Triphyllius of Kostroma

Holy Venerable Martyr Triphyllius of Kostroma, a hieromonk, is remembered with the martyrs of the Epiphany Monastery in Kostroma: the hieromonks Macarius and Sabbatius, the hierodeacon Athenogenes and the monks Barlaam, Dionysius, Job, Herodion, Simeon, Cyril, Maximus, Joasaph and Gurias. They were killed on 30 December 1608 (old style) in the Time of Troubles by Polish-⁠Lithuanian invaders and their helpers. The monastery had been founded in the 1420s by Venerable Nikita of Kostroma, disciple and kinsman of Venerable Sergius of Radonezh.

In the autumn of 1608 the forces of the man who called himself Dmitry II, "the thief of Tushino", had won battles, and cities, among them Kostroma, resolved to swear allegiance to him, hoping thus to spare themselves from disaster. But the plundering and violence of the invaders provoked an uprising, and Kostroma overthrew its new rulers. To put down the revolt, the Tushinites sent punitive detachments under Colonel Lisovsky. On 28 December (old style) 1608 the invaders captured Kostroma, but met resistance from the monks of the Epiphany Monastery. On 30 December the monastery was taken by force and plundered, and its defenders died as martyrs.

The Kostroma church historian I. V. Bazhenov wrote that the monks, loyal to Tsar Shuisky, shut themselves in the monastery and preferred to lose their treasures and even their lives rather than betray their duty and oath; as martyrs of fidelity they all perished at the hands of the robbers. The monastery's synodikon, from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, preserves the list of the victims: thirteen brethren, hieromonks, a hierodeacon and monks, among them Triphyllius, then the monastery's servants and thirty-⁠four monastery peasants, while in Kostroma the monks of the Exaltation of the Cross monastery also fell. The invaders' triumph was short: in February 1609 a new uprising seized Kostroma, and the detachment left behind was defeated by the Russian force of the voivode David Zherebtsov.

The memory of those killed was kept every year at the monastery on 30 December with a memorial service and a common liturgy, as the refectory rule of the first half of the seventeenth century shows. The commemoration went on after the monastery became a convent in the nineteenth century, until it was closed in the twentieth. Its revival from 1990 brought back the old customs. On 5 March 2004 Patriarch Alexy II approved the list of the Synaxis of the Saints of Kostroma, which includes the names of the defenders of the monastery, and since then they have been venerated as saints of the Kostroma land.

Saint Triphyllius is commemorated on 5 February, in the Synaxis of the Saints of the Kostroma Metropolia, in the new style.