Cyril of Kostroma

Holy Venerable Martyr Cyril of Kostroma was a monk of the Epiphany monastery in Kostroma and one of the brethren killed there on 30 December 1608 (old style), in the Time of Troubles, by Polish-⁠Lithuanian invaders and those who sided with them.

The Epiphany monastery had been founded in the 1420s by Saint Nikita of Kostroma, a disciple and kinsman of Saint Sergius of Radonezh, on the edge of the city, and by the early seventeenth century it was well ordered. In the autumn of 1608 the army of the second False Dmitry, called in the common speech "the thief of Tushino" after the place of his camp, defeated the government forces. Cities such as Yaroslavl, Uglich, Romanov, Vologda, Galich and Kostroma decided to swear allegiance to him, hoping thereby to escape ruin. But the violence of the invaders stirred an uprising: toward the end of 1608 Galich, Vologda, Totma and Nizhny Novgorod rose, and the people of Kostroma overthrew the new authority and captured and executed the traitor voivode, Prince Gorbaty-⁠Mosalsky.

To subdue them the Tushino leaders sent punitive detachments, under Colonel Lisovsky, with two thousand Cossacks and 608 mercenaries. On 28 December 1608 (old style) they took Kostroma, but at the Epiphany monastery they met resistance. On 30 December the monastery was taken by force and laid waste, and its defenders died as martyrs. The church historian of Kostroma, I. V. Bazhenov, wrote that the monks, faithful to Tsar Shuisky, shut themselves in the monastery and chose to lose their treasures and even their lives rather than betray their duty and oath; after the killing, the plunderers carried off the icons, sacred vessels, vestments and books.

The synodikon of the monastery, from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, preserves the names of the slain: the hieromonks Triphyllius, Macarius and Savvatius, the hierodeacon Athenogenes, the monks Barlaam, Dionysius, Job, Herodion, Simeon, Cyril, Maximus, Joasaph and Gurias, then the servants Peter, Athanasius and Epiphanius and other women servants and Christians of the monastery. The synodikon adds thirty-⁠four slain peasants from eight estates of the monastery. The Tushino men also killed the community of the Exaltation of the Cross monastery in the Kostroma kremlin, among them the archimandrite Gennadius and the hieromonk Anthony with nine more monks. The invaders' triumph was short: in February 1609 a new uprising seized Kostroma, and those who remained were defeated.

In the monastery the memory of the slain was kept every year: the refectory rule of the first half of the seventeenth century ordered that on 30 December a memorial service be sung and the Liturgy served in concelebration for the brethren, servants and Christians of the monastery. The commemoration went on even after the monastery became a women's community in the nineteenth century, until its forcible closing in the twentieth. The monastery began to revive in 1990, and on 5 March 2004 Patriarch Alexy II confirmed the list of the Synaxis of the Saints of Kostroma, which includes the names of these defenders. Since then they are venerated as local saints of the Kostroma land. Saint Cyril is commemorated on 5 February, in the new style.