John of Putivl

The right-⁠believing Prince John of Putivl (fourteenth century) was ruler of Putivl, killed by the Tatars, and is numbered among the saints as a martyr. He was entered in the Synaxis of All Saints Who Shone Forth in the Russian Land, and in 2009 the Synod of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church set his own commemoration on 20 September.

Little is known of his life. In most copies of the Lyubech Synodikon, which contains a separate section commemorating the princes of Chernigov, stands the commemoration of "Prince John of Putivl, passion-⁠bearer and wonderworker, killed by the Tatars for the Christians." The oldest manuscript is preserved in the synodikon of the church of the Entry of the Mother of God into the Temple at the Kyiv Caves Lavra. John is placed after Prince Ivan Romanovich of Putivl, who died in the first quarter of the fourteenth century, and before Prince Vladimir Ivanovich of Kyiv. For this reason it is now held that he lived in the first half of the fourteenth century, not in the thirteenth, as was believed. Perhaps he was even the son of Prince Ivan Romanovich, of the older, Bryansk line of the Olgovichi of Chernigov.

His reign fell in the time of Khan Uzbek (1313-1341), when the Golden Horde at times resorted to reprisals and executions against subject rulers. The record of his death in the Synodikon stands next to that of the execution, at the Horde, on Uzbek's order, in 1327, of Prince Ivan Yaroslavich of Ryazan. Perhaps John too was killed at the Horde, or during one of the Mongol campaigns through the land of Putivl toward the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.

That the Synodikon calls him a passion-⁠bearer killed "for the Christians" and a wonderworker shows a local veneration formed by the first quarter of the fifteenth century. In the mid-⁠seventeenth century, through Bishop Zosima Prokopovich of Chernigov, his commemoration reached Kyiv. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries his memory is hardly traceable. His name was entered in the Synaxis of All Saints Who Shone Forth in the Russian Land in the second half of the 1970s, in preparing the Menaia, and this is regarded as his general canonization. On 25 March 2009 the Synod of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church decreed a commemoration of his own, on 20 September. On 27 June 2009, in the Transfiguration church in Putivl, Metropolitan Vladimir of Kyiv served the Liturgy, after which the Synod's decision was announced and his life, composed by Archpriest Alexander Churochkin of Putivl, was read.