Anastasia of Uglich

Holy Venerable Martyr Anastasia of Uglich, abbess of the Epiphany Monastery in Uglich, died in the sacking of the city of Uglich by the Poles, in the Time of Troubles, in the year 1609. She is commemorated on 5 June, in the Synaxis of the Saints of Rostov and Yaroslavl.

She and the sisters of her monastery zealously tended many sick and wounded. In 1609 the Poles broke into Uglich, plundered and burned it and, in the Epiphany convent, killed all the wounded Russian soldiers and, with them, the abbess Anastasia and thirty-⁠five sisters. Until the beginning of the nineteenth century the grave of the "abbess killed with her company" lay on Annunciation Street, near the Annunciation church and the church of Saints Florus and Laurus. In the 1870s the grave of the venerable martyr was found in the courtyard of a house. It was enclosed with a fence, had a monument of white stone and a cross in which the icon of the Mother of God "of the Passion" was set. The inhabitants kept the lamp burning and turned in prayer to the abbess, and a handwritten prayer to Venerable Martyr Anastasia was preserved. Today, on the site of the Uglich Kremlin, where the Epiphany monastery once stood, a memorial cross has been set up.