Jonah of Perm

Saint Jonah the Hierarch was the fifth bishop of Perm, successor of Saint Pitirim. He departed to the Lord on 6 June 1470. He was canonized among the hierarchs. His commemoration is on 29 January and on 6 June.

He was chosen bishop from among simple monks and ordained in 1456 by Metropolitan Jonah of Moscow. He successfully continued the conversion to Christianity of the pagan Komi-⁠Permyaks, who lived on the Kama and the Chusovaya. At the beginning of his preaching he had to endure many hardships and sufferings among those he was converting, until he managed to convert a prince of Perm and several magi.

In the place of the destroyed pagan shrines he built churches and by the churches he founded schools. In 1459 Jonah is among the Russian hierarchs who wrote an "exhortation" to the Lithuanian bishops to remain faithful to Orthodoxy.

Bishop Jonah died in 1470 and was buried beside his predecessors, in the cathedral of the Annunciation. When the wooden church was rebuilt in stone, the tombs were placed in a separate All Saints chapel (1749). In 1936 the cathedral was destroyed. In 1996 a chapel was raised over the burial place, in which the relics of the holy bishops Gerasimus, Pitirim and Jonah rest beneath the ground.

The veneration of Saint Jonah began at the start of the seventeenth century: in 1607, by order of Tsar Vasily Shuisky, an icon of the hierarchs of Perm was painted, and soon after a common commemoration of them was set on 29 January.