The Feast and the Cult

How the Russian Church venerates the New Martyrs and Confessors: the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia, kept on 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 liturgical commemoration of the martyrs “known and unknown,” and the Butovo pilgrimage that has become the cult’s central place. This file treats the living veneration through which the martyrdom is kept present to the Church.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox

The Feast of the Synaxis

The New Martyrs are commemorated together in a single great feast: the Synaxis (Sobor) of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church — a “synaxis” or “assembly” being the Orthodox liturgical form for commemorating a whole company of saints on one day. The feast is kept on the Sunday nearest 25 January (old style) / 7 February (new style); when the 25th itself falls on a Sunday the feast is kept that day, and otherwise on the Sunday following (the feast of the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia, on the Sunday closest to 25 January o.s. / 7 February n.s.; OrthodoxWiki, “New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia,” and the OCA synaxarion). The dating is not arbitrary. It is anchored to the martyrdom of Metropolitan Vladimir (Bogoyavlensky) of Kiev, the first hierarch of the Russian Church killed in the persecution, shot near the Kiev Caves Lavra on the night of 25 January / 7 February 1918 (see The Martyred Bishops). So the whole company of the New Martyrs is commemorated on the day the first of their bishops fell — the feast built, as it were, on the grave of the protomartyr among the hierarchs.

The feast originated in the diaspora. The Russian Church Abroad, having glorified the New Martyrs in 1981, kept their commemoration; and after the Moscow Patriarchate’s glorification at the Jubilee Council of 2000 the feast entered the calendar of the whole Russian Church, so that it is now kept in common by the reconciled Church (on the establishment and spread of the feast, Christensen, The Making of the New Martyrs of Russia, Routledge, 2018; see The Two Glorifications). Beyond this common Synaxis, the Church keeps numerous local and particular commemorations — the Synaxis of the New Martyrs of Butovo, the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Solovki, diocesan synaxes gathering the martyrs of a region, and the individual feast-days of the named martyrs on their dates of death — so that the New Martyrs are woven throughout the calendar, not confined to the single Sunday.

The Commemoration of the Known and Unknown

A distinctive feature of the feast follows directly from the nature of the martyrdom: it commemorates not only the named and glorified New Martyrs but the whole multitude, “known and unknown,” “revealed and unrevealed, whose names are known to God.” The Jubilee Council of 2000 glorified the individually named Sobor together with this general body of the unknown, precisely because the great mass of those who died for the faith can never be individually identified (see The Priest and Lay Martyrs and The Scale of the Persecution). The feast is therefore, more than most saints’ feasts, a commemoration of the anonymous — a liturgical acknowledgement that the Sobor of the New Martyrs is vastly larger than the Church’s calendar can name, and that the unnamed multitude is venerated with the named few. This is the cult’s answer to the incompleteness of the documentary record: what the archives cannot supply, the general commemoration supplies, entrusting the unknown martyrs to the God who knows them (see The Theology of the New Martyrdom).

The Icon of the Sobor

The veneration has produced a distinctive iconography. The principal icon of the feast is a great composite icon of the Sobor of the New Martyrs and Confessors — a densely populated image in which ranks of martyrs, hierarchs, priests, monastics, and laity are arrayed, often around a central depiction of a church (in some versions the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, itself dynamited by the Soviets in 1931 and rebuilt in the 1990s, so that the destroyed and restored cathedral becomes an emblem of the destroyed and restored Church). Individual New Martyrs are also depicted in their own icons — Metropolitan Vladimir, Metropolitan Veniamin, the imperial passion-bearers, St. Elizabeth, St. Luke, and the rest — in the traditional forms proper to their rank, the hieromartyrs vested, the confessors bearing crosses. The iconography is a twentieth-century development within the received tradition: it takes the ancient forms for depicting martyrs and applies them to figures photographed in life, so that some New Martyr icons are painted from photographs — a poignant meeting of the archive and the icon (on the iconography of the Sobor, the general accounts of the New Martyr cult; the composite Sobor icon is the standard festal image).

The Butovo Pilgrimage

The living heart of the cult is the pilgrimage to Butovo. Since 2000, on the fourth Saturday of Pascha, the Patriarch of Moscow has led a great open-air Divine Liturgy at the Butovo firing range, at the memorial church raised there, gathering thousands to the mass graves where hundreds of the New Martyrs were shot (see The Butovo Firing Range). The Butovo pilgrimage is the cult’s central place because it joins the two things the veneration must hold together: the ground where the martyrs actually died, and the liturgy in which they are venerated — the mass grave and the altar in one place. The consecration at Butovo in 2007 of the stone Church of the Resurrection and the New Martyrs, in the same year as the reconciliation of the Moscow Patriarchate and the Church Abroad, made the site also a symbol of the healed Church, the shared martyrs sealing the reunion (see The Two Glorifications and Memory and Controversy). Other sites of the cult have grown in the same way: Ekaterinburg, where a great church-on-the-blood stands over the site of the imperial family’s killing and draws the “Tsar’s Days” pilgrimage each July; the restored Solovetsky Monastery; and the many local shrines of regional martyrs.

The Cult and the Renewal

The feast, the icons, and the pilgrimages together make the New Martyrs a present reality in the Russian Church’s life rather than a closed chapter of its history. They are invoked in the services, painted on the walls of new churches, and named in the dedications of parishes built since the Soviet collapse — so that the Church of the renewal has, quite literally, built itself in the martyrs’ name. This is the cult’s expression of the theology of the seed: the martyrs are venerated not as the dead of a past disaster but as the living intercessors and the foundation of the Church that grew from their blood (see The Theology of the New Martyrdom). That this veneration is also, in places, entangled with political and nationalist uses is the subject of the final file; but the cult itself, in its liturgical form — the Sunday Synaxis on the day of the first martyr-bishop, the commemoration of the known and unknown, the Butovo Liturgy over the graves — is the Church’s ordered and sober keeping of its greatest company of witnesses (see Memory and Controversy).

See Also

References

  • OrthodoxWiki, “New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia,” and the Orthodox Church in America synaxarion, “New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia,” oca.org. (The feast on the Sunday nearest 25 Jan o.s. / 7 Feb n.s.; its anchoring to Metropolitan Vladimir of Kiev; the commemoration of the known and unknown.)
  • Christensen, Karin Hyldal. The Making of the New Martyrs of Russia: Soviet Repression in Orthodox Memory. London: Routledge, 2018. (The establishment and spread of the feast; the cult and its sites; the New Martyrs in the post-Soviet church revival.)
  • On the Butovo pilgrimage and the annual patriarchal Liturgy, and the 2007 consecration of the Church of the Resurrection and New Martyrs: OrthoChristian.Com reporting on the Butovo memorial site (see The Butovo Firing Range).