Synaxis of the Hierarchs of Perm
Stephen, apostle of the Zyrians, who gave them an alphabet and the Scriptures in their own tongue, with the bishops who followed him in that missionary see and were killed for it.
Saint Stephen of Perm went in the fourteenth century to the Zyrians — the Komi people of the far northeast — and did what few missionaries of his age attempted: he learned their language, made an alphabet for it, and translated the services and the Scriptures into it, so that the Church they entered spoke to them in their own tongue. He became their first bishop, and the Permic letters he devised were used for two centuries.
The bishops who followed him inherited a mission still half-made, and three of them are commemorated with him on January 29. Gerasimus was killed in 1441; Pitirim was killed by the Voguls in 1455 while on the mission itself; Jonah completed the conversion of Great Perm and moved the see to Ust-Vym. The synaxis holds the four together as one work carried by four men, two of whom did not survive it.