Synaxis of the Moscow Hierarchs

The see of Moscow was not the ancient one — Kiev was — and the men commemorated here are in large part the reason it became the centre of the Russian Church. Saint Peter moved the metropolitan's residence to a small northern town in 1325 and was buried in the Dormition Cathedral he had begun there; Saint Alexis governed the principality itself while its prince was a child; Saint Jonah was the first metropolitan consecrated by the Russian bishops themselves, in 1448, when Constantinople had accepted the union of Florence.

Two of them died for saying what a ruler did not want to hear. Saint Philip rebuked Ivan the Terrible for the oprichnina from the ambon of his own cathedral and was deposed and strangled for it; Saint Hermogenes, patriarch during the Time of Troubles, refused to bless the Polish claimant to the throne and wrote letters from his cell calling the country to resist, until he was left to starve.

The ancient commemoration gathered five — Peter, Alexis, Jonah, Philip and Hermogenes. As the Church glorified later occupants of the see, they were numbered with them: Job, the first patriarch; Macarius, who gathered the Great Menaion Reader; Innocent, the apostle of Alaska who ended his life as Metropolitan of Moscow; and Tikhon, patriarch through the revolution.