The life of Peter, Aleksy, Jonah and companions
Philip, the Metropolitan whose stand against Ivan the Terrible's cruelty cost him his life, was added to their number in 1875. Hermogenes, Patriarch through the turmoil of the early seventeenth-century Time of Troubles, joined the commemoration last of all, in 1913.
Each of the five keeps his own separate feast day elsewhere in the calendar, with a fuller life of his own; this shared day exists instead to honor them together, as one continuous line of shepherds who guided and defended Moscow across generations profoundly different from one another in their trials. Their combined memory is kept less as five biographies condensed into one than as a single testimony to the office they each in turn filled: watchmen over the same city and the same flock, joined in the Church's prayer as they were never quite joined in time.
