Barlaam of Keretsk was a sixteenth-century priest and ascetic of the Kola peninsula on the White Sea coast of northern Russia. Born about 1505 in the village of Keret, he bore the name Vasily (Basil) before his monastic tonsure and is said to have come from a family of simple Pomors, the seafaring Russian settlers of the far north. He is commemorated on January 15 and November 6, and is venerated as a protector of seafarers and fishermen of the White Sea region.
According to his life, Vasily married around 1535 and was ordained first deacon and then priest, serving at the Church of Saint Nicholas in Kola before being transferred in 1540 to the Church of Saint George in Keret. There, by tradition, he killed his own wife. The sources preserve differing accounts of the deed: one ascribes it to jealous suspicion of adultery, while another relates that his wife became possessed and that, deceived by the demon as he sought to drive it out, he mortally wounded her.
Stricken with remorse, Vasily submitted to an extraordinary penance. By tradition Saint Theodore of Kola directed him to carry the coffin bearing his wife's body in a boat, rowing the northern waters from Keret to Kola and back again until the body decomposed and was reduced to dust. He kept a strict fast through these years, by one account eating fish only once a year, at Pascha. He was afterward tonsured a monk with the name Barlaam (Varlaam), about 1548, and withdrew to live in solitude, settling at the mouth of the Keret River and later on an island in Chupa Bay.
Barlaam reposed around 1589 or 1590. He was glorified by miracles after his death, especially the deliverance of those in danger of drowning, and came to be honored across the Russian north as a patron of those who travel by sea. By tradition his relics were found incorrupt on January 15, 1722; they were lost in 1961. His veneration was formally entered into church calendars in 1903.
