Monastic Martyrs of Valaam

The Monastic Martyrs of Valaam were thirty-⁠four monks of Valaam Monastery, killed on 20 February 1578 by Swedish invaders for their steadfastness in the Orthodox faith. Valaam Monastery, near the border of Great Novgorod with Sweden, was repeatedly ravaged by the Swedes, who were drawn both by profit and by the wish to plant the Latin faith in the surrounding lands.

Under King Gustav Vasa (1523 to 1560) the Reformation took place in Sweden. In the reign of his son John III, a military detachment of Lutheran converts, who according to Saint Ignatius Brianchaninov "still breathed a fanatical preference for their newborn faith," crossed the ice from the mainland to the island and attacked the monastery. On 20 February 1578, eighteen old men and sixteen novices were killed. Their names, with the note "beaten by the Germans on Valaam, elders and servants," were entered in a synodikon that later passed to the Vasiliev Monastery: Hieromonk Titus, schemamonk Tikhon, monks Gelasios, Sergius, Barlaam, Savva, Konon, Sylvester, Cyprian, Pimen, John, Samon, Jonah, David, Cornelius, Niphon, Athanasios, Serapion and another Barlaam, and the novices Athanasios, Anthony, Luke, Leontios, Thomas, Dionysios, Philip, Ignatius, Basil, Pakhomios, another Basil, Theophilos, John, Theodore and another John.

According to a nineteenth-⁠century legend, a Valaam monk near the hermitage of Abbot Nazarius was granted a vision of unknown black-⁠robed monks who walked in two rows out of a green grove flooded with sunlight, singing the old funeral hymns. They walked with hands folded on their breasts, with bright faces and an unspeakable meekness in their eyes, but their robes were sprinkled with blood and covered with wounds. The grass did not bend where they passed. They vanished as they had come, into the green thicket. With the blessing of Abbot Damascene, the monastery served the Divine Liturgy "for their eternal rest" every year on 20 February, and a cathedral panikhida was sung. At the Jubilee Council of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church, held on 13 to 16 August 2000, the thirty-⁠four monastic martyrs were canonized for Church-⁠wide veneration. They are commemorated on 20 February (new style; 5 March on the old calendar).