Seraphima of Korets

Venerable Seraphima of Korets (in the world Princess Sofia Koretska, died 1633) was the first abbess of the convent at Korets in Volhynia. She was glorified locally in the Rivne diocese by decision of the Synod of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of 6 December 2019, and the service of glorification was held on 24 June 2021 in the Holy Trinity Monastery at Korets; she is commemorated on 20 April (3 May), and her glorification on 11 (24) June.

She was born into a noble family, the second daughter of Prince Joachim (Yefim) Koretsky (d. 1612) and Anna Chodkiewicz (d. 1626). The Koretsky princes took part in restoring the monastery of Korets, destroyed to its foundations by the Tatar-⁠Mongols. Building began in 1571, despite opposition from the Catholic Polish nobility, and the work was finished in the autumn of 1579. On the Friday of Bright Week in 1580 Sofia was tonsured a nun with the name Seraphima by Bishop Gedeon Balaban of Lviv and Kamianets, and on Thomas Sunday she was raised to abbess of the monastery.

After Bishop Cyril Terletsky of Lutsk went over to the Union (1595), Catholic priests and representatives of Western orders began to come to the monastery to urge the nuns to enter the Union. The abbess resisted this influence by the power of her rank as a princess, the sister of the local ruler. The nuns' faithfulness was strengthened by the move to Korets of the Kyivan polemicist Lavrenty Zizanii, priest of the Ascension Cathedral (1612-1619), and his brother Stefan, author of treatises against the Catholics. In spring 1620, at the abbess's request to her brother Prince Samuil Joachimovich Koretsky, who complained of the narrowness of the buildings, the foundation of a larger monastery dedicated to the Holy Trinity was laid in the town.

In 1622 the Turks killed Samuil, the last Orthodox prince of the Koretskys, and his brother John, who had accepted Catholicism with the name Jan-⁠Karol, proposed to the abbess that she take from the prince's chapel the icon "Helper of Sinners" and the shroud of the Mother of God. The abbess carried them to the monastery in procession. At the same time Jan-⁠Karol gave the new church and the cell buildings under construction to the Franciscans. Seraphima restored the monastery completely, founded a shelter for orphan girls and revived the workshops of painting, gilding of domes, gilding of wood, and the sewing of church vestments and mitres.

She left all her wealth, and her mother's, to the monastery, on condition that it remain within the Orthodox Church; in her testament of 20 March 1633 she gave the monastery the town of Aleksandriya with nine villages bought from Princess Krystyna Wisniowiecka, her right to her dowry and her loans. She died in November 1633 and was buried, according to some sources, by Metropolitan Peter Mohyla, according to others by Bishop Athanasius Puzyna of Lutsk. The diocesan press, however, gives the year 1627. The monastery was in Uniate hands between 1752 and 1795.

The Synod decided on her glorification on 6 December 2019, and on 24 June 2021, the day of veneration of the Korets icon, at the Holy Trinity Monastery in Korets several hierarchs served the rite of glorification and a procession with the wonderworking icon.