Job

Holy Venerable Martyr Job was one of the monks of the Epiphany monastery in Kostroma who were killed on 30 December 1608 by Polish-⁠Lithuanian soldiers and their helpers, in the Time of Troubles. With his brethren the Church honours him as a martyr of fidelity to the tsar and to the true faith.

From the seventeenth century Kostroma has remained a symbol of victory over those times. 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 forces of the supporters of the Second False Dmitry, called by the people "the thief of Tushino", defeated the government forces at Rakhmantsevo and at Rostov. Like the inhabitants of other towns, the people of Kostroma resolved to swear allegiance to the thief of Tushino, hoping thus to escape ruin. Their embassy, headed by Archimandrite Theodosius of the Ipatiev monastery and Abbot Arseny of the Epiphany monastery, set out for Tushino. But the plunder and violence of the foreigners soon brought a rising of the people. At the end of 1608 Galich, Vologda, Totma and Nizhny Novgorod rose up, and in Kostroma the new authority was overthrown. The traitor voivode, Prince Gorbaty-⁠Mosalsky, was captured and put to death.

Against the rising the Tushino men sent punitive bands, with Colonel Lisovsky and the captains Stravinsky and Lanckoronski, with two thousand Cossacks and 608 mercenaries. The town militia, poorly formed and untrained, could not stand against the professional troops. On 28 December 1608 (old style) the foreigners 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 died as martyrs.

The Kostroma church historian I. V. Bazhenov wrote that the monks of the monastery, faithful to Tsar Shuisky, shut themselves in and chose to lose treasures and property and even life, rather than betray their duty and oath. After the monastery was taken by force they all died at the hands of brigands, who then plundered the icons, vessels, vestments and books, and destroyed the charters of gift.

The memorial book of the monastery, preserved to this day and written at the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth century, contains an entry with the names of those slain: the hieromonks Tryphillius, Macarius and Sabbatius, the hierodeacon Anfinogen, and the monks Barlaam, Dionysius, Job, Herodion, Simeon, Cyril, Maximus, Joasaph and Gurias, along with three servants and five female servants. Further on are written thirty-⁠four peasants of the monastery, from eight estates. The monks of the Exaltation of the Cross monastery in the Kostroma kremlin also fell, among them Archimandrite Gennadius, the hieromonk Anthony and nine monks.

The foreigners' triumph was short. In February 1609 a new rising swept Kostroma, many traitor nobles were drowned in the Volga, and those left in the town shut themselves in the Ipatiev monastery and were soon defeated by the army of the voivode David Zherebtsov. The commemoration of those killed at the Epiphany monastery was kept each year on 30 December, according to the refectory rule of the monastery from the first half of the seventeenth century, with a memorial service and a joint Liturgy. The monastery was forcibly closed in the twentieth century and revived from 1990. On 5 March 2004 Patriarch Alexy II approved the list of the Synaxis of the Saints of Kostroma, which includes the defenders of the monastery who fell in the Time of Troubles, and since then they have been venerated as saints of the region. The saint is commemorated on 5 February, in new style.