The life of Thirty-four Holy Martyrs of the Monastery of Valaam
Valaam sat close to the contested border with Sweden and had already suffered repeated raids from that direction, driven as much by plunder as by a wish to see the Latin and now Lutheran faith replace Orthodoxy in the region. When the soldiers demanded that the monks renounce their faith and were refused, they turned on the community itself. Eighteen elders and sixteen younger novices, thirty-four in all, were put to death together on the twentieth of that month for their steadfastness. Their individual names have been kept in the monastery's own memory, from the hieromonks down to the youngest of the novices, though little beyond this list and the bare fact of their martyrdom survives about any one of them. The Russian Church did not formally number them among the saints for church-wide veneration until August 2000, more than four centuries after their deaths, when a jubilee council of bishops confirmed the local reverence Valaam itself had never let lapse.
