Cyprian of Tropa

Holy Venerable Cyprian of Tropa, also called Cyprian of Yaroslavl, founded the monastery of Saint Nicholas at Tropa, on the site where the village of Nikolo-⁠Tropa now stands, in the Rybinsk district of the Yaroslavl region. He died before the 1560s. The place and year of his birth, his family and his name in the world are not known.

According to a later tradition, Cyprian settled in the Poshekhonye district, in the forest on the river Zolotukha, thirty versts north-⁠east of Rybinsk. There the icon of Saint Nicholas the Wonderworker appeared to him in a miraculous way, and at the place of the appearance he founded the monastery of Saint Nicholas on the Tropa.

Local veneration began, it seems, soon after his death. The survey book of the royal villages of 1561 shows two churches in the monastery, an unheated one dedicated to Saint Nicholas and a heated one dedicated to the holy Great Martyr Paraskeva. Eleven brothers lived there at that time: the abbot Theodosius and ten elders. In the same year the community had several icons connected with Cyprian, among them a Deisis, an icon of the Mother of God the Hodegetria and an icon of Saint Nicholas, which the elder Cyprian had given to the house of Saint Nicholas. In 1750 the monastery had three churches, among them a wooden one dedicated to Cyprian's own patron, the Hieromartyr Cyprian, bishop of Antioch. Beside the churches stood a wooden bell tower with six bells, and the monastery was surrounded by a wooden fence with four corner towers. In the forest near the monastery stood a wooden chapel set up at the place where the icon of Saint Nicholas appeared.

The relics of Cyprian rested beneath the floor of the church of the Hieromartyr Cyprian, where his tomb also stood. The inventories of 1750 speak of a wooden tomb covered with a black velvet pall with a silver cross, and of an icon of the saint set above it. Near the tomb a troparion and a prayer to the venerable one were written out on the wall. The monastery kept records of the miracles and healings at his relics, but they burned on 26 January 1730, when a fire destroyed the heated church of the Smolensk icon of the Mother of God. In 1750 the abbot Joachim reported to the consistory that every year on 2 October, at the memorial of the Hieromartyr Cyprian, a great number of worshippers came to the service, and after the Liturgy memorial services were held for the founder Cyprian.

The monastery was closed in 1764 and its cathedral became a parish church, after which nothing more is known of Cyprian's tomb; the local people seem to have gone on honouring his memory. In the early nineteenth century a stone church with five domes and three altars was built and in 1812 consecrated, dedicated to the Smolensk icon of the Mother of God, to Saint Nicholas and to the Hieromartyr Cyprian of Antioch. The church was closed in 1935 and survives today in ruins.

The canonization of Cyprian took place when his name was entered in the Synaxis of the Saints of Rostov and Yaroslavl, whose celebration was established in 1964 with the blessing of Archbishop Nikodim (Rotov) of Yaroslavl and Rostov. The saint is commemorated on 5 June, in the new style.