The Venerable Zosima and Savvatius of Solovki were the founders of the Monastery of Transfiguration of the Savior on the Great Solovetsky Island, the largest of the islands of the Solovetsky Archipelago in the White Sea, at the mouth of the Onega Bay. Before the arrival of St. Herman and St. Savvatius of Solovki, for thousands of years the Solovetsky Islands (Solovki) had been the fishing and hunting grounds of the ancient inhabitants of this area, who, judging by the few burial sites surviving on the Kola Peninsula, were relatives of today’s Yukagirs, the indigenous people of Eastern Siberia.
The Venerable Savvatius took his monastic tonsure in the Kirillo-Belozersky Monastery, then moved to the Transfiguration Monastery on Valaam. In the 1430s, in search of solitude, he settled on Solovki, but before his death he returned to the mainland. A year later, the monk Zosima settled on Solovetsky Island, becoming hegumen of the monastery founded there in 1452. Under him the relics of the Venerable Savvatius were translated to Solovki, and his local veneration began.
In the very first years of the hermitage of the Venerable Zosima and Savvatius on the Great Solovetsky Island, representatives of the indigenous peoples of the North, who fished during the summer season, continued to come to the islands. In the hagiography of the venerable monks, there is information about miraculous visions of angels who whipped a woman so that she would never appear on the islands anymore. She was told that this place was meant for monastic life and that there would be a monastery there. The place where the woman experienced this apparition of the Heavenly protectors of monasticism was eventually named Sekirnaya Mountain — it is the highest point of the Great Solovetsky Island, and a lighthouse was later built there.
Though St. Zosima and St. Savvatius never met during their lifetime, their joint posthumous appearances influenced the formation and spread of their paired iconography. The first paired image of Zosima and Savvatius was painted in 1478 by hegumen Dosipheus, who in 1503 wrote the Lives of the saints.
