Hierarch
Hierarch Herman of Kazan and Svyazhsk
1505 — †6 ноября 1567
St. Herman of Kazan and Svyazhsk (secular name Grigory Sadyrev-Polev) — first archimandrite of the Sviyazhsk Dormition Monastery, second Archbishop of Kazan, who denounced the oprichnina to Ivan the Terrible and was for this held under guard in Moscow until his death in 1567; the circumstances of his death (plague or violent killing) are disputed in the sources, though a medical examination of his relics found evidence of decapitation, supporting the violence account.
St. Herman, secular name Grigory Fyodorovich Sadyrev-Polev, was born in 1505 in Staritsa to a noble family. He took monastic vows at the Volokolamsk Monastery, where he worked as a manuscript copyist and was close to St. Maximus the Greek during the latter's imprisonment there. He became archimandrite of the Staritsa Monastery (1551), then abbot of the newly founded Sviyazhsk Monastery (1555), where he built the Dormition Cathedral (1558) and turned the monastery into an educational and missionary center for the Kazan region. In 1564, after the death of St. Guriy, he was elected Archbishop of Kazan and Sviyazhsk. In 1566 Ivan the Terrible attempted to elevate him to the Moscow metropolitan throne, but Herman openly condemned the oprichnina and called on the tsar to repent; for this he was rejected by the tsar and held under guard in Moscow.
CIRCUMSTANCES OF DEATH — SOURCES DISAGREE: the chronicles speak of his death "during a plague outbreak" in Moscow; however, Prince Andrei Kurbsky wrote that the hierarch was "secretly strangled by the tsar's order" or "poisoned," and the Life of Metropolitan Philip states that an oprichnik "cut off his head with an axe in his cell." Physical evidence supports the violence account: examinations of his relics in 1888 and 1922 found signs of decapitation ("two blows — one from the front severing the lower part, another from behind along the neck") inconsistent with natural death from plague. He died on November 6, 1567.