Athanasius of Valaam

Saint Athanasius of Valaam, Venerable Martyr, was a monk of the Valaam monastery and received a martyr's death, together with thirty-⁠three other brethren, on 20 February 1578, in an attack by Swedish soldiers. His name stands in the synodikon among the monks as "monk Athanasius". The Russian Orthodox Church numbered them among the saints for veneration throughout the Church at the Jubilee Bishops' Council of August 2000. He is commemorated on 5 March (20 February by the old calendar), on 3 June in the synaxis of the saints of Karelia, and on 22 August in the synaxis of the saints of Valaam.

In its long history, the Valaam monastery, situated near the frontier between the lands of Great Novgorod and Sweden, was plundered several times by the Swedes. In the time of King Gustav Vasa (1523 to 1560) the Reformation was carried out in Sweden. In the days of his son John III, a band of soldiers, newly turned Lutherans and full of zeal for their freshly received faith, pursued the Orthodox Karelians. They crossed the ice from the mainland to the island and attacked the monastery. On 20 February 1578 eighteen elders and sixteen novices were killed for their steadfastness in Orthodoxy.

Their names, with the note "slain by the Germans at Valaam, elders and servants", were entered in a synodikon that later came to the Vasilievsky monastery. Among the monks were the hieromonk Titus, the schemamonk Tikhon, and the monks Gelasius, Sergius, Barlaam, Sabbas, Conon, Silvester, Cyprian, Pimen, John, Samon, Jonah, David, Cornelius, Nifont, Athanasius, Serapion and another Barlaam. Among the novices were Athanasius, Antony, Luke, Leontius, Thomas, Dionysius, Philip, Ignatius, Basil, Pachomius, another Basil, Theophilus, John, Theodore and another John. The Swedish attacks continued; at Valaam there is no stone that has not been marked with the blood of the strugglers.

In the nineteenth century a monk of Valaam, near the hermitage of Abbot Nazarius, saw a vision of unknown monks who came in two rows from a green grove full of sunlight and sang the funeral prayers in the ancient chant. They walked with arms folded on their breasts, radiant of face and with eyes of unspeakable gentleness. When the procession came close to the monk, he saw that all of them were sprinkled with blood and covered with wounds. The grass was not trampled where they had passed. They vanished as they had come, into the green thicket, and the soft echo of the funeral chant hung in the air for a long time.

With the blessing of Abbot Damascene, on the day of the martyrdom of the thirty-⁠four monks, 20 February, the Divine Liturgy "for their eternal repose" was celebrated at Valaam every year, followed by a general memorial service.