Basil of Valaam

Holy Venerable Martyr Basil of Valaam, the second saint of that name among the martyrs of 1578, was likewise a novice of the monastery on the island of Valaam, where he was killed for the Orthodox faith.

The monastery stood near the frontier between Novgorod and Sweden and had suffered Swedish raids many times. After the Reformation came to Sweden, in the reign of King John III, a detachment of recently converted Lutherans, who were hunting down the Orthodox Karelians, came over the ice from the mainland and broke into the monastery. On 20 February 1578 eighteen elders and sixteen novices met a martyr's end because they would not abandon the Orthodox faith.

The synodikon in which their names are written, later kept at the monastery of Saint Basil, remembers them as men "beaten by the Germans". The list of novices contains two names of Basil, and this one is the second of them. Among the slain are also the priest-⁠monk Titus, the schemamonk Tikhon and the monks Sabbas, Conon, Silvester, Cyprian, Pimen, Jonah, David, Niphon and Serapion, together with the novices Pachomius, Theophilus, John and Theodore.

According to an old record, a Valaam monk of the nineteenth century, living near the hermitage of Abbot Nazarius, saw unknown monks walking in two lines with burial chants out of a sunlit thicket. Their faces were bright, yet they were covered with blood and wounds, and the grass stayed unbent beneath them. The vision faded into the undergrowth, and the echo of their singing hung in the air for a long while.

On the day of their martyrdom, 20 February (4 March new style), a Liturgy for the repose of the thirty-⁠four was served at Valaam with the blessing of Abbot Damascene, followed by a memorial service. They were canonized at the Jubilee Council of Bishops in August 2000, for veneration throughout the Church. In the new style the saint is commemorated on 5 March (a movable date), and then on 3 June with the saints of Karelia and on 22 August (movable) with the saints of Valaam.