late 16th – first third of the 17th century
A monk of the St. Nicholas-Shartomsk Monastery in Suzdal (1625)
Our Venerable Father Joachim of Shartomsk
Saint Joachim of Shartomsk was a Russian monastic ascetic and icon painter associated with the St. Nicholas-Shartomsk Monastery near Suzdal in the early 17th century. His exact dates are not recorded; tradition places his life across the last quarter of the sixteenth and the first third of the seventeenth century, with his repose conventionally tied to the 1620s–1630s. He is commemorated on September 9.
By tradition he received the monastic tonsure in the Rostov lands and was reckoned among the disciples of Saint Irinarch the Recluse of Rostov before settling at the Shartomsk monastery. There he lived as a recluse, devoting his days to prolonged prayer, strict fasting, and the painting of icons. He is venerated, together with Saint Nicholas, as a heavenly patron of the monastery.
Joachim is remembered for an austere reclusive discipline. According to the tradition surrounding him, he wore heavy iron fetters for years — hand and leg shackles together with crosses and chains — whose combined weight is reported to have exceeded 150 kilograms. The sources relate that, apart from a period of forced exile to the Solovki Islands, the latter part of his life was spent in Suzdal, where he died and was buried.
Joachim was esteemed as a gifted icon painter, and several icons attributed to his hand later came to be venerated as miraculous. Tradition holds that he gave his icons to poor parishes that could not afford a painter's services. Russian sources name four miraculous icons of the Mother of God ascribed to him, of which only one is said to survive; other accounts point to images preserved at the Saviour-Euthymius (Spaso-Evfimiev) Monastery in Suzdal and in the town of Vyazniki in the Vladimir region.
The St. Nicholas-Shartomsk (Nikolo-Shartomsky) Monastery stands near the small Shartoma river in what is now the Ivanovo region. Its foundation is traditionally linked to the discovery of an icon of Saint Nicholas, and the community appears in written records from the early fifteenth century. In the seventeenth century, the period in which Joachim labored there, the monastery suffered during the Time of Troubles and was later rebuilt; its Nikolsky Cathedral was consecrated in the middle of that century.