James and John of Menyuga

Saints James and John of Menyuga were two child brothers of the Novgorod land, honoured as righteous in the Synaxis of the Saints of Novgorod. Their life survives only in a popular account, written down in the eighteenth-⁠century Brief Narrative of the Saints from oral tradition. The Church commemorates them on the third Sunday after Pentecost.

According to tradition, in a peasant family, that of Isidore and Barbara, two boys were left unattended while their parents worked in the field: John, aged five, and James, aged three. While they played at the edge of the village of Verkhny Prikhon, John accidentally killed his younger brother. Seized by fear, he ran home and hid in the oven. When the parents returned from the field they lit the fire in the oven, and John made no sound. His body was found only after the oven had been heated. The author of the narrative counts one of the brothers as innocently slain and the other as a martyr.

The sources give the year of death only approximately, about 1569, although the narrative itself speaks of 1570. The brothers were first buried at the parish church of Saint Nicholas. Later, hunters found their coffins in a forest near Lake Kamenskoe and the village of Menyusha, and the coffins were brought back to the church of Saint Nicholas. After the brothers appeared to the hunters in a dream and asked to be moved to another place at Menyusha, they were buried again there, and a chapel rose on the spot.

Healings took place at their grave, among them that of the monk Macarius, builder of the Trinity monastery of Menyuga from 1668 to 1684. In the time of Metropolitan Cornelius of Novgorod (1674-1695) their relics were found, and the brothers were canonized then. The monastery burned in 1780, and a wooden church of the Holy Trinity was later built on its site, with a side chapel in their honour; it was replaced by a stone church between 1837 and 1841. In 1859 a silvered copper shrine bearing a scene from the narrative was set over their grave. The saints are venerated chiefly in the Novgorod region.