Two professors from the Russian Academy of Science survive wilderness ordeal thanks to distant monastery

30 / 09 / 2011

The two hikers were lost—instead of their intended six day trip, they wandered through the northern forests of Archangelsk region for a whole month, and there is no telling how it would have ended had not God's Providence led the scholars to the Holy Theophany Kozhe Lake Monastery, one of the most far flung monasteries in Russia.

No matter which of three possible routes you take to this locality, the final thirty or more kilometer leg of the trip must be covered on foot through a dense forest. Hieromonk Mikhei (Razinkov) has been living the ascetic life since 1998 in the monastery founded by St. Nicodim of Kozhe Lake in the 16^th century. There is no electricity or telephone in the monastery, but there was food, with which the monastery's abbot supplied the hapless scientists and blessed them to finish their course along the Kozhe River. Upon their return to Moscow, one of them, a doctoral professor of physical and mathematical sciences and director of the laboratory in the Institute of Chemical Physics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Sergei Anatolievich Zhukov, sent a letter to Bishop Daniel of Archangelsk and Kholmogory thanking him for the help they received in the monastery. "We will never forget it, and will always remember your diocese with gratitude," emphasized the professor. His Eminence expressed his sincere joy over the fact that God's Providence had preserved the scientists in those dire circumstances, reports the press service of the diocese of Archangelsk.