Martin of Turov

Our Venerable Father Martin of Turov, the Cook, Monk of the Monastery of Saints Boris and Gleb

Venerable · d. after 1146, at Turov

Commemorated 27 June — Repose at the monastery of Saints Boris and Gleb at Turov

Martin was the cook of the bishops of Turov, on the Pripyat in the Turov–Pinsk country of what is now southern Belarus, and served four of them in succession — Simeon, Ignatius, Joachim (attested 1114–1146) and George. The last of these released him from the kitchen on account of his age; rather than leave, the old man took the monastic habit and lived alone in the bishop's monastery of Saints Boris and Gleb. Years of heavy work had left him chronically ill, and in one attack he lay three days unable to move, with no one to bring him water. He called on the passion-bearers Boris and Gleb, and on the third day they came to him "as they are painted in their icon," gave him to drink, and healed him. He lived another year, told the story to his spiritual father, and reposed after 1146. It is one of the smallest and most domestic of the Russian miracle-narratives, and one of the most affecting.

The bishop's cook

Almost everything known of Martin is contained in a short account transmitted in the Prolog, the Slavonic synaxarion, and attached to the traditions of the Boris and Gleb monastery at Turov. It gives him no birthplace, no parentage and no date of birth; it gives him an occupation, and that is his whole identity in the record. He was the cook — повар — of the episcopal house at Turov.

He held the post through four episcopates. The names are transmitted as Simeon, Ignatius, Joachim and George; of these Joachim is documented in the chronicles between about 1114 and 1146, which is the only firm chronological anchor in the whole story. Turov in those decades was a considerable place — the seat of a principality and of a bishopric, and the town in which, within a generation, Cyril of Turov would be tonsured in the same monastery of Boris and Gleb and become the greatest preacher of the Russian land.

By the time Bishop George came to the see, Martin was old and no longer fit for the work of a kitchen that fed a bishop's household, and George released him from it. The natural thing for a discharged servant to do was to go; Martin instead received the monastic tonsure and stayed, living by himself in a cell in the monastery precinct — the account locates it "on the bog," on the low wet ground by the meadow.

The visit of Boris and Gleb

He was not well. The long years of lifting and carrying had ruptured him — the Russian text names a hernia — and the attacks came often. In one of them he was laid flat and could not rise. The narrative is exact about the circumstances, and they are what give it its force: he lay three days, alone; nobody came; and he was tormented above everything by thirst, with water out of reach.

On the third day he called aloud on the holy passion-bearers Boris and Gleb, the patrons of the house he lived in, to have mercy on him. And they came — openly, says the account, and in the form in which they are painted in their icon, the two princely brothers in their cloaks. They asked him what ailed him. He said he was dying of thirst. One of them carried the pail and the other poured with the ladle, and they gave him to drink; and he was healed, at once and completely.

Recovering himself, the old cook did the only thing a cook could think to do, and offered his visitors bread and salt — the immemorial gesture of Russian hospitality. They would not take it. They told him to lie down and rest, and were gone.

Repose

Martin lived another year after the healing, and in that year told what had happened to his spiritual father, from whom the account passed into writing. He then reposed, at Turov, at some point after 1146; the year is not recorded. He was venerated locally from soon afterwards, and his commemoration entered the Prolog and thence the general Russian calendar.

Feast and commemoration

June 27 (church date; New Calendar civil June 27, Old Calendar civil July 10), kept in the Russian Church and by the Orthodox Church in America, and with particular honour in Belarus, where Turov lies and where he is counted among the saints of the land. He has no proper service in general use; the common of a venerable father is sung with his name, and in Turov and in the Belarusian churches his memory is naturally kept with that of Boris and Gleb, to whom he owed his healing, and of Cyril of Turov, the glory of the same monastery. June 27 falls in most years within the window of the Apostles' Fast, whose beginning is movable; no seasonal note is asserted here.

Hymns

Troparion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable father)

In thee, O Father, that which is according to the image was preserved exactly: for taking up the cross, thou didst follow Christ, and by thy deeds didst teach us to despise the flesh, for it passeth away, but to care for the soul, a thing immortal; wherefore thy spirit rejoiceth with the angels, O venerable Martin.

Original translation from the Slavonic

Iconography

Martin is painted as an aged Russian monk of the twelfth century — grey-bearded, in the dark mantle and koukoulion, hands folded or holding a scroll — and where he has an attribute at all it is drawn from his story rather than his office: the pail and ladle with which the passion-bearers gave him drink. His proper scene is that visit: the old monk lying on a plank bed in a bare cell, and the two young princes standing over him in their fur-trimmed cloaks and caps, one holding the bucket and the other bending with the dipper — a subject occasionally worked in Russian menaion-icons and in the illustrated cycles of the miracles of Boris and Gleb, where it belongs rather to their cycle than to his.

No pre-1900 icon of Martin of Turov has been located for this collection; searches of Wikimedia Commons under his Russian and Belarusian names returned nothing. His feast being in June, the Menologion of Basil II (September–February) contains nothing for him, and as a Russian saint of the twelfth century he would not appear in it in any case.

Disputed questions

The dates. Nothing about Martin can be dated except through the bishops he served, and only Joachim is securely attested (c. 1114–1146). "After 1146" is therefore a lower bound derived from the episcopate of his successor George, not a transmitted date of death. The four names themselves come from the account and are not all independently documented.
Where he lived. The Russian text places his cell "на болонье" — on the bolonye, the low-lying flood-meadow outside the town wall — which English versions render variously as "on the bog" or "on the pasture." It marks him as living apart from the community, not in the common dormitory.
What the miracle is evidence of. The detail that Boris and Gleb appeared "as in their icon" is of some interest to historians of Russian piety: it is early, explicit testimony that by the mid-twelfth century the princely martyrs had a fixed and recognisable iconographic type, and that ordinary people knew it well enough to identify a vision by it.
The Synaxis of the Belarusian Saints. Martin is numbered among the saints of the Belarusian land, whose common commemoration is kept on the third Sunday after Pentecost. That commemoration is movable and does not belong to this fixed day.
Not to be confused with Martin the Confessor of Rome (pope, †655), Martin of Tours (†397), or Martinian of Caesarea.