Canonization and Relics

St. Joseph of Volotsk reposed on 9 September 1515 at the Dormition Monastery he had founded near Volokolamsk, and was buried there. Local veneration began soon after his death and was carried by his own monastery and its Lives; the Russian Church gave him a general (all-Russian) glorification in the later sixteenth century, the date most often fixed at 1579, though the precise year and the local-versus-general distinction are reported variously and must be pinned to the menologion and the church-historical tradition rather than asserted as exact fact. This file sets out his repose and burial, the canonization and its dating, the long after-history of the Iosifo-Volokolamsk monastery — its wealth and fortifications, its service as a prison for notable religious-political captives, its Soviet closure and desecration, and its return to the Church in 1989 — and the feast days and relics, with every hagiographical and relic claim pinned to its attestation per METHODOLOGY §3.5.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (cenobitic founder; “Possessors”)

The Repose of 1515

Joseph died on 9 September 1515 (Old Style) at the Dormition Monastery of Volokolamsk, the house he had founded in 1479 and governed for thirty-six years (Goldfrank 2000, introduction; Fedotov 1966, II). The date 9 September is the one carried by his Lives and by the liturgical tradition that keeps it as his principal feast, and it is consistent across the hagiographical and church-calendar witnesses (Goldfrank 2000; on the Lives, see the Volokolamsk Paterik and the vitae of Savva Chorny and the others discussed in Section 08). He had been abbot of his own monastery from its foundation, and he died in it, surrounded by the community whose strict cenobitic life he had legislated (Goldfrank 2000, on the Monastic Rule; on that rule, see The Strict Typikon).

The Lives surround his last days with the customary edifying material — his final exhortations to the brethren on the keeping of the ustav, his reception of the Mysteries, his death in the monastic habit. These details are reported here as what the Lives attest, not as independently established fact (METHODOLOGY §3.5); the earliest and most important of them is the Life by Savva Chorny (Savva the Black, later bishop of Krutitsy), composed within a generation of Joseph’s death, with the anonymous Life and the Life attributed to Lev Filolog standing alongside it (on the dating and reliability of these texts, see Section 08). He was buried at the monastery, in or by the Dormition (Uspensky) church that was its center, and his tomb there became at once the focus of the local cult (Goldfrank 2000; Fedotov 1966, II).

Local Veneration and General Glorification

As with most Russian saints of the period, Joseph’s veneration grew in two stages: a local cult at and around his own monastery, beginning soon after his death and nourished by his Lives, the keeping of his memory on 9 September, and the prestige of the house he had founded; and then a general (all-Russian) glorification by the authority of the Russian Church, extending his commemoration to the whole church (on the pattern of local then general canonization in this era, see The Mongol and Muscovite Periods). The sixteenth century was the great age of Russian canonizations — above all the councils of 1547 and 1549 under Metropolitan Macarius, which glorified a large number of Russian saints — and Joseph’s general glorification belongs to this Macarian and post-Macarian wave of canonizations (Fedotov 1966, II; Goldfrank 2000).

The year most commonly given for Joseph’s general glorification is 1579, associated with the metropolitanate of Antony (Metropolitan of Moscow 1572–1581) and falling in the reign of Ivan IV. This is the date carried in the standard church-calendar and hagiographical tradition. It should, however, be handled with the caution METHODOLOGY §3 requires for canonization dates of this period, which are not always recorded with the precision later readers want, and which are sometimes reported differently in different church-historical sources. [Disputed: the date and scope of Joseph's general glorification — the church-calendar tradition most commonly fixes the all-Russian canonization at 1579 (under Metropolitan Antony), and this is the year usually cited; some church-historical accounts associate his general veneration with a slightly different date or treat the 1579 act as a confirmation and extension of an already-established local cult rather than a single founding moment, and the surviving conciliar documentation for the act is not as full as for the Macarian councils of 1547–1549. The 9 September commemoration and the local cult at Volokolamsk are securely attested from the sixteenth century; the precise year of the general glorification is the less certain element and is given here as it stands in the menologion tradition (Fedotov 1966, II; Goldfrank 2000)]. What is not in doubt is that within decades of his death Joseph was venerated as a saint of his own monastery, and that by the late sixteenth century his commemoration had the standing of an all-Russian feast.

The Monastery After Its Founder: Wealth and Walls

The house Joseph left became one of the great monasteries of Muscovy, and its after-history is inseparable from his legacy. Already wealthy and well-endowed in his lifetime — the material basis of the charity Joseph defended (see The Case for Monastic Estates and Charity and the Famine) — the Iosifo-Volokolamsk (Iosifo-Volotsky) monastery grew through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries into a major landholding house with extensive estates, a large library and scriptorium, and a hierarchy-supplying role: numbers of bishops and metropolitans of the sixteenth-century Russian Church came out of its “Josephite” milieu (Fedotov 1966, II; Goldfrank 2000; on the Josephite ascendancy, see The Josephite Legacy). Its prosperity was exactly the kind Joseph had argued for: monastic wealth ordered to liturgy, learning, hospitality, and almsgiving.

In the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the monastery was also fortified, acquiring the stone walls and towers that made it, like a number of great Russian houses (Trinity-Sergius above all), a defensible fortress as well as a monastery — a role that mattered in the disorders of the Time of Troubles (early 1600s) and after (mongol-and-muscovite history; standard Russian monastery-historical accounts). The surviving ensemble — walls and towers, the Dormition cathedral rebuilt in the later seventeenth century, refectory and bell-tower — reflects this period of wealth and building, and the monastery remained a significant and richly-endowed house through the imperial period until the secularization of monastic estates under Catherine II (1764) reduced, though it did not end, its standing.

A Prison for Notable Captives

A grim feature of the monastery’s history — shared with several other great fortified Russian houses — is its use, at times, as a place of confinement for notable religious and political prisoners. The stone-walled monastery, remote and secure, served the state and the church hierarchy as a prison. Several such associations are attached to Volokolamsk in the historical tradition, and they are reported here with the attestation noted, because the details vary in the sources.

The most famous figure associated with confinement in the Josephite orbit is Maximus the Greek (Maksim Grek, d. 1556), the learned Athonite monk and translator condemned by Russian church councils in 1525 and 1531, who spent long years imprisoned in Russian monasteries — and it is the Iosifo-Volokolamsk monastery that is named, in the tradition, as one of his early and harshest places of confinement (standard accounts of Maximus the Greek; Fedotov 1966, II). [Disputed: the place and conditions of Maximus the Greek's first imprisonment — the church-historical tradition regularly names the Iosifo-Volokolamsk monastery as the site of his initial and most severe confinement after his condemnation in 1525, before his later transfer to Tver and eventual release to Trinity-Sergius; the precise sequence and duration of his confinements are reported with some variation in the sources, and the harshness of the Volokolamsk period in particular is part of the hagiographical-historical tradition around Maximus rather than uniformly documented]. The irony — a Josephite house imprisoning the learned Greek whose criticisms touched on monastic wealth — was not lost on later writers.

The monastery is also associated with Tsar Vasili IV Shuisky (d. 1612), deposed in 1610 and carried off to Poland, where he died in captivity in 1612; his remains, after their return to Russia, are reported in the tradition to have been buried for a time at the Iosifo-Volokolamsk monastery before their later translation to the Archangel Cathedral in the Moscow Kremlin (1635) (standard Russian historical accounts of the Time of Troubles and the Shuisky reburial). [Disputed: Vasili Shuisky's burial at Volokolamsk — the historical tradition holds that after the return of his remains from Poland he was interred at the Iosifo-Volokolamsk monastery before being translated to the Kremlin's Archangel Cathedral in 1635; the detail of the Volokolamsk interment is carried in the church- and dynastic-historical tradition, and the dating of the stages of the reburial is given with some variation]. These associations — Maximus the Greek, Shuisky, and lesser figures — belong to the monastery’s standing as a great fortified house at the disposal of church and crown, and they are reported as the tradition attests them, with the cautions above.

Closure, Desecration, and Return

Under the Soviet anti-religious campaigns the monastery shared the fate of Russian monasticism generally. It was closed in the 1920s–1930s, its community dispersed, its buildings turned to secular and at times degrading uses, and its life as a monastery extinguished for the better part of the century (standard accounts of the Soviet suppression of the Russian Church; on the broader twentieth-century catastrophe, see St. Tikhon of Moscow). The relics and the cult suffered the disruption common to the period. The dating and detail of the closure and of what became of the relics in those decades are not uniformly recorded and are reported here as the standard church-historical accounts give them.

The monastery was returned to the Russian Orthodox Church and reopened in 1989, in the wave of restorations that accompanied the millennium of the Baptism of Rus’ (1988) and the late-Soviet thaw in church-state relations (standard accounts of the post-Soviet monastic revival; on the wider rehabilitation of Joseph’s reputation in this period, see Section 08). The reopened monastery resumed the cult of its founder, and in the years following, his relics were uncovered and translated and enshrined in the monastery — the act by which the second of his feast days is kept. [Disputed: the year of the post-Soviet uncovering/translation of St. Joseph's relics — the relics are reported to have been uncovered and solemnly translated/enshrined at the reopened monastery in the years after 1989, with church accounts placing the uncovering and translation in the 1990s–2000s (a translation on 18 October is the date kept liturgically; some accounts associate the relic-translation specifically with the turn of the millennium / early 2000s); the precise year is given variously in church-press and monastery accounts and is pinned here to the liturgical commemoration rather than asserted as a single fixed date]. The relic and miracle claims attached to the shrine are reported as what the monastery and the church tradition attest, not certified as historical fact (METHODOLOGY §3.5).

Relics

St. Joseph’s relics rest at the Dormition (Iosifo-Volotsky / Iosifo-Volokolamsky) monastery, the house he founded and in which he was buried, and they are the center of his cult there (Goldfrank 2000; monastery and church-historical accounts). The relics were venerated locally from soon after his 1515 burial; were disrupted in the Soviet period of the monastery’s closure; and were uncovered, translated, and enshrined again after the 1989 reopening (see the Disputed note above on the year of the translation). As with all relic veneration in the Orthodox tradition, the honor paid to them is the honor of the saint, and the wonders reported at the shrine are received as the testimony of those who report them and the witness of the monastery, not as facts this account independently asserts (METHODOLOGY §3.5; the model for this discipline is the treatment of the relics of St. Polycarp in the Martyrium Polycarpi).

The Feast Days

St. Joseph of Volotsk is commemorated on two principal days, both kept on the Julian (Old Style) calendar used by the Russian Orthodox Church (so that the corresponding Gregorian / civil dates fall thirteen days later in the present era):

9 September — his repose (1515), the principal feast (Goldfrank 2000; the church menologion). On the Gregorian civil calendar this falls on 22 September in the present era.
18 October — the uncovering and translation of his relics (the post-Soviet translation at the reopened monastery; see the Disputed note above on the year), kept as a second feast. On the Gregorian civil calendar this falls on 31 October in the present era.

[Disputed: the calendar and dating of the feasts — both dates are kept Julian/Old Style by the Russian Church and are given here in that form; the 9 September repose is securely and uniformly attested, while the 18 October relic-feast is tied to the post-Soviet uncovering/translation whose exact year is reported variously (see above). The Gregorian equivalents (22 September; 31 October) apply to the present era's thirteen-day offset and should not be projected back to earlier centuries]. The two feasts together — repose and translation of relics — are the ordinary shape of a Russian saint’s liturgical commemoration, and they frame Joseph’s cult as it is kept today at the monastery that bears his name.

References

Goldfrank, David M., ed. and trans. The Monastic Rule of Iosif Volotsky. Rev. ed. Cistercian Studies 36. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 2000. (Introduction on Joseph’s life, death in 1515, the monastery, and the Lives; the Monastic Rule and its observance.)
Fedotov, George P. The Russian Religious Mind, Vol. II: The Middle Ages, the Thirteenth to the Fifteenth Centuries. Ed. John Meyendorff. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966. (Joseph’s repose and cult; the sixteenth-century Russian canonizations and the Macarian councils; the Josephite milieu and the supplying of the hierarchy.)
Meyendorff, John. Byzantium and the Rise of Russia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. (The wider church-state and monastic context of Muscovy in which the monastery flourished.)
The Lives of St. Joseph of Volotsk — the Life by Savva Chorny (Savva the Black, bishop of Krutitsy), the anonymous Life, and the Life attributed to Lev Filolog; with the Volokolamsk Paterik. (The earliest written attestation of Joseph’s repose, burial, and the local cult; their dating and reliability are treated in Section 08.)
Standard Russian church-historical and monastery sources on the Iosifo-Volokolamsk (Iosifo-Volotsky) monastery — its wealth, fortification, use as a place of confinement (Maximus the Greek; the Shuisky reburial tradition), Soviet closure (1920s–1930s), 1989 reopening, and the post-Soviet uncovering and translation of the relics. (Cited generally; the contested datings are flagged in the [Disputed] notes above and pinned to the liturgical commemoration rather than to a single church-press figure, per METHODOLOGY §3.)
The Russian Orthodox menologion (church calendar), for the commemorations of 9 September (repose) and 18 October (translation of relics), kept Old Style. (The liturgical attestation of the feasts; the precise year of the relic-translation is reported variously, as noted.)