Zosimas of Solovki

Zosimas of Solovki (died 1478) was one of the founders of the Solovetsky Monastery, the great monastic community established on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea in the Russian North. Through his labors a remote and inhospitable island became a center of cenobitic monastic life and one of the most important monasteries of medieval Russia.

Little is recorded with certainty about Zosimas's origins; by 1436 his parents had died and he resolved to take up the solitary life of a hermit. At the mouth of the Suma River he met the monk Herman, who had earlier lived on the Greater Solovetsky Island together with the monk Savvatiy. After Savvatiy's death, Zosimas and Herman traveled together to the Solovetsky Islands, where they settled and where other monks soon gathered around Zosimas and regarded themselves as his disciples.

Zosimas built a wooden church and organized the gathered monks into a monastery placed under the Eparchy of Novgorod. After two earlier-appointed superiors had departed, Bishop Iona of Novgorod appointed Zosimas as hegumen (abbot) of the community. Under his governance the monastery flourished, receiving substantial endowments from the Novgorod Republic and establishing itself as one of the richest monasteries in Russia.