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Biography

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Atanazy Filipowicz, venerated in the Orthodox churches as the hieromartyr Athanasius of Brest, was a monk and abbot in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the first half of the seventeenth century. He was born toward the end of the sixteenth century, conventionally dated about 1597, somewhere in the Orthodox lands of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Precise information about his birthplace and family is lacking in surviving sources. He was educated at the Orthodox brotherhood school in Vilnius, where he acquired a grounding in theology and in Church Slavonic, Polish, and Latin. Before entering religion he worked as a teacher and tutor.

In the 1620s he received the monastic tonsure at the Monastery of the Holy Spirit in Vilnius, taking the name Athanasius. He later lived at other Orthodox monasteries and became closely associated with the wonderworking Kupiatycka icon of the Mother of God. About 1640 he was made igumen of the Monastery of Saint Simeon Stylites in Brest. From Brest he became a leading public opponent of the Union of Brest of 1596, which had established a church of Eastern rite in communion with Rome. He preached and wrote against the Union, petitioned royal and ecclesiastical authorities, and urged Orthodox Christians not to accept it.

His principal surviving writing is a diary, the Diariusz, which mixes spiritual autobiography, accounts of visions, travel notes, and polemic. He traveled to Warsaw to lay the grievances of the Orthodox before the king and undertook a journey to Moscow in search of support from the tsar. These efforts, and his reputation for prophetic warnings of disaster for the Commonwealth, brought him into repeated conflict with civil and Uniate authorities. He was arrested and imprisoned on several occasions.

In 1648, amid the Cossack uprising led by Bohdan Khmelnytsky, Atanazy was detained in Brest and accused of stirring unrest. On 5 September 1648 he was taken from confinement into a forest near the town, tortured, and put to death by shooting and the sword. Orthodox tradition holds that his body was later recovered and found incorrupt, and that he was buried at the Monastery of Saint Simeon in Brest. He has been venerated as a martyr for Orthodoxy from the later seventeenth century, with his principal feast on 5 September, and is commemorated in the Russian, Belarusian, Polish Autocephalous, and other Orthodox churches. Much of what is known of his inner life depends on his own diary and on subsequent hagiography; the documentary record of his public career and of his death in 1648 is nonetheless consistent across later historical and ecclesiastical accounts.

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