Hierarch Philip, Metropolitan of Moscow

CRITICAL IMAGE CORRECTION: the previous sole image turned out to be a famous Renaissance/Baroque portrait of a European nobleman in black court dress with a large white ruff collar and tall black hat — this is almost certainly a portrait of King Philip II of Spain (a secular Habsburg monarch, 16th century) with no connection to Orthodox veneration; the image has been removed as gross contamination (confused with the secular namesake by ordinal number "Philip II"). The correctly identified saint is St. Philip, Metropolitan of Moscow (secular name Feodor Kolychev).

Saint Philip was born in 1507 into a distinguished boyar family. Leaving court service, he secretly left Moscow in 1537 and became a monk at the Solovetsky Monastery, where he performed hard labor and, from 1548, served as abbot — building the stone Dormition and Transfiguration cathedrals. In 1566, at Ivan the Terrible's insistence, he was made Metropolitan of Moscow, having secured a promise of non-interference in the affairs of the Oprichnina.

Yet seeing the brutality of its terror, he broke that reluctant silence: on March 2, 1568, in the Dormition Cathedral, he publicly refused to bless the tsar and denounced the lawlessness of the oprichniki. Ivan convened a church council against him, packed with false witnesses who accused him of sorcery. On November 8, 1568, Philip was stripped of his office during the liturgy itself, imprisoned, tortured, and exiled to the Otroch Monastery in Tver.

On December 23, 1569, on the tsar's order, the oprichnik Malyuta Skuratov strangled him in his cell, after mockingly asking his blessing for Ivan. His relics were later moved to Solovki (1591) and then to Moscow's Dormition Cathedral (1652). The Church venerates him as a fearless denouncer of tyranny.