Hieromartyr Philip, Metropolitan of Moscow and All Russia

Philip, born Fyodor Kolychev in 1507, came from a Moscow boyar family and served at the court of the young Ivan IV. At about thirty, struck by the Gospel words "No one can serve two masters", he secretly left Moscow, worked for a time as a shepherd near Lake Onega and became a monk at the Solovetsky Monastery in the White Sea. He worked in the kitchen and the smithy before becoming abbot.

In 1566 Ivan the Terrible made him metropolitan of Moscow. Philip publicly rebuked the tsar for the killings of the oprichnina. In 1568 he was deposed on false testimony: oprichniki tore off his vestments during a service in the Dormition Cathedral. He was imprisoned in the Otroch monastery in Tver, where in December 1569 Malyuta Skuratov strangled him. His relics were taken to Solovki and, in 1652, to the Dormition Cathedral in Moscow.