Why this word is great
STRANNIK — [Noun] A religious pilgrim in the Russian Orthodox tradition who undertakes perpetual, ascetic wandering as a form of devotion, living on alms and prayer. Borrowed from Russian странник (strannik), from странный (strannyj, "strange, foreign"), from сторона́ (storoná, "side, region, country"), ultimately from Proto-Slavic *storna ("side"), thus literally meaning "one who is from another side/region, a wanderer." Unlike a tourist, whose journey is a curated consumption of experience, or a hermit, whose faith demands a fixed retreat, the strannik embodies a kinetic austerity, his devotion measured in versts. He is the figure fading into the birch forest at dusk, his boots caked with the mud of a hundred backroads; he is the whisper of a prayer in a crowded third-class railway carriage; he is the calloused hand accepting a crust of black bread at a remote monastery gate—a life where the soul's progress is written not in arrival, but in the endless, humble grammar of departure.