Early Life and Priesthood
Hermogenes was born around 1530 in Kazan and is recorded as having been descended from Don Cossacks. He came of age during the reign of Ivan the Terrible, in the decades after Kazan's incorporation into the Muscovite state. He served as a priest at a church dedicated to Saint Nicholas near the Kazan bazaar.
In 1579, while he was a priest there, the wonderworking Kazan Icon of the Mother of God was discovered. With the blessing of Archbishop Jeremiah, Hermogenes carried the newly appeared icon to his church. He later became a monk, and from 1582 served as archimandrite of the Savior-Transfiguration Monastery at Kazan.
Metropolitan of Kazan
At the Holy Synod of 1589, which established the patriarchate of Moscow, Hermogenes was consecrated bishop on May 13, 1589, becoming the first Metropolitan of Kazan. Over roughly the next twenty years he gained renown for his missionary work among the Muslim Volga Tatars, a number of whom were converted to Orthodoxy, and he laboured to instruct the newly baptized. He also sought the liturgical commemoration of Orthodox martyrs who had died in the conflicts with the Tatars.
Election as Patriarch and the Time of Troubles
In 1606 Hermogenes was summoned by False Dmitry I to take part in a newly instituted Senate at Moscow. When he learned of the pretender's plan to marry the Roman Catholic Marina Mniszech, he firmly declared against the alliance and was sent into exile. After False Dmitry's deposition he returned with honours, and the new tsar, Vasily IV, supported his elevation to the primatial see. On July 3, 1606, Hermogenes was installed as Patriarch by the assembly of holy hierarchs at Moscow's Dormition Cathedral.
As Polish forces pressed into Russia, Hermogenes opposed their design of placing Prince Wladyslaw on the Russian throne unless he first converted to Orthodoxy, and he resisted the pressure of the Polish king Sigismund III, whom he regarded as a threat of Catholicism and Uniatism to Orthodox Russia. In December 1610 he distributed letters to Russian towns urging the population to rise against the Poles. He blessed the volunteer forces gathered by Prokopy Lyapunov, and later those mustered by Kuzma Minin and commanded by Prince Pozharsky who would ultimately liberate Moscow.
Imprisonment and Martyrdom
For his defiance, Hermogenes was seized by Polish forces and Russian collaborators and imprisoned in the Chudov Monastery in Moscow. He was held in harsh confinement for more than nine months, beaten and deprived of food, and died of starvation on February 17, 1612. He is venerated as a hieromartyr for this witness.
Relics and Glorification
Hermogenes was first buried in the Chudov Monastery, and his remains were transferred to the Dormition Cathedral in Moscow in 1654. During repair work in 1913, relics identified as his were found in one of the crypts. He was glorified that same year, on May 12, 1913, an act connected with the tercentenary of the Romanov dynasty. The Russian Orthodox Church commemorates him on February 17 (his repose) and May 12 (his glorification); he is also remembered on October 5 with the Synaxis of the Moscow Hierarchs.
