Macarius of Kostroma

The Venerable Martyr Macarius of Kostroma was a hieromonk of the Epiphany monastery in Kostroma and died on 30 December 1608 (old style), with twelve other brethren, when the monastery was taken by the Polish-⁠Lithuanian troops and the men of False Dmitri II's camp. With him were killed the hieromonks Tryphillius and Savvatius, the hierodeacon Athenogenes and the monks Varlaam, Dionysius, Job, Herodion, Simeon, Cyril, Maximus, Joasaph and Gury.

The monastery and the Time of Troubles

The monastery had been founded in the fifteenth century by the Venerable Nikita of Kostroma, disciple and kinsman of Saint Sergius of Radonezh. In the autumn of 1608, when the men of "the thief of Tushino" won battles and several cities swore loyalty to him, the people of Kostroma sent an embassy to Tushino, but the violence of the invaders brought an uprising, and the traitor voivode was killed. The Tushino men sent punitive detachments under Colonel Lisovsky. On 28 December the city was taken, but the monks of the Epiphany monastery, shut in it and resolved to lose property and life rather than break their oath to the tsar, resisted. On 30 December the monastery was taken by force and plundered, and its defenders killed. The monastery's synodikon names the thirteen monks, servants and thirty-⁠four peasants; monks of the Exaltation of the Cross monastery in the Kremlin were also killed. In February 1609 the city rose again and the remaining invaders were crushed.

Commemoration

The memory of those killed was kept every year in the monastery on 30 December with a memorial service and the Liturgy, according to a seventeenth-⁠century rule, and went on after the monastery became a convent in the nineteenth century, until its closing in the twentieth. After its revival, from 1990, Patriarch Alexy II approved on 5 March 2004 the list of the Synaxis of the Saints of Kostroma, with the names of these defenders, venerated since then as local saints. The commemoration is kept on 5 February, in the new style.