Gregory of Avnezh

Venerable Martyr Gregory of Avnezh was a hermit on the heights of Avnezh, on the river Sukhona, and received a martyr's death on 15 June 1392, together with Cassian. He is commemorated on 15 June, 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. The birth year in our record (1400) cannot agree with a death in 1392.

In the second half of the fourteenth century the hermits Stephen, a disciple of Saint Sergius of Radonezh, and Gregory began to live on the Avnezh height. Around the year 1370 they built a church and cells for monks. In their work they were greatly helped by a rich villager of that place, named Constantine Dimitrievich, who later became a monk 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 the raids of the Kazan Tatars and the men of Vyatka. In one of them, on 15 June 1392, both ascetics, Gregory and Cassian, were killed, and after their martyrdom the monastery became desolate. The desolation lasted one hundred and thirty-⁠two years, and the place where the monastery had stood became almost entirely overgrown with forest.

In 1524 a villager of Avnezh, clearing the forest, found their relics, and an Orthodox chapel was put up over them. In 1560 Abbot Barlaam of the Holy Trinity Monastery built beside the tomb of the saints, with the gift of the Russian tsar, a monastery, which in 1764 was turned into a parish church. Their relics, with the blessing of Metropolitan Macarius, were examined by Bishop Joasaph of Vologda, and it was ordained that the local commemoration of the wonderworkers of Avnezh should be kept on the day of their death.