Theodore of Valaam

Holy Venerable Martyr Theodore of Valaam is one of the thirty-⁠four monks of the Valaam Monastery killed for the faith on 20 February 1578.

In its long history the Valaam monastery, near the border of the lands of Great Novgorod with Sweden, was many times laid waste by the Swedes. Under King Gustav Vasa (1523 to 1560) the Reformation had been carried out in Sweden. In the reign of his son John III, a military detachment of newly converted Lutherans, who, in the words of Saint Ignatius (Brianchaninov), "still burned with a fanatical attachment to their newly born faith," pursuing the Orthodox Karelians, crossed over the ice from the mainland to the island and attacked the monastery. On 20 February 1578 eighteen blessed elders and sixteen novices were killed as martyrs for steadfastness in the Orthodox faith. Their names, with the note "slain by Germans at Valaam, elders and servants," were entered in a synodikon which later came to the Vasilievsky monastery: the hieromonk Titus, the schemamonk Tikhon, the monks Gelasius, Sergius, Varlaam, Savva, Conon, Silvester, Cyprian, Pimen, John, Samon, Jonah, David, Cornelius, Nifont, Athanasius, Serapion, another Varlaam, and the novices Athanasius, Anthony, Luke, Leontius, Thomas, Dionysius, Philip, Ignatius, Basil, Pachomius, another Basil, Theophilus, John, Theodore and another John. The attacks of the Swedes continued. On Valaam there is no stone that has not been marked with the blood of ascetics.

In the nineteenth century a monk of Valaam, 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 and sang funeral prayers in the old chant, with their hands folded on their chests, radiant of face and with eyes of unspeakable gentleness. When the procession approached the monk, he saw that all were sprinkled with blood and covered with wounds. Where they had passed, the grass was not trampled. They vanished as they had appeared, into the green thicket, and soft echoes of the funeral chant lingered long in the air.

With the blessing of Abbot Damascene, on the day of the martyrdom of the thirty-⁠four monks, 20 February (4 March, new style), the Divine Liturgy "for their eternal repose" is celebrated at Valaam every year, with a memorial service in concelebration. They were numbered among the saints of the Russian Church for general veneration by the Jubilee Council in August 2000. Theodore is commemorated on 5 March, on a movable day, in the Synaxis of the Saints of Karelia on 3 June, and in the Synaxis of the Saints of Valaam on 22 August, on a movable day.