Maria of Radonezh

Saint Maria of Radonezh was the mother of Saint Sergius of Radonezh, the greatest ascetic of the Russian land. She lived, with her husband Cyril, at the end of the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth century in the principality of Rostov. Toward the end of her life she was tonsured, and she died in 1337 (according to some sources, at the latest in the early 1340s). She is commemorated, with Saint Cyril, on 28 September and 18 January.

The family

Cyril and Maria, according to tradition, had an estate on the bank of the river Ishnya, four kilometres from Rostov. Cyril was a boyar of good family serving the princes of Rostov, Constantine Borisovich and then Vasily Konstantinovich, whom he accompanied several times on journeys to the Golden Horde. He is thought to have shared a common ancestor with the Velyaminov family, the Varangian Simon, builder of the Dormition church of the Kiev Caves Monastery. Maria's origin is unknown: she may have been of simple Russian people or of noble Tatars, perhaps descendants of Genghis Khan. The husband of Maria's sister, Dyuden, who moved with Cyril to Radonezh, was one of the many noble baptized Tatars of Rostov. Another relative of Maria, Tormos, also moved to Radonezh with Cyril. But the sources do not exclude her origin from simple Rostov people or from other peoples of the Rostov and Volhynian lands.

The couple preferred to live in the country rather than in town, and their children, though of boyar stock, grew up in the labours and cares of ordinary villagers, becoming skilled at every trade. Cyril and Maria kept the rules of the Church strictly, prayed and went to church together, helped the needy and received strangers. During her pregnancies Maria fasted, avoiding meat, fish and milk and eating only bread and vegetable food. They had the children Stephen, Bartholomew (the future Sergius of Radonezh), Peter and Anna (Anna is mentioned by the historian Kryuchkov, while in other sources Anna is the wife of Stephen).

According to the Life, when Maria was in church, pregnant with Bartholomew, the child cried out three times in a loud voice in his mother's womb. From his first days the infant amazed everyone by fasting: on Wednesdays and Fridays he ate nothing at all, and on other days he refused his mother's milk if she had eaten meat.

Radonezh and the end

When Bartholomew was about twelve, he asked his parents for a blessing to become a monk; they did not object but asked him to wait until their death. Around 1328 (according to the Trinity-⁠Sergius Lavra, around 1340), reduced to poverty by a long famine in the Rostov land, they moved to the principality of Moscow, to Radonezh, where they lived near the church of the Nativity of Christ. The hierodeacon Onesimus, a relative of the boyar Cyril and later one of the first disciples of Saint Sergius, had invited him there through the Moscow chiliarch Protasy Fyodorovich. Cyril was to receive an estate, but because of age could not serve the prince, and the duty was taken over by the eldest son, Stephen.

At the end of their lives Cyril and Maria were tonsured together, first as monk and nun and then in the schema, at the Intercession monastery of Khotkovo, three kilometres from Radonezh, then both a men's and a women's monastery. Stephen, who had also settled in the monastery after his wife's death, cared for them in their weakness. They died in 1337 (in any case not later than the early 1340s), in old age, after illness, having blessed Bartholomew for the monastic struggle. Their children buried them in the Intercession cathedral, where their relics lie still. Saint Sergius, before important decisions and before his long journeys on foot through the Russian land, dangerous because of robbers and wild beasts and often made alone, always visited the place of their rest.

Veneration

Already in the fourteenth century, in the illustrated Life of Saint Sergius, his parents are shown with haloes. By the nineteenth century their veneration had spread through Russia, as the calendars of the time show, and people came to them for healing. On 3 April 1992, in the year of the 600th anniversary of the repose of Saint Sergius, the Council of Bishops of the Russian Church decreed the glorification of the schemamonk Cyril and the schemanun Maria for the whole Church. They are also commemorated in the synaxes of the saints of Rostov and of Radonezh.