Martyr Jonah of Pechenga

Jonah of Pechenga was a sixteenth-century Russian priest who, after being widowed, entered monastic life at the Pechenga (Pechenga-Trinity) monastery on the Kola Peninsula and became a disciple of its founder, Saint Tryphon. He was killed during a raid on the monastery by Swedish-Finnish forces and is venerated as a martyr. He is commemorated on December 15, the feast he shares with his teacher Tryphon, and also on December 25.

According to the synaxarion, Jonah had served as a parish priest before his entry into monasticism. The Orthodox Church in America's two accounts of his life differ in detail: one relates that he was a priest at Kola who withdrew to the Pechenga monastery after the deaths of his daughter and wife and became a disciple of Saint Tryphon, settling in 1583 at a wilderness site adjacent to the monastery that later became his burial place; the other places his birth around the year 1500 in Varzuga, a Pomor village in the Murmansk region, and identifies him as a parish priest before he joined the community.

The Pechenga monastery had been founded in 1533 by Saint Tryphon, a monk from Novgorod, at the mouth of the Pechenga River on the Barents Sea, as a base for the conversion of the local Sami (Skolt) population. Tryphon died in 1583. Some years later the wooden monastery was raided and burnt; by tradition Jonah and a fellow priest, the priestmonk Herman, were martyred during the celebration of the Divine Liturgy as they were receiving the Eucharist, together with a large number of monks and laypeople of the community. The martyrs came to be venerated throughout the Novgorod region, and the Russian Orthodox Church established Jonah for Church-wide veneration in 2003.