Also known as The 34 Martyrs of Valaam Monastery · the Valaam Martyrs
Thirty-four monks of Valaam Monastery — eighteen elders and sixteen novices — slain by Lutheran Swedish forces on February 20, 1578 for refusing to abandon the Orthodox faith. They were canonized by the Russian Church in 2000.
Feast Day
February 20
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The Monastic Martyrs of Valaam are a group of thirty-four monks of the Valaam Monastery — eighteen elders and sixteen novices — who were slain in 1578 for refusing to abandon the Orthodox faith. Their commemoration is kept on February 20.
Valaam Monastery stands on the island of Valaam, the largest island in Lake Ladoga, in the Karelia region of northwestern Russia. By tradition it was founded by Saints Sergius and Herman of Valaam, though the surviving record does not predate the sixteenth century and scholars have proposed founding dates ranging from the tenth to the fifteenth centuries. The killing of the community in 1578 belongs to the long conflict between Orthodox Russia and Lutheran Sweden in this contested borderland.
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The Raid of 1578
In 1578 the monastery was attacked, and a number of its monks and novices were killed by Swedish forces, who were Lutheran at the time. According to the count preserved in the Orthodox synaxarion, thirty-four members of the community died — eighteen elders and sixteen novices — put to death because they would not renounce their Orthodox faith.
The Valaam community was not the only such loss in the region. The monastery would later be left desolate between 1611 and 1715 following further Swedish assaults, its buildings burned to the ground, after which the Karelian border between Russia and Sweden was drawn through Lake Ladoga. The monastery was restored in the eighteenth century.
Historical Context
The 1578 raid fell within the wider Russo-Swedish hostilities of the period associated with the Livonian War (1558–1583), a struggle for control of Old Livonia in the territory of present-day Estonia and Latvia in which Russia faced a shifting coalition that included Sweden and the union of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. From 1577 onward the conflict turned against Russia, and its northwestern monasteries — Valaam among them, set on the contested frontier of Lake Ladoga — were exposed to attack.
Valaam itself recovered and flourished in later centuries, growing wealthy and overseeing some twenty smaller sketes by the early twentieth century; it was from this same monastery that the 1793 mission departed for Alaska.
Canonization
The Monastic Martyrs of Valaam were canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church at its Jubilee Council in 2000.
