Veneration and Legacy

How the New Martyrs are venerated, and how their memory remains contested. This section treats the feast and the cult — the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors kept on the Sunday nearest 25 January / 7 February, the icons, and the Butovo pilgrimage — and then the still-unresolved questions the memory carries: Sergianism, the closed archives, the political uses of the martyrs, and the incompleteness of the reckoning, held honestly and from both sides.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox

Overview

This closing section turns from the history to its afterlife: how the Church keeps the New Martyrs, and how their memory continues to be argued over.

The first file, The Feast and the Cult, treats the liturgical veneration: the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia, its feast fixed to the Sunday nearest 25 January (old style) / 7 February — the date of the first hierarch-martyr, Metropolitan Vladimir of Kiev — the great composite icon of the Sobor, the general commemoration of the known and unknown, and the Butovo pilgrimage as the cult’s central place.

The second file, Memory and Controversy, treats the contested memory honestly and from both sides: the unresolved Sergianism question, the re-closing of the archives, the political and nationalist uses of the martyrs and the “tsar-redeemer” current the Church has resisted, and the incompleteness of a reckoning that the fall of the archives left unfinished — a memory the collection insists on holding without resolving.

Contents

File Description
the-feast-and-the-cult.md The Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors, the Sunday nearest 25 Jan / 7 Feb; the icons; the Butovo pilgrimage
memory-and-controversy.md The still-contested memory — Sergianism, the archives, the political uses, the incompleteness — held honestly and from both sides

See Also

References

  • Christensen, Karin Hyldal. The Making of the New Martyrs of Russia: Soviet Repression in Orthodox Memory. London: Routledge, 2018.