Barlaam

Holy Venerable Martyr Barlaam, a monk, is one of the martyrs of the Epiphany Monastery in Kostroma, killed in the Time of Troubles. The calendar page names him separately only as a monk, with no further details of his life, and tells the fate of the whole community.

The monastery, founded in the 1420s by Venerable Nikita of Kostroma, a disciple of Venerable Sergius of Radonezh, was well ordered at the beginning of the seventeenth century. In 1608 the forces of the man who called himself Dmitry II, "the thief of Tushino", won battles, and cities, among them Kostroma, resolved to swear allegiance to him. The plundering and violence of the invaders soon provoked an uprising. The Tushinites sent punitive detachments and on 28 December (old style) 1608 took Kostroma. The brethren of the monastery met them with resistance, and so on 30 December the monastery was taken by force and plundered, and its defenders died as martyrs. The historian I. V. Bazhenov wrote that the monks, loyal to the tsar, shut themselves in the monastery and valued duty and oath above riches and life.

The monastery's synodikon names those killed: the hieromonks Triphyllius, Macarius and Sabbatius, the hierodeacon Athenogenes and the monks Barlaam, Dionysius, Job, Herodion, Simeon, Cyril, Maximus, Joasaph and Gurias, then three servants, five women servants and thirty-⁠four monastery peasants. The monks of the Exaltation of the Cross monastery in the Kostroma Kremlin also perished. In February 1609 a new uprising drove out the invaders. Their memory was kept at the monastery every year on 30 December until its closing in the twentieth century; after the revival of 1990 the tradition was resumed. On 5 March 2004 Patriarch Alexy II approved the list of the Synaxis of the Saints of Kostroma, which includes their names.

Saint Barlaam is commemorated on 5 February, in the Synaxis of the Saints of the Kostroma Metropolia, in the new style.