora River, in the land of Yaroslavl about twenty kilometers from the town of Lyubim, where he lived as a hermit in fasting and prayer.
As others gathered around his cell, Sylvester founded a coenobitic community and, with the blessing and an antimension granted by Metropolitan Alexis, built a wooden church consecrated to the Resurrection of Christ. He served as the monastery's first abbot until his repose on April 25, 1379, and is commemorated on that date.
Sources record that Sylvester dug wells in the wilderness with his own hands and set apart a grove around the monastery within which no trees were to be felled. The tradition is associated with an account that in 1645 a hieromonk named Job, a builder at the Resurrection Monastery, disregarded this prohibition and began to cut timber in the grove; by tradition he was struck blind in punishment and afterward recovered his sight at the saint's coffin.
Sylvester was buried to the right of the wooden Resurrection church, and his burial place was venerated as a source of healings. His relics were regarded as incorrupt and, by the nineteenth century, were enshrined in a bronze, silver-plated tomb. Accounts relate that the relics were lost during the upheavals of the 1920s and have since been returned to the church.
The same Obnora River region is associated with other monastic saints, among them Venerable Paul of Obnora and Sergius of Nurom, who were later glorified for their ascetic labors in that wilderness.