Martha of Diveyevo
Our Venerable Mother Martha, Schema-nun of Diveyevo
Venerable · b. February 10, 1810, at Pozhidovo (now Malinovka), Nizhny Novgorod governorate — d. August 21, 1829, at Diveyevo
Commemorated 21 August — Repose of the schema-nun of Diveyevo
Martha — in the world Maria Semyonovna Milyukova — came to Seraphim of Sarov at the age of thirteen and never went home. The elder kept her in the little women's community at Diveyevo which he was then building, tonsured her at last into the great schema, and set her among the first of its sisters; and she lived out the six years that remained to her in an unbroken silence and a labour — carrying bricks, grinding flour, digging the ditch of the community — that the oldest nuns could not match. She died on 21 August 1829, aged nineteen. St Seraphim knew of her death before he was told of it, arranged her burial with an unheard-of solemnity, and said of her afterwards that she was in the Kingdom of Heaven at the throne of God, near the Queen of Heaven, among the holy virgins. She was canonised in 2000, and her relics rest at Diveyevo.
The child from Pozhidovo
She was born 10 February 1810 in the village of Pozhidovo — now Malinovka — in the Nizhny Novgorod governorate, a few hours' walk from Diveyevo, into an ordinary peasant family. Nothing distinguishes her childhood in the record except that her elder sister Praskovya was in the habit of going to Sarov.
On 21 November 1823, the feast of the Entrance of the Theotokos, Praskovya took the thirteen-year-old Maria with her to Father Seraphim. What happened at that meeting is the whole hinge of her life and is recorded in the Diveyevo chronicle: the elder spoke with the child alone for a long time, and when they came out he told the sister to go home without her. Maria was not to return to her family. She was to remain in the community.
Six years of silence
She entered the "mill community" — the young women's settlement St Seraphim had founded by the mill at Diveyevo on the direction, as he said, of the Mother of God herself, and whose rule he gave with his own mouth. She was the youngest there and by every account the most austere.
The chronicle's picture of her is consistent and strange. She kept unceasing prayer; she did not speak unless there was a necessity, and then briefly; she took the hardest of the manual work — carrying bricks for the building of the church, grinding at the mill, labouring at the great ditch — and did it, as the account has it, while silently lifting up her ardent soul to the Lord. In four years of building she outstripped in ascesis women twice and three times her age who had come to the life long before her. St Seraphim, who saw her often, gave her instructions he gave no one else and forbade her to repeat them; the sisters noticed that he spoke of her differently.
At some point before her death — the chronicle says secretly, and the date is not preserved — he tonsured her into the great schema with the name Martha. That a girl not yet twenty should be given the schema at all is the strongest testimony to what he thought of her, and it is why she is called schema-nun in the calendar of a Church that gives the title sparingly.
Her death, and what St Seraphim said
She fell ill and died on 21 August 1829, at nineteen years old.
St Seraphim, at Sarov, is said to have known of it at the hour, before the news reached him, and to have wept. He directed that she be buried with a solemnity the community had never seen: the sisters were to be given wax candles, particular prayers were to be said, and the funeral was to be kept as for one of the great. To her brother Ivan, who came to Sarov afterwards, he said the words that have been repeated ever since — that his sister was in the Kingdom of Heaven, at the throne of God, near the Queen of Heaven, with the holy virgins. He spoke of her to the sisters as one already interceding for the community, and in his prophecies of Diveyevo's future she has a place.
Veneration
The memory was local and continuous. Martha was buried at Diveyevo beside the first superior, Alexandra, and the two — with Elena Manturova, who died in 1832 — came to be venerated together as the three foundresses of the convent. Through the whole nineteenth century pilgrims to Diveyevo prayed at their graves; through the Soviet closure the memory was carried by the dispersed sisters; and with the reopening of the convent the graves were opened and the relics recovered.
She was canonised in 2000 for local veneration in the diocese of Nizhny Novgorod, together with the other Diveyevo foundresses, and her relics were placed in the convent church, where they are venerated. Her memory is kept on the day of her repose, August 21, and again with the Synaxis of the Saints of Diveyevo.
Feast and commemoration
August 21 (church date; New Calendar civil August 21, Old Calendar civil September 3), within the afterfeast of the Dormition; kept in Russian usage — the Moscow Patriarchate, the Orthodox Church in America and the Russian diaspora — and above all at Diveyevo itself, where her relics rest. She is commemorated also in the synaxis of the Diveyevo saints. Her day falls on the same date as the older Russian commemorations of Abramius of Smolensk and his disciple Ephraim, with whom the Russian day-lists print her.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable woman)
In thee, O Mother, that which was made after the image of God was preserved with exactness; for taking up the Cross thou didst follow Christ, and by thy deeds thou hast taught us to despise the flesh, which passeth away, and to care for the soul, which is immortal. Wherefore, O venerable Martha, thy spirit rejoiceth with the angels.
Original translation from the Slavonic
Iconography
Martha is painted as a very young nun in the great schema — which is the whole point of her image and the thing that arrests a viewer who knows what the vesture means. She is shown with a girl's unlined face, in the black analavos and the pointed koukoulion embroidered with the cross, the instruments of the Passion and the skull; the right hand is at the breast or holds a prayer-rope, the left a scroll. Where the Diveyevo saints are shown together she stands with Alexandra and Elena, the three inclining towards the convent or towards the Mother of God "of the Tenderness" — the icon before which St Seraphim died. In the composite icons of the Synaxis of the Saints of Diveyevo she has a place in the front rank, next to her elder.
All of this iconography is modern: she died in 1829, was glorified in 2000, and no pre-1900 image of her exists or could exist. Nothing is stored for her here, and the entry is listed among the wanted icons on the understanding that the want cannot be supplied within the licence policy of this collection unless a free-licensed modern icon is offered by its painter.
Disputed questions
- The date of the tonsure into the schema. The chronicle reports it as having been done by St Seraphim without publicity and does not date it; some accounts place it shortly before her death, others earlier. Nothing in the sources decides it.
- The scope of the glorification. The canonisation of 2000 was a local one, for the Nizhny Novgorod diocese, and this is how the Orthodox Church in America records it; her name has since spread well beyond that diocese with the devotion to Diveyevo generally. The corpus records the local act and does not assert more.
- Sources and their character. Almost everything known of her comes from the Chronicle of the Serafimo-Diveyevo Convent compiled by Archimandrite Seraphim (Chichagov), which is a devotional compilation of the reminiscences of the surviving sisters, gathered two generations after the events. It is the only source there is, and it is not a critical one.