Venerable Macarius Wonderworker of Zhabynka

Macarius of Zhabyn was a Russian monastic of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, remembered as the founder and restorer of the Zhabyn Monastery of the Entry of the Most Holy Theotokos into the Temple, near the River Oka not far from the city of Belev. Born in 1539, he was tonsured in his early years with the monastic name Onuphrius. He is venerated as a wonderworker, and is commemorated on January 22 and September 22.

In 1585 he founded the Zhabyn monastery. Three decades later, in 1615, the community was destroyed by Polish forces under the command of Lisovski during the upheavals of the Time of Troubles. Returning to the charred ruins, Macarius led the monastery's restoration, raising a stone church in honor of the Entry of the Theotokos into the Temple, with a bell-tower at the gates, in place of the earlier wooden church.

Sources describe a life of severe ascetic struggle, in which he endured cold, heat, hunger, and thirst, and often withdrew deep into the forest to pray in solitude. After the monastery had been restored, he took the great schema, receiving the name Macarius, and withdrew to a solitary life near the River Zhabynka, from which his epithet derives. He died in 1623 at the age of eighty-four and was buried opposite the monastery gates.