Cassian of Avnezh

Venerable Martyr Cassian of Avnezh (in the world Constantine Dimitrievich) was a monk on the heights of Avnezh, on the river Sukhona, and received a martyr's death on 15 June 1392. The Russian Church honours him among the venerable martyrs. The birth year in our record (1400) cannot agree with a death in 1392, so we have not used it.

In the second half of the fourteenth century the hermits Stephen, a disciple of Saint Sergius of Radonezh (Stephen of Makhrishch), and Gregory settled in the Avnezh district, on the river Sukhona, on the Avnezh height. About the year 1370 they built a church and cells for monks. A wealthy villager, Constantine Dimitrievich, helped them, and then became a monk himself, with the name Cassian, and was made cellarer of the new monastery when Grand Prince Dimitry Donskoy summoned Stephen to Moscow.

At the end of the fourteenth century the monastery suffered greatly from raids of the Kazan Tatars and the men of Vyatka. In one of these raids, on 15 June 1392, both ascetics who remained there, that is Cassian and Gregory, as our summary indicates, were killed. After their martyrdom the monastery fell into complete desolation. The desolation lasted one hundred and thirty-⁠two years, and the place where it had been became overgrown with forest.

In 1524 a villager of Avnezh, clearing forest for farmland, found the relics of the ascetics of Avnezh. A chapel was built over them. In 1560 Abbot Barlaam of the Holy Trinity Monastery built, at the tsar's expense, a monastery beside the tomb of the saints (in 1764 it was turned into a parish church). With the blessing of Metropolitan Macarius, the relics were examined by Bishop Joasaph of Vologda and then placed under a slab in the new monastery. A local commemoration of the wonderworkers of Avnezh was established on 15 June. They are also commemorated on the third Sunday after Pentecost, in the Synaxis of the Saints of Vologda, and on 6 July, in the Synaxis of the Saints of Radonezh.