Macarius of Kiev
The Holy Hieromartyr Macarius, Metropolitan of Kiev and All Rus
Hieromartyr · Bishop · d. 1 May 1497, at Strigolovo on the Vzhishcha
Commemorated 1 May — Martyrdom by Tatars while serving the Liturgy
Macarius, Metropolitan of Kiev and All Rus (1495–1497), was killed by a Tatar raiding party at the altar, in the middle of the Divine Liturgy, in the village of Strigolovo on the river Vzhishcha, on 1 May 1497. Formerly archimandrite of the Holy Trinity monastery in Vilna, he was raised to the metropolitan throne of the western Russian lands at a moment when the Church there was pressed between the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Latin hierarchy and the Crimean Tatars, and he spent his short episcopate travelling his ruined diocese to rebuild what the raids had destroyed. He died vested and serving, having told the people to flee and refused to leave the holy table. His incorrupt relics rest in Kiev, and he is honoured as the hieromartyr of the Kievan see.
Archimandrite of Vilna
Little is recorded of Macarius before his elevation. He was a monk of the western Russian lands, and by the last decade of the fifteenth century he was archimandrite of the Holy Trinity monastery in Vilna (Vilnius), the chief Orthodox house of the Lithuanian capital and the natural residence of a metropolitan whose titular city, Kiev, lay in ruins. He is remembered in the Vilna tradition as a man of prayer and of unusual gentleness.
Metropolitan of Kiev and All Rus
On the death of Metropolitan Jonah (Glezna) the bishops and princes of the western metropolia elected Macarius, and — following the practice then obtaining in Lithuania — he was consecrated locally in 1495, the confirmation of the Ecumenical Patriarch being sought afterwards. Patriarch Niphon II of Constantinople sent the confirming letter by an exarch, with a reproof for the irregularity of consecrating before the patriarchal blessing had been received, but recognising the election; the episode is a standard example in the historiography of the difficult canonical position of the Kievan metropolia in the fifteenth century, cut off from Moscow since 1458 and living under a Roman Catholic grand duke.
The metropolia Macarius inherited was in a wretched state. Kiev itself had been burnt by the khan Mengli-Girey in 1482 — the Caves monastery sacked, the church of the Holy Wisdom desolate — and the Tatar raids continued every summer. In Lithuania the Orthodox nobility was under steady pressure to conform to Rome, and the Union of Florence still shadowed every negotiation. Macarius set himself to visit and rebuild: to consecrate churches, restore the Sophia cathedral in Kiev, and be present among a scattered and terrified flock.
Martyrdom at the altar
In the spring of 1497 he travelled from Vilna toward Kiev on such a visitation. On 1 May, at the village of Strigolovo on the river Vzhishcha, in the Pripyat marshes near Mozyr, he was serving the Divine Liturgy when word came that a Tatar band was upon the village. The account preserved in the Lithuanian-Russian chronicles and in the synaxarion is plain: the metropolitan told the people to save themselves and would not himself leave the holy table; he was cut down before the altar, in his vestments, at the Liturgy. Many of those with him were killed, and others carried off into captivity.
His body was brought down the Dnieper to Kiev and laid in the cathedral church of the Holy Wisdom. The relics were found incorrupt and glorified by miracles; when the Sophia cathedral was closed in the twentieth century they were transferred, and they now rest in the cathedral of Saint Vladimir in Kiev, where his memory is kept with particular honour as the last metropolitan of the united Kievan see to die a martyr.
Feast and commemoration
May 1 (church date; New Calendar civil May 1, Old Calendar civil May 14) — the day of his martyrdom. The feast is kept in Ukraine and in the Russian Church and appears on the American calendar; in Kiev it is served at the Saint Vladimir cathedral where his relics lie. He is also commemorated among the Synaxis of the Saints of Volhynia and of the Kievan land, and his name is invoked in the litanies of the local hierarchs of Kiev.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (common of a hieromartyr)
As a sharer in the ways and a successor to the thrones of the Apostles, O divinely-inspired one, thou didst find in contemplation the means to ascend to divine heights; rightly dividing the word of truth, thou didst struggle for the faith even unto blood, O hieromartyr Macarius: intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.
Original translation from the Slavonic
Iconography
Macarius is painted as a hierarch in full vesture — sakkos or phelonion, omophorion, and the white klobuk of a Russian metropolitan — blessing with the right hand and holding the Gospel in the left, and as a martyr he may bear the cross or the palm. His characteristic narrative scene, and the one by which he is known, is the martyrdom at the altar: the vested metropolitan standing before the holy table with the chalice or the Gospel while armed horsemen break into the church behind him. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century Kievan iconography also shows him with a view of the Sophia cathedral. No pre-modern image has been located, and no licence-clean icon of him is stored here.
Disputed questions
- Which Macarius. He is Macarius I or Macarius II of Kiev depending on how the earlier bearers of the name are counted; in the Russian and Ukrainian literature he is regularly distinguished as "Macarius the Hieromartyr" or "Macarius of Vilna" from Macarius, Metropolitan of Moscow (†1563), the compiler of the Great Menology, who is a different man and is not a martyr.
- The place. The chronicle name is transmitted as Strigolovo, Skryhalovo or Skryhalava; it is identified with the village of Skryhalava on the Pripyat, in the Mozyr district of what is now southern Belarus. Some notices locate the martyrdom "on the road to Kiev" without a name.
- The canonical question of his consecration. Sources disagree on how far Patriarch Niphon reproved the Lithuanian bishops; the letter is variously read as a reprimand accompanied by recognition, and as a straightforward confirmation. The disagreement is recorded here and not resolved.
- Not to be confused with Macarius the Great of Egypt, Macarius of Alexandria, Macarius of Kalyazin, or the new-martyr Macarius of Kios, all of whom the calendar keeps on other days.