Serapion of Valaam

Holy Venerable Martyr Serapion of Valaam was a monk of the Valaam monastery and is counted among the thirty-⁠four monks and novices killed by the Swedes in 1578.

The monastery and the attack

At that time the Valaam monastery stood near the frontier between the lands of Novgorod the Great and Sweden, and it was plundered by the Swedes several times. Under King Gustav Vasa (1523-1560) the Reformation had been carried out in Sweden. In the reign of his son John III, a military band of newly converted Lutherans, pursuing the Orthodox Karelians, crossed the ice from the mainland to the island and attacked the monastery. Saint Ignatius Brianchaninov writes that they still burned with a fanatical attachment to their newly born faith.

The martyrdom

On 20 February 1578 eighteen elders and sixteen novices were killed for their steadfastness in the Orthodox faith. Their names, entered in a memorial book with the note that they were beaten by Germans on Valaam, were preserved in a synodikon later kept at the Vasilyevsky monastery. Among them are named the hieromonk Titus, the schemamonk Tikhon and the monks Gelasius, Sergius, Barlaam, Sabbas, Conon, Silvester, Cyprian, Pimen, John, Samon, Jonah, David, Cornelius, Nifont, Athanasius and Serapion, and the novices Athanasius, Anthony, Luke, Leontius, Thomas, Dionysius, Philip, Ignatius, Basil, Pachomius, Theophilus, John and Theodore.

Veneration

In the nineteenth century a Valaam monk saw, near the hermitage of Abbot Nazarius, a procession of black-⁠robed monks. They walked in two rows out of a green grove filled with sunlight, singing funeral prayers in the old znamenny chant, with their arms crossed on their chests. They were radiant and their eyes were gentle, but as they drew near the monk saw that their clothing was spattered with blood and their bodies covered with wounds. The grass was not trampled where they passed, and they vanished into the thicket as they had come.

With the blessing of Abbot Damascene, each year on 20 February (4 March in the new style) the Divine Liturgy for their repose was served at Valaam, followed by a common memorial service. The venerable martyrs were canonized for veneration throughout the Russian Church at the Jubilee Council of Bishops in August 2000. Serapion is commemorated on 5 March (a movable date), on 3 June in the Synaxis of the Saints of Karelia and on 22 August (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Valaam, all in the new style.