St Sophrony the Athonite was born in Moscow on 22 September 1896 and was baptised Sergei Semyonovich Sakharov. He studied Fine Arts in Moscow, searching for an ideal of beauty that transcended the purely aesthetic. During the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, he was arrested twice and imprisoned at the Lubyanka, but in 1921 he managed…
Just one day after the feast of St. Sophrony of Essex was celebrated for the first time since his glorification among the saints last year, he was honored as the patron saint of a restored and reconsecrated church in a town in northwestern Romania. On Sunday, July 12, the old church in Sânmartin de Beiuș,…