Joasaph

Holy Venerable Martyr Joasaph, a monk, is one of the thirteen martyrs of the Epiphany monastery of Kostroma, who fell in the Time of Troubles, on 30 December 1608 (old style), killed by the Polish-⁠Lithuanian interventionists and those who helped them. The Azbyka page tells the passion of all of them and says nothing particular about him, other than his name in the list of the slain.

The Epiphany monastery, founded in the 1420s by Venerable Nikita of Kostroma, disciple and kinsman of Saint Sergius of Radonezh, was well ordered at the beginning of the seventeenth century. In the autumn of 1608 the armies of the supporters of False Dmitry II, called "the Thief of Tushino", won battles against the government forces, and the people of Kostroma, like the inhabitants of other towns, resolved to swear fealty to the thief, hoping to escape plunder. But soon the violence of the interventionists stirred the people to revolt, which overthrew the new power and killed the traitor governor. To crush the revolt, punitive detachments set out from Tushino, with Colonel Lisovsky and two thousand Cossacks. On 28 December 1608 (old style) they took Kostroma, but met the resistance of the community of the Epiphany monastery. On 30 December (old style) the monastery was taken by force and laid waste, and its defenders died as martyrs.

The historian Bazhenov wrote that the monks of the monastery, faithful to Tsar Shuisky, shut themselves in it and preferred to lose treasures and goods and to give their lives rather than betray their duty and oath. The synodikon of the monastery lists the names of those killed: the hieromonks Triphyllius, Macarius and Savvatius, the hierodeacon Athenogenes, the monks Barlaam, Dionysius, Job, Herodion, Simeon, Cyril, Maximus, Joasaph and Gurias, then servants, women servants and thirty-⁠four peasants of the monastery. Books and treasures were plundered, and the charters of donation were destroyed. The same fate befell the monks of the Exaltation of the Cross monastery in the kremlin. In February 1609 a new revolt seized Kostroma and the detachment left in the town was defeated. The memory of those slain was kept every year at the monastery, on 30 December, with a memorial service and Liturgy, until its closing in the twentieth century. On 5 March 2004 Patriarch Alexis II approved the list of the Synaxis of the Saints of Kostroma, in which are also the defenders of the monastery, honoured since then as saints of the land of Kostroma.

The Church commemorates him on 5 February, in the Synaxis of the Saints of the Kostroma Metropolia, together with the other martyrs of the Epiphany monastery.