Gurias

Holy Venerable Martyr Gurias is numbered among the venerable martyrs of the Epiphany monastery of Kostroma: the hieromonks Triphyllius, Macarius and Savvatius, the hierodeacon Athenogenes, and the monks Barlaam, Dionysius, Job, Herodion, Simeon, Cyril, Maximus, Joasaph and Gurias. The calendar says nothing of him beyond his name in this list; we tell here the story of the whole community.

Since the seventeenth century Kostroma has been one of the symbols of overcoming the Time of Troubles. A glorious page of its history is the feat of the monks of the men's monastery of the Epiphany, who fell at the hands of the Polish-⁠Lithuanian invaders and their helpers on 30 December 1608. The monastery had been founded in the 1420s by Venerable Nikita of Kostroma, a disciple and kinsman of Venerable Sergius of Radonezh, in a suburb of the town, and at the beginning of the seventeenth century it was well ordered.

In the autumn of 1608 the troops of the supporters of False Dmitry II, called by the people the Thief of Tushino from the place of his camp, defeated the government army at Rakhmantsevo and at Rostov. Like the inhabitants of other towns (Yaroslavl, Uglich, Romanov, Vologda, Galich), the people of Kostroma decided to swear allegiance to the Thief of Tushino, hoping perhaps thereby to escape devastation. An embassy of nobles and townsmen, led by Archimandrite Theodosius of the Ipatiev monastery and Hegumen Arsenius of the Epiphany monastery, went to Tushino. But soon the licence of violence of the invaders led to a popular uprising: at the end of 1608 Galich, Vologda, Totma and Nizhny Novgorod rose, and in Kostroma the new rule was overthrown; the traitor voivode, Prince Gorbaty-⁠Mosalsky, was captured and put to death by the people of Kostroma.

To crush the uprising, the Tushino men sent punitive detachments: Colonel Lisovsky and the captains Stravinsky and Lancoronsky with two thousand Cossacks and 608 mercenaries. The poorly organised militia of the land could not withstand a professional army. On 28 December (old style) 1608 the invaders took Kostroma, but met resistance from the monks of the Epiphany monastery. On 30 December (old style) the monastery was taken by force and plundered, and its defenders fell as martyrs. The Kostroma church historian I. V. Bazhenov (1855-1920) wrote that the monks, remaining faithful to Tsar Shuisky, shut themselves in the monastery, resolved to lose treasures and property and even life rather than betray their duty and oath, and all perished at the hands of the brigands after the monastery was taken by force. The brigands then plundered the holy icons, vessels, vestments and books and destroyed the charters.

The monastery's synodikon (from the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth century) preserves an entry with the list of the victims of the Tushino men: the brethren, servants and attendants, Christians of the monastery, killed by the enemies of the tsar and by the Lithuanians, among them the monk Gurias. Then follow the names of three servants, five women attendants and thirty-⁠four peasants of the monastery from eight villages. The monks of the Exaltation of the Cross monastery in the Kostroma Kremlin also fell, Archimandrite Gennady, Hieromonk Anthony and nine monks.

The invaders' triumph did not last. In February 1609 a new uprising seized Kostroma, many traitor nobles were drowned in the Volga, and the detachment left behind shut itself in the Ipatiev monastery, but was soon crushed by the army led by the voivode David Zherebtsov. The memory of the slain was honoured each year in the monastery; the refectory rule of the first half of the seventeenth century required that on 30 December a memorial service be sung and the Liturgy served in concelebration for the brethren, servants, women attendants and Christians of the monastery who were killed. The commemoration continued even after the monastery was turned in the nineteenth century into a convent, named Epiphany-⁠Anastasia, until its forcible closure in the twentieth century. The revival of the convent, begun in 1990, also brought the revival of the old customs. On 5 March 2004 Patriarch Alexy II approved the list of the Synaxis of the Saints of Kostroma, which contains also the names of the defenders of the monastery who fell in the Time of Troubles. Since then they have been venerated as local saints of the Kostroma land. They are commemorated on 5 February, in the Synaxis of the Saints of the Kostroma Metropolis.