Maximus of Kostroma

Holy Venerable Martyr Maximus of Kostroma was a monk of the Epiphany monastery in Kostroma and died on 30 December 1608 (old style), when the monastery was taken by Polish-⁠Lithuanian troops and their helpers. The Azbyka page commemorates him among the thirteen monks killed then: the hieromonks Tryphillius, Macarius and Savvatius, the hierodeacon Athenogenes and the monks Varlaam, Dionysius, Job, Herodion, Simeon, Cyril, Maximus, Joasaph and Gury.

The monastery had been founded in the 1420s by the Venerable Nikita of Kostroma, disciple and kinsman of Saint Sergius of Radonezh. In the autumn of 1608 Kostroma rose against the men of False Dmitri II, "the thief of Tushino", who sent punitive detachments into the region. On 28 December (old style) the city was taken, but the monks of the Epiphany monastery resisted; on 30 December the monastery was taken by force and plundered, and its defenders died as martyrs. The historian I. V. Bazhenov writes that the monks, loyal to the tsar, shut themselves in the monastery, resolved to lose their property and their lives rather than break their oath.

The names of those killed were written in the monastery's synodikon, together with some servants and thirty-⁠four peasants of the monastery. In the monastery their memory was kept every year, on 30 December, with a memorial service and the Liturgy. When the monastery became a convent in the nineteenth century, the commemoration went on until its closing in the twentieth century and was resumed after the monastery was revived, from 1990. On 5 March 2004 Patriarch Alexy II approved the list of the Synaxis of the Saints of Kostroma, in which these monks are included, venerated since then as local saints.

They are commemorated on 5 February, in the new style, in the Synaxis of the Saints of the Kostroma Metropolis.