April 2, 1922: St. Raphael’s remains were interred at Mount Olivet Cemetery in Brooklyn. After his 1915 death, St. Raphael’s body had been placed in a crypt in his Brooklyn cathedral, but a few years later, his successor Bishop Aftimios Ofiesh decided to move the cathedral to a new building, and Raphael’s body was moved to the cemetery. Decades later, it was transferred to the Antiochian Village in Ligonier, PA.

April 2-4, 1924:  [The following was written by Aram Sarkisian] The Russian Orthodox Archdiocese of North America convened in Detroit for the 4th All-American Sobor.  The Sobor opened with a Presanctified Liturgy and Molieben at All Saints Russian Orthodox Church on the city’s east side, but for lack of space moved downtown to the parish house of St. John Episcopal Church for its plenary sessions.

Delegates to the 4th All-American Sobor, Detroit, MI, April 1924

The 4th All-American Sobor was convened for several reasons, much of it having to do with the general turmoil the Archdiocese had experienced in the wake of the Russian Revolutions of 1917.  The most notable of its decisions is the oft-cited “Declaration of Autonomy,” in which the Archdiocese invoked Patriarchal Ukaz #362 of November 1920, in which Patriarch Tikhon gave leeway to dioceses to temporarily govern themselves when communication and regular contact with the authorities in war-torn Russia became insurmountable for normal church life, until such time as normal relations could be established.

In an April 12th telegram to Patriarch Tikhon announcing the decision, it was stated that this action was taken “as a way of self-preservation,” a somewhat imperfect solution to an intensely difficult set of questions facing the church in North America.  And, thus, the jurisdictional body which would become known as the Metropolia was formed, which would in turn receive its autocephaly from Moscow in 1970 and rename itself the Orthodox Church in America.

April 7, 1934: Metropolitan Germanos Shehadi died in Beirut. Met Germanos had come to America twenty years earlier as a visitor, raising funds for an agricultural school in his archdiocese in what is today Lebanon. But then St. Raphael, the Syrian bishop in America, fell ill and died, and the popular Germanos decided to remain in America. The Syrians splintered, and one faction — the “Antacky” — recognized the authority of Germanos. The other group — the “Russy” — favored Bishop Aftimios Ofiesh, who served under the Russian Church. Germanos’ position was pretty shaky, because his own Patriarchate of Antioch refused to bless his work in America and instead ordered him to return to his archdiocese. Germanos held out, but then in 1924, the Patriarchate sent an official delegation to America and established the modern Antiochian Archdiocese of North America. This seriously undermined Germanos’ position, and most of his “Antacky” parishes naturally switched over to the official Antiochian jurisdiction. Germanos hung around in America for another nine years before finally returning to Syria in late 1933. The 62-year-old Germanos soon fell ill and died several months later. In addition to his role in the Russy-Antacky schism, he is most remembered for two things: (1) he briefly oversaw a Ukrainian jurisdiction in Canada, and (2) he was renowned for his beautiful singing voice.

April 7, 1947: Fr. Georges Florovsky arrived in New York aboard the Queen Elizabeth. Later this week, we’ll be publishing an article by Matthew Baker on this event.

This week in American Orthodox history (April 2-8) is a post from OrthodoxHistory.org. All rights reserved. Your use of this article is subject to our Terms of Use.

March 31, 1879: On Holy Saturday, St. Innocent, by now the Metropolitan of Moscow, died. Rather than try to summarize his life in a paragraph (a nearly impossible task), I would recommend reading this excellent homily on St. Innocent by another great American missionary, Fr. Sebastian Dabovich.

April 1, 1959: Archbishop Iakovos Coucouzis was enthroned in New York as the primate of the Greek Archdiocese.

March 26, 1965: The famous cover of LIFE magazine, featuring Martin Luther King and Archbishop Iakovos, was published. The photo was taken during the famous civil rights march to the courthouse in Montgomery, Alabama. In an earlier march, a Unitarian minister who participated was beaten to death, and Iakovos joined the next march in response to the murder. Iakovos’ involvement in the King march was featured prominently in Dr. Albert Raboteau’s 2006 “Orthodoxy in America” lecture at Fordham University, the text of which is available online.

March 29, 2000: The OCA Holy Synod proclaimed Bishop Raphael Hawaweeny to be a saint. He was consecrated on May 13.

Also, a bit of a programming note: I wasn’t able to record this as a podcast this week — time just got away from me. Sorry about that!

This week in American Orthodox history (March 26-April 1) is a post from OrthodoxHistory.org. All rights reserved. Your use of this article is subject to our Terms of Use.

Clergy surrounding St. Raphael's casket. (Click to enlarge.)

On Tuesday, Aram Sarkisian told the story of a mystery photo featuring an Orthodox priest, whom he eventually identified as the Syrian/Antiochian Fr. Job Salloom of Washington, DC. In the course of his investigation, Aram noticed that the mystery priest bore a striking resemblance to a priest in an earlier image — a 1915 group photo of clergy surrounding the casket of St. Raphael Hawaweeny. That led Aram and me to start another project: an attempt to identify all the clergy in that St. Raphael photo. That photo appears at the top of this article, and I’ve added numbers to make the identification process easier.

Our idea was to identify as many of these men as possible, and then ask our readers for help. We figure that, by “crowdsourcing” the image, we may be able to get the names of every single one of the clergymen pictured.

One of the first problems we ran into was the fact that the visiting Antiochian Metropolitan Germanos Shehadi is nowhere to be found in the photo, although he played a prominent role in the funeral service. And for that matter, there are only 18 or so priests in the photo (and that includes the Russian Bishop Alexander Nemolovsky), but there were many more at the funeral. According to A. Issa’s St. Vladimir’s Seminary thesis on the life of St. Raphael, 22 Syrian priests, three deacons, two bishops (Germanos and Alexander), and an unspecified number of Russian priests were present.

So what gives? Where are Metropolitan Germanos and all the rest of the Syrian clergy?

The answer is that they aren’t in the photo, because they weren’t in Brooklyn when this photo was taken — because this photo is not from St. Raphael’s funeral. Raphael died on February 27, 1915. The funeral took place on March 7, which allowed enough time for the Syrian clergy to converge on Brooklyn. But the day after Raphael’s death, on Sunday, February 28, Bishop Alexander celebrated the Divine Liturgy in the Syrian cathedral. I’m nearly certain that the above photo was taken after this service. Metropolitan Germanos hadn’t even left Montreal for New York yet, and many other Syrian priests were only just making their travel arrangements.

So that’s our first clue: it’s very likely that all of the clergy in this photo lived within an afternoon’s train ride of Brooklyn, because that’s all the time they would have had to get there. Let’s look at each clergyman one by one, and see what we can find here at the outset.

#1: Fr. Job Salloom

Clergyman #1

Fr. Job Salloom

It’s fitting that the man who started this whole project, Fr. Job Salloom, is #1 on our list (by virtue of standing at the far left of the photo). Check out Aram’s recent article to learn more about Fr. Job.

#2: Unidentified

Clergyman #2

#3: Unidentified

Clergyman #3

#4: Fr. Michael Husson (?)

Clergyman #4

Fr. Michael Husson

Fr. Michael Husson was an active priest in America from 1902 to 1937, and most of that time was spent at St. George Church in Worcester, MA. His career encompassed a huge swath of Antiochian history in America, from St. Raphael’s consecration in 1904 through the dueling consecrations of Antony Bashir and Samuel David in 1936. In between, Fr. Michael’s parish was the first to throw its lot in with Metropolitan Germanos Shehadi’s “Antacky” faction. Later, in 1924, Worcester was the site of the consecration of Victor Abo-Assaly, the first primate of the modern Antiochian Archdiocese of North America. The above photo of Fr. Michael was taken in about 1900, so we can assume he looked a little different standing around St. Raphael’s casket in 1915. That said, Aram and I both think that Clergyman #4 looks rather similar to Fr. Michael — enough so that it could be him, 15 years later. If any of our readers has a later photo of Fr. Michael, please let us know. (And for a bit more on Fr. Michael, check out this article I wrote a couple of months ago.)

#5: Fr. Michael Ilyinsky

Clergyman #5

Met Makary Ilyinsky

In 1915, 48-year-old Fr. Michael Ilyinsky was on the staff of St. Platon Russian seminary in Tenafly, NJ. In 1935, after the death of his wife, Fr. Michael was consecrated a bishop, taking the monastic name Makary, and served as the first Dean of St. Vladimir’s Seminary from 1938 to 1944. In 1946, Archbishop Makary left the Metropolia and in 1947 became Exarch (primate) of the Moscow Patriarchate’s Exarchate of North and South America. In 1952, he was elevated to the rank of Metropolitan. The above photograph was taken slightly before his death in 1953.

#6: Fr. George Maloof

Clergyman #6

Fr. George Maloof

Fr. George Maloof was the founding priest of St. George Church in Boston, and he served there from 1900 until his death in 1920. The photo on the right is from the St. George parish website. Fr. George was recently described as “an intensely spiritual man whose only concern was the welfare of his flock.”

#7: Fr. Aftimios Ofiesh

Clergyman #7

Bishop Aftimios Ofiesh

This is an easy one. Fr. Aftimios Ofiesh was one of the leading candidates to replace St. Raphael as Bishop of Brooklyn, and he was consecrated to the post in 1917. But a large portion of the Syrians rejected Aftimos’ authority in favor of Metropolitan Germanos, creating the “Russy-Antacky schism.” Aftimios eventually created his own jurisdiction, the American Orthodox Catholic Church, which drifted to the fringes of mainstream Orthodoxy. In 1933, Aftimios married a young woman, effectively ending his ecclesiastical career.

#8: Archdeacon Emmanuel Abo-Hatab

Clergyman #8

Adn. Emmanuel Abo-Hatab

Another easy one: Archdeacon Emmanuel was St. Raphael’s right-hand man, and he accompanied the great bishop on many of his missionary trips. Adn. Emmanuel was just 25 in 1915 — far below the canonical minimum age for consecration — but he was one of the top candidates to succeed Raphael. In the end, Aftimios Ofiesh was chosen instead, and his former rival Emmanuel became a loyal lieutenant. In 1927, Emmanuel was consecrated a bishop for Aftimios’ American Orthodox Catholic Church, but two years later, Emmanuel bolted to join the Russian Metropolia. Aftimios had fallen out of favor with the Metropolia, and Emmanuel replaced him as bishop for the Syrians. Just a few weeks after Aftimios got married in 1933, Emmanuel died.

#9: Bishop Alexander Nemolovsky

Clergyman #9

Bishop Alexander Nemolovsky

In 1915, Alexander Nemolovsky was the Bishop of Alaska, yet from the departure of Archbishop Platon in mid-1914 until the arrival of Archbishop Evdokim in May 1915, Alexander was also serving as temporary administrator of the entire Russian Archdiocese of North America. Later, after the Bolshevik Revolution and the departure of Abp. Evdokim for the All-Russian Sobor, Alexander again served as temporary administrator, and was elected as diocesan primate at the 2nd All-American Sobor in 1919. The embattled Abp. Alexander served but three years in this post, and departed for Constantinople in 1922.  He eventually became the Archbishop of Brussels under the Patriarchate of Constantinople, then the Patriarchate of Moscow, and was elevated to the rank of Metropolitan in 1959.  Met. Alexander died in Belgium in 1960.

#10: Unidentified

Clergyman #10

We don’t know who this man is, but he appears to be either a deacon or a subdeacon.

#11: Unidentified

Clergyman #11

This priest may be Russian, rather than Syrian.

#12: Fr. Basil Kerbawy

Clergyman #12

Fr. Basil Kerbawy

Fr. Basil Kerbawy was dean of St. Nicholas Cathedral in Brooklyn (where the casket photo was taken) from 1907 until his death in 1937. He was married and thus ineligible to become a bishop, but Fr. Basil threw his weight behind Archdeacon Emmanuel. He had a sort of love-hate relationship with Aftimios, sometimes serving as an ally, other times as an enemy. Awhile back, I wrote about a rather amusing incident involving Fr. Basil’s beard, some rotten vegetables, and the Mayor of New York. In 1924, he made a pastoral visit to Jamaica, which is where the grainy newspaper photo on the right was taken.

#13: Possibly Fr. Ingram Nathaniel Irvine

Clergyman #13

Fr. Ingram Irvine

Unfortunately, Clergyman #13′s face is obscured, so we can’t tell for sure whether he has Irvine’s distinctive, gigantic mustache — but if you look closely, it looks like he might. From other images, we know that Irvine had a bald head, just like #13. Also, both men appear to have dark eyebrows. We’re almost certain that Irvine was present for the casket photo, given that he was St. Raphael’s English secretary. None of the other priests in the photo look like Irvine, so we’re reasonably confident that we’ve made the right identification.

#14: Unidentified

Clergyman #14

#15: Unidentified

Clergyman #15

#16: Unidentified

Clergyman #16

#17: Unidentified

Clergyman #17

#18: Fr. Joseph Elia Xanthopoulos

Clergyman #18

Fr. Joseph Elia Xanthopoulos

I’ve written quite a bit about the few Greek priests who served in the Russian Mission, but until we started this project, I had never known about Fr. Joseph Elia Xanthopoulos, a half-Lebanese, half-Greek priest who served in the Syrian Mission. At the time of St. Raphael’s death, he was the pastor of St. Mary Church in Wilkes-Barre, PA. Later, he joined the Greek Archdiocese and served at St. George in Springfield, MA for two decades. He’s a fascinating figure who defies our neat little ethnic categories, and I’d love to learn more about him.

So, that’s it: we’ve got a pretty good idea about 10 of the 18 clergy pictured in the casket photo, but we need your help to identify the other eight (and to confirm the identities of the priests we’ve already found). Next week, Aram will be back with a follow-up article, along with more information to help with the identification process. In the meantime, if you’re at an Antiochian parish, see if you can match one of the clergymen in the casket photo to one of your old parish priests. If you have old parish commemorative booklets with photographs, compare them with the unknown faces.  If you find any matches, or have pictures that could otherwise help with the identification process, please drop me an email at mfnamee [at] gmail [dot] com. We need your help!

Who are the clergy around St. Raphael’s casket? is a post from OrthodoxHistory.org. All rights reserved. Your use of this article is subject to our Terms of Use.

March 14, 1767: Philip Ludwell III, the first Orthodox convert in American history, died in London. Decades earlier, in 1738, Ludwell had joined the Orthodox Church in London. He was just 22 at the time, and was a rising star in the Virginia aristocracy. Remarkably, the Russian Holy Synod gave him permission to bring a portion of the Eucharist back to Virginia. In 1762, Ludwell brought his three daughters to England to be received into the Church as well. Of course, we would know none of this were it not for the exceptional research and writing done by Nicholas Chapman, whose articles we’re proud to feature here at OrthodoxHistory.org. Click here to read Nicholas’ first article on Ludwell, and here to read about Ludwell’s landmark translation of an Orthodox catechism. And if you find Ludwell as fascinating as I do, I would highly recommend that you invest $4.95 to download Nicholas Chapman’s recent lecture on Ludwell. (And for $9.95, you get a CD of the lecture, a copy of Ludwell’s portrait, and the Ludwell family book plate.) I rarely encourage our readers to buy stuff, but trust me: this is worth it.

St. Alexis Toth

March 14, 1853: Chronologically, after Ludwell, the most important American Orthodox convert has to be St. Alexis Toth, who was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire 159 years ago this week (most of my sources say March 14, but Wikipedia has his birthday as March 18). Originally a Greek Catholic (“Uniate”) priest, Toth was assigned to serve a Carpatho-Rusyn parish in Minneapolis in 1889. But the local Roman Catholic archbishop didn’t want Toth’s “kind” — that is, Greek Catholics — in his diocese, and the two men clashed immediately. In 1891, Toth and his Minneapolis congregation joined the Russian Orthodox Church. Dozens and dozens of Uniate parishes followed suit over the next two decades, and Toth was one of the chief advocates of Uniate conversion to Orthodoxy. He died in 1909 and was canonized by the OCA in 1994.

March 13, 1868: Fr. Nicholas Kovrigin was sent on a pastoral visit to San Francisco, establishing the first foothold of the Russian Church in the contiguous United States. It all started back in the 1850s, when San Francisco’s growing Orthodox community organized into a mutual aid society. In the early 1860s, Russian ships visited the area, and some local Orthodox children — including the future Fr. Sebastian Dabovich — were baptized by a Russian navy chaplain. But there wasn’t a Russian parish until Kovrigin came along later in the decade. His visit was precipitated by the arrival, late in 1867, of the renegade Ukrainian priest Agapius Honcharenko, who moved to the Bay Area and tried to start some kind of hybrid Protestant/Orthodox parish. The Orthodox people seem to have realized that they needed to get an actual, legitimate Orthodox priest in their city, so they sent a formal request to the bishop in Alaska, who responded by sending Kovrigin for a visit. Initially, it was just that — a visit — but later in 1868, Kovrigin was formally assigned to be the pastor of a new parish in San Francisco. Unfortunately, Kovrigin seems not to have been made of the strongest moral fiber, and he ran into all sorts of trouble, ultimately being suspected of foul play in the death of his superior, cathedral dean Fr. Paul Kedrolivansky. Kovrigin was finally sent away in 1879, by the newly arrived Bishop Nestor Zass. On a more positive note, despite many trials and tribulations (and name changes), the San Francisco parish has survived to this day, and is now Holy Trinity, a cathedral of the OCA.

March 15, 1896: Archimandrite Theoclitos Triantafilides celebrated the first Divine Liturgy in Galveston, Texas. I’ve written about Fr. Theoclitos recently: he was one of only three Greek priests to serve under the Russian Mission. Previously, he had been the tutor to the future king of Greece and the future Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. His Galveston parish was multiethnic, composed of Serbs, Greeks, Syrians, Russians, Copts, and American converts. To this day, his old parish of Saints Constantine and Helen venerates him as a holy man. To learn more about Fr. Theoclitos, read this article by Mimo Milosevich.

March 15, 1898: The future Antiochian Metropolitan Antony Bashir was born in Douma, in what was then the Ottoman Empire and what is now Lebanon. Bashir led the Antiochian Archdiocese of New York from 1936 until his death in 1966. This was the era of the “New York-Toledo” schism, when the Antiochians in America were divided into competing archdioceses (one based in New York and the other in Toledo, Ohio). Bashir was a major proponent of pan-Orthodox cooperation and the proliferation of English in church services.

March 13, 1904: Archimandrite Raphael Hawaweeny was consecrated to the episcopacy by Archbishop Tikhon Bellavin and Bishop Innocent Pustynsky. This was the first episcopal consecration in American Orthodox history. Technically, St. Raphael was a vicar bishop under St. Tikhon, the Russian Archbishop of North America, and St. Raphael’s “diocese” was actually a vicariate for Syro-Arabs. Reality was considerably more complicated, and St. Raphael basically functioned as a mostly independent diocesan bishop with ties to both the Russians and the Patriarchate of Antioch. (As he put it, his diocese was a diocese of Antioch, “notwithstanding its nominal allegiance to the Russian Holy Synod.”) He served as bishop until his death in 1915.

March 12, 1914: Fr. Alexander Hotovitzky, dean of St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox Cathedral in New York, returned to Russia after nearly two decades of service in America. He went on to suffer under the Communists, died a martyr’s death, and has since been canonized a saint.

Bishop Nicholai Velimirovich

March 18, 1956: The exiled Serbian bishop Nicholai Velimirovich died at St. Tikhon’s Monastery in South Canaan, Pennsylvania. He had first come to America in the 1910s, as a representative of the Serbian Church. After World War II, Bishop Nicholai returned to the United States as a refugee, and he went on to teach at several Orthodox seminaries in the US. I feel like I should have a lot to say about Bishop Nicholai — who, after all, was canonized in 2003 and is famous for his prolific writings (most notably the Prologue from Ochrid), but to be honest, I don’t really know all that much about the man. There are a couple of informative biographical articles online, but I should note that both are written from a somewhat hagiographic (as opposed to a strictly historical) perspective. Click here for one published in The Orthodox Word, and click here for one from the periodical Orthodox America.

March 16, 1960: The Standing Conference of Canonical Orthodox Bishops in the Americas — better known simply as SCOBA — held its first meeting. SCOBA arose from the ashes of the “Federation,” a 1940s attempt to foster pan-Orthodox cooperation in America. And while many initially thought that SCOBA might lead to the unification of the various jurisdictions, that obviously never happened. In 2010, SCOBA was disbanded and replaced by the Assembly of Bishops. The two organizations are different in many ways, but two are of particular note: (1) SCOBA included on the heads of the jurisdictions, while the Assembly includes every active, canonical bishop in America, and (2) the “Mother Churches” tolerated SCOBA, but the same Mother Churches actually created the Assembly. Along the same lines, SCOBA was a voluntary association, whereas the Assembly is an official ecclesiastical organization with a clear mandate from the Mother Churches. I realize that I didn’t really say much about the first SCOBA meeting, but that’s a story for another day.

March 13, 1965: On the very same day, both Albanian Bishop Theophan Noli and Greek Bishop Germanos Liamadis died. As far as I know, this was the only instance of two American Orthodox bishops dying on the same date.

March 18, 1981: OCA Metropolitan Ireney Bekish died. He had been the Metropolia/OCA primate from 1965 until his retirement in 1977 — so, the period when the OCA received its Tomos of Autocephaly and established its current identity — but I’ve never heard anyone talk of him as a major historical figure. Nobody talks about the era of Ireney, because it really was the era of Fr. Alexander Schmemann, who effectively led the OCA during Ireney’s entire episcopate.

March 16, 2008: ROCOR’s First Hierarch, the revered Metropolitan Laurus Skurla, died, shortly after helping to accomplish the reunion of ROCOR with the Moscow Patriarchate. Met Laurus had led ROCOR for seven years, and while he is most remembered for that tenure, the bulk of his hierarchical career was spent as abbot of Holy Trinity Monastery in Jordanville, New York.

March 13, 2011: Metropolitan Nicholas Smisko of the American Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Diocese (ACROD) died of cancer after more than a quarter-century as primate of ACROD. A year later, his position has yet to be filled. ACROD has established a memorial web page for Met Nicholas; click here to view it.

This week in American Orthodox history (March 12-18) is a post from OrthodoxHistory.org. All rights reserved. Your use of this article is subject to our Terms of Use.

Sketch of Holy Trinity chapel in Portland, OR, founded by Lavrenty Chernov. Image courtesy of St. Nicholas Orthodox Church in Portland.

March 10, 1895: Fr. Sebastian Dabovich dedicated Holy Trinity Orthodox chapel in Portland, OR. The small Portland community included Greeks, Syrians, and Russians, among others. The man most responsible for its establishment was a layman named Lavrenty Chernov. An Alaskan Creole, Chernov was born in 1848 and eventually moved to Portland. The ramshackle chapel was used for perhaps a decade, but it eventually fell out of use. In the first decade of the 20th century, the Greeks of Portland began using it for their own church, which was also called Holy Trinity.

March 5-7, 1907: The Russian Archdiocese held its first “All-American Sobor” in Mayfield, PA. A few years ago, OCA archivist Alex Liberovsky gave a nice lecture on the Sobor, which you can read on the OCA website. The Sobor was held concurrently with the convention of the Russian Orthodox Catholic Mutual Aid Society. And while it was called “All-American,” it was a purely “Russian” affair: the other ethnic groups affiliated with the Russian Archdiocese, such as the Syro-Arabs and the Serbs, were not included. That said, the Sobor was a major step for the Russian Mission in America.

March 7, 1915: The funeral for St. Raphael Hawaweeny was held in his Brooklyn cathedral. Something interesting, which I’d never noticed before: St. Raphael was apparently friends with an American named Gary Cronan, who got permission from the New York Heath Administration to have St. Raphael buried in a crypt in St. Nicholas Cathedral. Cronan reportedly built the crypt himself. (My source for this is the unpublished St. Vladimir’s Seminary M.Div. thesis by A. Issa.) St. Raphael actually didn’t rest in the crypt for very long — Bishop Aftimios Ofiesh acquired a new cathedral in 1920, and St. Raphael’s relics were transferred to Mount Olivet Cemetery in 1922. Today they rest at the Antiochian Village in Ligonier, PA. Anyway, I’m really curious to learn more about Gary Cronan.

Back in December, we reprinted Isabel Hapgood’s very good New York Tribune article on Raphael’s death and funeral.

March 6, 1921: Fr. Kallinikos Kanellas, one of the first Greek Orthodox priests in America, died in Little Rock, AR. Kanellas came to America from India, where he had been the priest of the Greek Orthodox church in Calcutta. He initially came to America just for a visit, but he fell ill and was forced to stay for awhile. He became affiliated with the Russian cathedral in San Francisco, which had a very large Greek population. He made at least one major mission trip through the country, visiting Georgia, New York, and Chicago, among other places. He was one of the first Orthodox priests to visit Chicago. In 1892, Bishop Nicholas Ziorov took over the Russian Diocese, and he released Kanellas, who then traveled to the eastern part of the United States. He eventually spent eight years as rector of the Greek church in Birmingham, AL, which was under the Church of Greece. Later, he became the first priest in Little Rock, where he died in 1921. Toward the end of his life, the Greek-American Guide described Kanellas as “a very sympathetic and reverend old man.”

UPDATE: To listen to a podcast based on this article, click here.

This week in American Orthodox history (March 5-11) is a post from OrthodoxHistory.org. All rights reserved. Your use of this article is subject to our Terms of Use.

Photo of Barbara MacGahan, 1893

February 28, 1904: Barbara MacGahan died in New York. A native of Russia, MacGahan was the widow of a famous American war correspondent, and she became a renowned journalist in her own right. She was the principal founder of St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox Church (later Cathedral) in New York City, and she played an important role in the Russian Mission until her death. In MacGahan’s day, a disproportionate number of the Orthodox in America were men. And the status of women in turn-of-the-century America was certainly far more restricted than it is today. I mean, today, we don’t bat an eyelash at the thought of a woman chairing a parish council, but such a thing was probably inconceivable more than a century ago. It was in that world that MacGahan became a major player in the Russian Mission, right at the time when it was expanding beyond its original focus of Alaska. Barbara MacGahan may have been the most influential woman in the early history of American Orthodoxy.

February 28, 1914: The choir of New York’s St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox Cathedral performed at the White House for President Woodrow Wilson. Some of the robes worn by the choir members at this event have survived, and are held at the OCA archives in Syosset, NY.

February 27, 1915: St. Raphael Hawaweeny, the Syrian Bishop of Brooklyn, died. What can be said of St. Raphael that has not already been said? How about this quotation from Rev. T.J. Lacey, a notable Episcopalian priest who had a strong affinity for the Orthodox Church:

Bishop Raphael was a master-builder. He laid strong enduring foundations, gathering a large constituency and acquiring valuable property for the congregation. He was a man of wide education and keen intelligence, a master of many languages. He possessed rare gifts of administration, and was unselfishly devoted to the spiritual and material welfare of his people. His death, in 1915, deprived the Syrian Church of a strong leader.

February 28, 1937: The Ukrainian Orthodox Bishop Bohdan Spylka was consecrated by the Greek Archbishop Athenagoras Spyrou.

UPDATE: In the original version of this post, I said that Fr. Alexander Hotovitzky returned to Russia on February 27, 1914 (so, the day before his cathedral choir performed at the White House). But my fellow SOCHA director Aram Sarkisian informed me that this was incorrect — actually, Hotovitzky was present at the White House concert, and he left for Russia on March 12. The reason for the error is that March 12 is February 27 according to the Old Calendar. We’ll make note of Hotovitzky’s departure in a couple of weeks, when we get to the actual anniversary.

Also, I originally said that the choir concert was on February 29 (the date reported by other sources), but as Aram points out, 1914 was not a leap year. The concert actually took place on February 28.

This week in American Orthodox history (February 27-March 4) is a post from OrthodoxHistory.org. All rights reserved. Your use of this article is subject to our Terms of Use.

St. Nicholas of Japan. This photo appeared in the Vestnik along with a eulogy by Fr. Alexander Hotovitzky.

St. Nicholas Kasatkin, the missionary bishop of Japan, died 100 years ago today. He was remarkably well known in America, where both secular periodicals and Russian Church publications chronicled his ministry. The official newsletter of the Russian Mission was the Vestnik, known in English as the Russian Orthodox American Messenger and edited by Fr. Alexander Hotovitzky. When Bishop Nicholas died in 1912, the Vestnik ran a two-part article on Orthodoxy in Japan, beginning on March 14. They also published a brief eulogy, which we’ve reprinted below. While no author is credited for the eulogy, it was almost certainly written by Hotovitzky, who was not only the Vestnik editor but a sometime poet.

An irreparable loss! The Orthodox Church is mourning. Her most worthy son, the apostle of her teaching, has departed from earthly life. Before the news of the decease of the Most Reverend Nikolai, the glorious light-bringer of Japan, all the small struggles and discords which are vexing the organism of the Russian Orthodox Church shrink into insignificance. “Nikolai of Japan”: you have before you the most glorious page of the missionary work of the Orthodox Church, an Orthodox pastor’s service of more than fifty years in a foreign land, and what service! He gave himself up wholly to his sacred task, and wedding his bride, the Japanese Church, he kept those sacred ties unbroken until his latest breath. A unique example! While he lived, there was no need to prove to enquirers and questioners of the vitality of the Orthodox Church, and its missionary tendencies: it was enough to say “Nikolai of Japan”, and the whole world of other creeds and other faiths became silent in adoration: for all the powers of other creeds and other faiths could not show his equal among the ranks of their warriors!

Let us prostrate ourselves before thy sacred tomb, O light-bringer of Japan, true servant of Christ! And let us pray: — Be thou the representative, in the heavenly habitations, of thy beloved Orthodox Church, and may God save her from all injuries and obstacles, and may He send forth other light-bringers, even in part like to thee to illumine the world with the light of the Gospel of Christ!

Eulogy for St. Nicholas of Japan by St. Alexander Hotovitzky is a post from OrthodoxHistory.org. All rights reserved. Your use of this article is subject to our Terms of Use.

Fr. Ilia Zotikov

One of the little mysteries I’ve been meaning to research for some time has a bit of a family connection.  This past week, I finally had the opportunity to delve into it, and the results were far different than I ever anticipated.

My great-grandparents were married on May 2/15, 1908 at St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox Cathedral in New York City.  As someone who specializes in that particular era, and who has focused a lot of research on events and figures at St. Nicholas at the time, it’s always been a bit of a curiosity as to which priest married them.  With the number of notable clegymen in and around New York at the time, and being a historian, I just had to know.  Last week, while having lunch with my grandmother (their youngest daughter, now 97 years old), I asked if she had their marriage certificate.  A few minutes later, she retrieved a rather fascinating set of documents from a file drawer, which included not only the answer to my original question, but also led me to something I think our readers would find interesting.

In 1916, my great-grandparents,who had moved to Detroit, wrote to the cathedral and requested the metrical records for their wedding and the baptisms of the three of their children who were born in New York.  In return, they received pre-printed forms designed for this purpose, with the requested information from the metrical books filled in by hand by Vsevolod Andronoff, the cathedral’s deacon, and signed by Fr. Leonid Turkevich (the future Metropolitan Leonty), then the Dean of the Cathedral.

Fr. Alexander Hotovitzky (third from left) and Archimandrite Raphael Hawaweeny (fourth from left) assisting Bp. Tikhon at the blessing of the cornerstone of St. Nicholas Church, New York City, May 22, 1901

In the record for the marriage, I was surprised to find the name of a priest I had never seen before:  Fr. Ilia Zotikov.  When I got home, I searched through the print and online sources I normally use to find information on priests, and found surprisingly little.  Other than the fact that he was in New York at the early part of the 20^th century, Zotikov seemed to have fallen into obscurity.  Then, like any crafty, 21^st-century researcher, I ran a Google search in Russian.  Dozens of hits popped up.  This is where the story became something quite interesting.

In 1922, Fr. Ilia Zotikov, like untold thousands in his vocation during the Soviet era, was forced into the murky abyss of the Soviet prison system, where his personal and professional lives were interrupted by a dizzying series of arrests, trials, imprisonments, exile, and ultimately, death.  Of course, Orthodox Americans are quite familiar with the Hieromartyr Fr. Alexander Hotovitzky, who is depicted and venerated in iconography throughout the world, and whose biography has been published far and wide.  This has as much to do with the circumstances of his various trials and ultimate martyrdom in the Gulag in the Soviet Union as his prominence in the North American Diocese during the nearly two decades he served in the United States.  Yet the same cannot be said for Zotikov, even though his life, ministry, and subsequent fate were quite similar, and intrinsically tied, to those of Hotovitzky.

Ilia Ivanovich Zotikov was born into a priestly family in Finland in 1863.  He was educated at the St. Petersburg Theological Seminary, where his classmates included John Kochurov and Alexander Hotovitzky.  In 1895, Zotikov was one of a number of Russian seminarians recruited for service as missionaries in America by Bishop Nicholas Ziorov, Bishop of Alaska and the Aleutians.  Zotikov was assigned to be an assistant to Fr. Evtikhy Balanovitch, and both were sent to New York City to start the small parish that would ultimately become St. Nicholas Cathedral.

They arrived in New York with their wives, both named Mary, on April 1, 1895 (NY Sun, 4/2/1895).  On May 19^th, Bp. Nicholas ordained Zotikov to the priesthood in the parish’s tiny house parlor sanctuary at 323 2^nd Avenue (New York Herald, 5/20/1895).  When Balanovitch left St. Nicholas in 1896, Zotikov stayed on to assist Balanovitch’s replacement, his seminary classmate Fr. Alexander Hotovitzky, who had been ordained a priest in San Francisco earlier in the year.  Together they were instrumental in both the growth of the congregation and the subsequent building of the parish’s new church on 97^th Street, which would become the cathedral of the entire North American Diocese in 1905.  Hotovitzky became the Cathedral Dean, and Zotikov the Sacristan.  It was there that Zotikov officiated the marriage of my great-grandparents in 1908, and where, as my grandmother’s files revealed, Hotovitzky baptized their first daughter two years later.

In the late summer of 1910, Zotikov returned to Russia. For most of the ensuing decade, he served in various parishes in St. Petersburg.  In 1919, he was reassigned to Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow, where, alongside Hotovitzky, he served as Sacristan of the Cathedral and assistant to Patriarch Tikhon, in a nearly identical arrangement to that at St. Nicholas Cathedral more than a decade before.  There, the Patriarch, Hotovitzky, Zotikov, and Cathedral Dean Fr. Nicholas Arseniev were on the front lines of the defense against the repression of the Church by the Bolshevik government.  Both Patriarch Tikhon and Fr. Alexander would be arrested and imprisoned multiple times in the early years of Bolshevik rule.

Metropolitan Benjamin of St. Petersburg, a seminary classmate of Frs. Hotovitzky and Zotikov, before the Petrograd Revolutionary Tribunal, June 1922

In early 1922, the Bolshevik government ordered the seizure of all ecclesiastical vessels and objects of value held by the Church.  This was met with resistance by clergy and laity alike.  The clergy of Christ the Savior Cathedral, led by Hotovitzky, were especially instrumental in resisting the order, and meetings were held at Hotovitzky’s apartment to draft resolutions in opposition.  For his participation in these meetings, Zotikov was amongst a group of clergy and laity arrested in the spring of 1922, and was subsequently sent to Butyrki Prison.

In December, Zotikov, Hotovitzky, and others appeared before the Moscow Revolutionary Tribunal.  Hotovitzky and two others were given ten-year sentences.  Most of the others, Zotikov amongst them, were sentenced to three years’ imprisonment and one year of deprivation of civil rights.  Appeals were unsuccessful, but in late 1923, many of the sentences were cut short on amnesty.  Zotikov returned to Christ the Savior, and in 1924, was reassigned to the Descent of the Holy Spirit, where he remained for several years.  Hotovitzky was left without a parish assignment, instead filling in where he was needed.

Zotikov was arrested again in June 1927.  Found to be in possession of the “Solovki Declaration,” a document issued by bishops imprisoned in the Solovki prison camp in opposition to the Soviet government, Zotikov was again imprisoned at Butyrki, put on trial, and sentenced to three years of exile in Vladimir, about 120 miles east of Moscow.  There, he became rector of a small cemetery chapel then serving as the cathedral for the entire Diocese of Vladimir following the forced closure of Dormition Cathedral earlier in 1927.  By this point in time, Soviet law had restricted the clergy from nearly every aspect of their vocations, leaving priests like Zotikov on dangerous ground as they attempted to perform even the most basic sacramental duties.  By 1929, widespread arrests of clergymen were underway.

In 1993, the Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate published an article by Andrei Kozarzhevsky about parish life in Moscow in the 1920s and 1930s, which sheds some light on this period of Zotikov’s life.  (Thе article was recently translated into English and published on the Russian website Pravoslavie.ru.)  Kozarzhevsky was baptized by Zotikov in 1918, and was well acquainted with both Zotikov and Hotovitzky in his adolescence.  As a child, he assisted Zotikov during services in Vladimir, and recalled Zotikov’s third arrest, on October 13^th, 1930, for “membership in a counter-revolutionary organization of churchmen,” that being the Church.

On October 19^th, 1930, Zotikov was convicted by the OGPU (the arm of the Soviet secret police who spearheaded the repression of religious groups) and was relegated to the notoriously brutal Vladimir Central Prison.  On October 23^rd, Zotikov was sent for execution.  Some sources state both he and Protodeacon Michael Lebedev were shot by a firing squad, though Kozarzhevsky claims he suffered a fatal heart attack on the way to the execution.   Regardless, Fr. Ilia Zotikov is considered a Hieromartyr, and is commemorated according to the church calendar with the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia on January 25/February 7.

Andrei Kozarzhevsky’s recollections of Zotikov do not end with his death.  After Fr. Alexander Hotovitzky was martyred in the Gulag in 1937, Kozarzhevsky came into possession of a few of Hotovitzky’s personal effects, including a copy of a poem written by Hotovitzky in New York during the summer of 1910, on the occasion of a “triple event:” The feast of St. Elias, Zotikov’s name-day, and his imminent departure for Russia.

By any measure, it is clear that Zotikov and Hotovitzky (and their wives) were particularly close, a bond which apparently began in seminary, yet was forged largely in America.  When Hotovitzky departed for Russia in 1900 to raise money for the building of St. Nicholas Church, it was Zotikov who officiated the service blessing his trip.  When the church complex was finished, the Hotovitzkys and Zotikovs were neighbors in its apartments.  Mary Hotovitzky and Mary Zotikov later served together on the board of the Cathedral Sisterhood.

Far away from their native land, the two former classmates depended on each other, and continued to do so after they were reunited in Russia, where they ultimately met similar fates in the Gulag.  It is no surprise, then, that Fr. Alexander Hotovitzky’s 1910 poem was “dedicated to my best friend Fr. Ilia Zotikov.”

A note on sources:  Much of the metrical data for this article, including the particular dates of Fr. Zotikov’s biography, can be found (in Russian) here.  Additionally, biographical details and a brief biography of Zotikov can be found in The Holy New Martyrs and Confessors of Central Russia (Vladimir Moss, 2009, 657-8), available for download (along with other similar works) here.

Fr. Ilia Zotikov: A Hieromartyr in a File Drawer is a post from OrthodoxHistory.org. All rights reserved. Your use of this article is subject to our Terms of Use.

Fr. John Kochurov at Holy Trinity Cathedral (Chicago Daily News, Library of Congress)

This photo, dated 1905, shows Fr. John Kochurov preaching from the pulpit in the newly-constructed Holy Trinity Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Chicago. It’s one of several great shots of Holy Trinity to be found in the Chicago Daily News photo collection, available online via the Library of Congress website. We’ll post more of these Chicago photos in the future.

Photo of the week: St. John Kochurov preaching in Chicago is a post from OrthodoxHistory.org. All rights reserved. Your use of this article is subject to our Terms of Use.

January 30, 1902: Archimandrite Raphael Hawaweeny, head of the Syro-Arab Orthodox Mission in America, began a pastoral journey to Mexico. Later this week — on February 3 — he made a brief stop in Cuba en route to Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. St. Raphael remained in the Yucatan for a month, until March 2. To his great surprise, he found not only Arab Orthodox Christians, but also many Mexican Catholics who were interested in converting to Orthodoxy. Unfortunately, this would be the only visit St. Raphael ever made to Mexico, and the missionary potential there was never realized. Incidentally, I’ve heard that the Mexican newspapers gave St. Raphael quite a bit of publicity, so if anyone reading this has access to Yucatan papers from 1902 (and can read Spanish), please let me know.

January 31, 1938: Metropolitan Samuel David, head of the Antiochian Archdiocese of Toledo, was excommunicated by both the Patriarch of Antioch and the ROCOR Holy Synod. The backstory was this: In 1935, the Arab Orthodox in America were set to elect a new hierarch who would, it was hoped, unite the long-divided factions of Antiochian Orthodoxy in America. The majority voted for Archimandrite Antony Bashir, who was duly consecrated in New York. But a strong minority favored Archimandrite Samuel David of Toledo. That minority found some other bishops to consecrate their man on the very same day that Bashir was consecrated. This division lasted until 1975, when Met Michael Shaheen of Toledo accepted subordination to Met Philip Saliba of New York.

February 1, 1928: The future Greek Archbishop (and Assembly of Bishops President) Demetrios Trakatellis was born in Thessaloniki, Greece. May God grant him many, many more years!

February 2, 1927: The Holy Synod of the Russian Metropolia (today’s OCA) created “The Holy Eastern Orthodox Catholic and Apostolic Church of North America” (more palatably known as the American Orthodox Catholic Church). This body — let’s just call it the AOCC — was led by Bishop Aftimos Ofiesh, who was simultaneously the head of the Metropolia’s Syro-Arab Mission. Whatever the intent of the Metropolia in creating the AOCC in the first place (and that intent is far from clear), Ofiesh himself viewed the AOCC as the vehicle for Orthodox unity in America. The AOCC was always on the fringe in terms of legitimacy, having been the ambiguous creation of the Metropolia, which itself was on shaky canonical footing in that era. (Only a few years earlier, the Metropolia had declared itself independent of the Soviet-influenced Moscow Patriarchate.) It wasn’t long before Ofiesh and his jurisdiction ticked off their Metropolia creators, driving the AOCC even further away from the mainstream. For all intents and purposes, the AOCC experiment ended in 1933, when Ofiesh married a young girl. However, as Fr. Oliver has recently shown, the AOCC did continue on until 1940 in the person of Bishop Sophronios Beshara, its last surviving hierarch. For a lot more on the AOCC, check out my conversation with Fr. Andrew Damick over at Ancient Faith Radio.

Fr. Nicola Yanney

February 5, 1873: The future Fr. Nicola Yanney was born in what is today northern Lebanon. Yanney eventually immigrated to America and settled down in Nebraska. After being widowed at a young age — and with a house full of young children — Yanney was chosen by his fellow Syrian parishioners in Kearney, NE to be their first parish priest. He traveled to Brooklyn and studied for the priesthood under St. Raphael, who had just been consecrated a bishop. In fact, Fr. Nicola was the first priest to be ordained by St. Raphael. Upon returning to Kearney, Fr. Nicola not only shepherded that community, but he was given responsibility for an immense territory — he was essentially responsible for all Arab Orthodox Christians living between Canada on the north and Mexico on the south, the Mississippi on the east and the Rocky Mountains on the west. Roughly speaking, he was the lone priest over all the territory that now comprises the Antiochian Diocese of Wichita and Mid-America. And he was a single parent.

Fr. Nicola was, by all accounts, an outstanding pastor. His end was a testament to his dedication: he died from influenza in 1918. Of course, that was the year of the horrible flu pandemic that killed so many millions. Fr. Nicola’s parishioners were among those dying from the disease, and rather than keep himself safe, Fr. Nicola went to his stricken people, hearing their final confessions and giving them communion. In this way, he caught the flu and soon died. It seems to me that he may be worthy of canonization. (To learn more about Fr. Nicola, read this article by Fr. Paul Hodge.)

This week in American Orthodox history (January 30-February 5) is a post from OrthodoxHistory.org. All rights reserved. Your use of this article is subject to our Terms of Use.

Fr. Jacob Korchinsky, 1916

In January 2010, I published an article about Fr. Jacob Korchinsky, who is being considered for canonization by the Russian Orthodox Church. Fr. Jacob spent many years as a priest in the United States and Canada (as well as Mexico and Australia, among other places) before ending his life as a martyr under the Soviets. What follows is that original 2010 article, with some minor revisions.

Here is an account of Fr. Jacob Korchinsky’s first five decades, from Michael Protopopov’s fascinating 2005 dissertation, The Russian Orthodox Presence in Australia:

Jakov Kosmich Korchinsky was born into a family of landed gentry in 1861, he attended the Elizavetgrad Secondary School and then a four year course to become a teacher. In 1886, Jakov married Varvara Yakovlev. Whilst working in diocesan schools, Jakov was recognized as an excellent teacher by the Ruling Bishop of the diocese, Archbishop Nicandor of Kherson and Odessa, and ordained a deacon on 8 November 1887. Whilst a deacon and still teaching, Fr Jakov enrolled at the Odessa Theological Seminary which he completed in 1895. Fr Jakov was then invited to teach in the missions in Alaska by Bishop Nikolai of the Aleutian Islands and Alaska and the young deacon and his wife set off for the Americas. On 25 March 1896 Fr Jakov was ordained priest and began his missionary work in Alaska. Within two years Fr Jakov had been awarded his first ecclesiastical distinction for “converting to Orthodoxy more than 250 savages.” In 1901, he was again recognised for building a church whilst doing missionary work in Canada. By 1902 the Korchinskys returned to Kherson because of Varvara Korchinsky’s failing health and Fr Jakov was appointed rector of the Resurrection church in Bereznegova on the Black Sea. In 1906 he was appointed rector [of] the Protection church in the Kherson prison.

After two years in the prison church, Fr Jakov reapplied to return to America and was appointed to the St Michael parish in Mount Carmel, Pennsylvania. Whilst in Pennsylvania Fr Jakov was awarded the gold pectoral cross by an Imperial Decree. On 25 March 1911, the Korchinskys were relocated to Newark, New Jersey, where Fr Jakov was appointed rector of the St Michael church and visiting priest to parishes in Erie, Carnegie and Youngstown. In the years immediately prior to his appointment as missionary to the Hawaiian Islands and the Philippines, Korchinsky was also Dean of Pennsylvania, a trustee of the Orthodox Orphanage of North America, Vice President of the Russian Emigre Society of North America and a member of the Imperial Russian Palestine Society.

And he still had another 30 years to go. Korchinsky was one of the jewels of the Russian Mission in America, one of those super-priests who covered vast territories and founded numerous churches. In 1900, he was sent to Edmonton, Alberta to become the first permanent parish priest in Canada. The same year, he visited Shandro, Alberta, and baptized 33 children in a single day. You get the sense, from reading about Korchinsky’s life, that this sort of event was rather commonplace for him. In his November 26, 1906 report to the Holy Synod, St. Tikhon wrote of Korchinsky, “He did much to convert the heathens to the Christian Faith and returned many Uniates to the Orthodox Church. He set the foundation for parish life in many places, built churches and assisted the unfortunate with his acquied medical knowledge.”

He founded churches in the United States, too. At the very least, I know that he was the founding priest of the Nativity of Christ Church in Youngstown, Ohio, in 1915. The same year, Korchinsky was elevated to Archpriest, and he relocated to Hawaii. From Orthodox Wiki’s excellent article on Hawaiian Orthodox history:

In 1915, an official request by the Russian Orthodox community in Hawaii and the Episcopal Bishop of Hawaii, Henry B. Restarick to the Holy Synod in St. Petersburg; a priest was dispatched that same year to Hawaii (with the blessing of Archbishop Evdokim (Meschersky) of the Aleutians) to pastor the large population of Orthodox Russian faithful. He establishsed permanent liturgical services in Hawaii and on Christmas December 25 (O.S.) / January 7 (N.S.) 1916, Protopresbyter Jacob Korchinsky celebrated the Divine Liturgy at Saint Andrew’s Episcopal Cathedral in Honolulu. Thus Orthodoxy was re-established in Hawaii.

While in Honolulu, writes Protopopov, Korchinsky happened to meet a group of Russian Latvians who were sailing from Australia to Egypt via Honolulu and the brand-new Panama Canal. They told him that there were Russians in Australia; not long afterwards, Korchinsky read this in the Vestnik (the official publication of the Russian Mission in America, January 1916):

[I]n Australia, there live thousands of Russian people, who are spiritually ministered to by a Greek priest who visits once a year. His services are conducted unwillingly and without a sense of piety, even though he receives a large amount of money for his services. It has also been reported that a self-styled “priest” has arrived in Australia from North America who has exploited the unsuspecting Russians with excessive fees for baptisms and weddings, so much so, that they complained to the police and the “priest” was arrested.

Korchinsky had heard enough. He wrote to the Russian Consul-General in Melbourne, who asked Korchinsky to come to Australia immediately. He arrived in March of 1916. In the months that followed, he visited 750 families and 500 isolated individuals, baptizing 16 children along the way (all these numbers are from Protopopov). But he contracted malaria due to the excessive heat, and in July, he returned to Russia. He wrote this to his bishop, Archbishop Evdokim Meschersky:

We have elected a committee to oversee church life, but my illness brought on by the excessive heat, has caused me to take to my bed and has deprived me of being of any further use… I most respectfully plead that Your Grace does not forsake the Russian Orthodox in Australia and especially their next generation of youngsters. I beg that Your Grace may raise the question of the Church in Australia at the forthcoming All Russian General Council and if it be appropriate to appoint me as the permanent priest for Australia.

The Holy Synod ended up placing Australia under the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Tokyo. Korchinsky, meanwhile, needed money. He had spent all his own funds on his missionary work. All the while, his wife and three-year-old daughter had remained in America, and Korchinsky wanted to go to them. He was given permission, and money, but then World War I intervened. Korchinsky was assigned to be a chaplain at the military hospital in Odessa, serving there from December 1916 to August 1917. From Protopopov:

Upon being demobilised from military service, Korchinsky was again faced with the problem of having nothing to live on. On 29 August 1917, he again wrote to the Holy Synod asking that he be assigned a pension, as he was so poor that he needed to live in a rural village where the folk fed him out of compassion. A second resolution was made by the Holy Synod for a pension to be granted to Korchinsky, but no documentary evidence is available to confirm a pension ever having been paid. Nor is it known if he returned to his family in Pennsylvania.

One way or another, Korchinsky’s family made it back to Russia. About his family… At some point amidst his travels, probably in 1913 or 1914, Korchinsky spent some time in Mexico City. While there, he adopted an orphaned infant named Dominica. Here is the story, told by the girl’s daughter in Faith, a Russian religious periodical, dated May 2006. The original in Russian, which I can’t read, so I used Google Translator:

Jacob Korchinsky was not the actual father of my mother, he was her adoptive father. In 1912-1916. He was the rector of the Orthodox Church in Mexico City, the capital of Mexico. There he gave the girl in foster homes, from a poor family of Spanish origin. In 1916-1917 grandfather returned to his home in Odessa, along with a girl (my mother was then year 3-4).

The translation obviously isn’t great, and the dates aren’t precise, but the gist is clear enough. (And there are more details if you follow the above link and can read Russian. Google Translator has some issues with Russian, unfortunately. To our Russian-speaking readers: if you have a moment and can do a quick translation, please let me know.)

Korchinsky stayed in Russia through the Revolution and the terror that followed. He was arrested on June 23, 1941. Two months later, like so many of his fellow priests, he was executed. He was 80 years old.

Based on all this, it seems to me that Fr. Jacob Korchinsky was indeed a saint, just like his fellow American priests and Russian hieromartyrs Alexander Hotovitzky, John Kochurov, and Seraphim Samuilovich. Korchinsky’s is a remarkable, multicontinental story which has not yet been told. If any of you have more information on Korchinsky, please email me at mfnamee [at] gmail [dot] com.

This article was written by Matthew Namee.

In Search Of… Fr. Jacob Korchinsky, Missionary and Martyr is a post from OrthodoxHistory.org. All rights reserved. Your use of this article is subject to our Terms of Use.

Tombstone of St. Raphael Hawaweeny, Antiochian Village, Ligonier, PA (click photo to enlarge)

Last week, I introduced Fr. Moses Abihider, a little-known Antiochian priest from the early 20th century. One thing we did know was that Fr. Moses was buried at the Antiochian Village along with St. Raphael, with whom he shared a tombstone. But… well, I was wrong about that one. See, before being moved to the Antiochian Village, St. Raphael had been buried at Mount Olivet Cemetery in Queens, NY. Fr. Andrew Damick pointed out to me that the tombstone may well have been moved from Mount Olivet along with Raphael’s body. If so, and unless the Antiochian Archdiocese also moved the other clergymen on the tombstone, it’s entirely possible that those clergymen are still in Queens.

I did some digging in my own files and found a copy of a June 23, 1988 letter from Metropolitan Philip to the Pennsylvania Department of Health, stating,

Please be advised that as the official hierarch of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America, I hereby authorize the disinternment of the following clergymen from the Mount Olivet Cemetery in the town of Maspeth, Burough of Queens, State of New York, and the transfer of their remains to the newly-established church cemetery on the sacred grounds of the Antiochian Village located in Ligonier, Pennsylvania.

This is followed by, “Grave No. 50: Bishop Raphael Hawaweeny (died Feb. 27, 1915, reinterred at Mount Olivet ca. 1920)”.

A second letter, with the exact same date and wording, authorizes the transfer of the bodies of Bishops Emmanual Abo-Hatab and Sophronios Beshara from Grave 52.

In an earlier document, a 1965 letter from the superintendent of Mount Olivet Cemetery to “Miss G. Hatab” (probably a relative of Bishop Emmanuel), it is noted that Bishop Raphael was buried alone in Grave 50; Frs. Moses Abihider, Agapios Golam, and Makarios Moore were buried in Grave 51; and Abo-Hatab, Beshara, and Fr. Fred Farkouh were buried in Grave 52.

The upshot being that the three bishops — Raphael, Emmanuel, and Sophronios — were moved to the Antiochian Village along with the tombstone, while the four priests (including Fr. Moses Abihider) presumably remained at Mount Olivet. I don’t know whether the Antiochian Archdiocese provided new grave markers for those priests to replace the tombstone.

Another thing worth noting: as is apparent from the photo of the tombstone, the inscriptions for the latter four clergymen — Beshara, Golam, Moore, and Farkouh — were added to the tombstone later. (Those four also died later than the first three.) Thus, the original three names were Hawaweeny, Abo Hatab, and Abihider.

Which makes me even more curious to learn more about Fr. Moses Abihider. I mean, he of all people was considered important enough to be buired alongside (and share a tombstone with) Bishop Raphael and Bishop Emmanuel. What distinguished this parish priest? Why was he deemed “worthy” to be buried with two bishops?

We’ll have more on Fr. Moses in the near future.

This article was written by Matthew Namee.

St. Raphael’s tombstone is a post from OrthodoxHistory.org. All rights reserved. Your use of this article is subject to our Terms of Use.

Father Bucko’s original research on Saint Peter the Aleut was for a conference on religion and violence on November 14, 2005.  He subsequently published his presentation as “Peter the Aleut: Sacred Icons and the Iconography of Violence”   Boletín: The Journal of the California Mission Studies Association. Robert Senkewicz Editor.  Volume 23 no.1 Pp. 22-45.  Spring 2006.  Reprinted in: The Contexts of Religion and Violence. Journal of Religion & Society.  Supplement Series 2. Edited by Ronald A. Simkins. The Kripke Center, 2007; Pp 31-48. http://moses.creighton.edu/jrs/2007/2007-3.html (PDF version – http://moses.creighton.edu/jrs/pdf/2007-3.pdf). 

Following a reference from a colleague in Finland he found the initial disposition of Ivan Kiglay in the library of congress card catalogue as:  Istomin, A. A., James R. Gibson, Valeri i Aleksandrovich Tishkov, and Institut *etnologii i antropologii im. N.N. Miklukho-Makla*i*a. 2005. Rossi*i*a v Kalifornii : russkie dokumenty o kolonii Ross i rossi*isko-kaliforni*iskikh sv*i*az*i*akh 1803-1850 : v dvukh tomakh. 2 vols. Moskva: Nauka.  The actual volume was borrowed from the Georgetown University library. To download the original deposition document in Russian, click on this link:

Peter the Aleut story – Initial testimony in Russian

To be entirely clear: This is the source from which all other accounts of St. Peter’s martyrdom are derived. But until now, it has been virtually unknown to Orthodox Christians, who have relied on much later, secondhand versions of the story. We at SOCHA have had a copy of this document for some months, but we (and Fr. Oliver in particular, who can read Russian) haven’t had time to get a translation done. We are grateful to Fr. Bucko for providing one. This initial translation was done by Mr. Gleb Coca, a Moldovian Muskee Fellow at the Creighton University school of business in September 2010. Please note that this is an initial translation only: it needs to be checked and revised by others familiar with the Russian language. But rather than wait for a more polished translation, I (Matthew) thought it best to publish this initial version, along with the original Russian account, with the hope that some of our readers would be inspired to offer their own expertise to produce an authoritative translation.

The bracketed small Roman numerals in the text indicate endnotes.

Testimony of Ivan Kiglay, port worker from Kadiak, regarding the capture by Spanish of a trading unit of RAK [Russian-American company] in 1815, [regarding] death of a dweller of Kadiak Chukagnak (St. Peter Aleut), and regarding his escape to the island Ilimena. Ross, May 1819.

In 1819 year, May, to the castle of Ross, of Kadiak Region, village Kashkatskovo, Ivan Kiglay was brought from the Ilimena Island on the small ship with the similar name, who  was interrogated  with a translators from Kadiak – Ivan Samoilov and Jacob Shelekhov, testimonies as follows: he was delegated by Tarakanov from Saint-Kentina, with others from the trading unit from Kadiak on 15 kayaks, to come to the service of Company of Tarasov, and were delivered on English small ship, named  “Foresta” to the Ilimena Island, where they were trading beavers.   The manager of this branch of the Company –  Tarasov – was not perceiving the trade as profitable and was not hoping for recovery in that island, so he decided to use his kayaks to move on other islands: Saint Rose and Ekaterina and later to the land shore of California. Because of the fact that in the Tarasov’s kayak it happened to be a hole and his Kayak started to fill with water, and because the weather was pretty fresh [cool], we landed at Cape Bay Saint Peter, were we have been kept by the weather.

On the next day a soldier came from the mission in Saint-Pedro, and told to Tarasov, the recently, on the island of Climant, 2 Kadiak dwellers ran away from Tarakanov. An award was declared for bringing them back. Later, although the weather was proper to departure for the island of Ekaterina, Tarasov decided to stay and to wait for those 2 Kadiak dwellers. On the fourth day of staying, about 20 soldiers on horses approached in silence and arrested Tarasov and all the other members of the crew [.] They treated them inhumanly, tortured a lot of people using hatchets, and to one of the Kadiak dweller from village Kaguiatskovo , named Chukagnak, they have hacked his head. After they have stolen all the beavers and their personal belonging, they were transferred to Sankt-Pedro Mission, where those 2 Kadiak Dwellers, who escaped from Climant, had been caught. Missioners and the leader of the named above mission (who’s name he does not remember), made a request to all the Kadiak dwellers to convert to catholic religion, for what they have replied that they have already converted to a Christian religion on Kadiak, and they do not want to convert to any other religion. In a short time, Tarasov and other Kadiak dwellers [crew members] were transferred to Saint Barbara. Though he (Kiglay Ivan) and wounded Chukagnak, were left in the mentioned mission, were kept with Indian criminals in the prison for several days, without food and water.

On that night the chief of the mission brought the order to convert to religion, although they did not do that, despite the critical situation that they faced. On the sunrise of the next day a religious clerk[i] came to the prison, accompanied by betrayed[ii] Indians, and called them out of the prison; Indians surrounded them, and by order started to cut (chop) Chukagnak’s fingers by articulations, from both hands and [after that] arms, and in the end cut his stomach (abdomen) [revealed his intestines], by that time, he was already dead.[iii]  That should have happened also to Kiglay, but at that time to the priest was brought a paper (he does not know from where and from whom). After reading that, [the priest] ordered to bury the body of the dead Chukagnak from Kasguiatskovo in the same place, and he [Kiglay] was send back to prison, and in a short time after that he was send to Saint-Barbara, where he have not found anybody  from his crew nor Tarasov, who had already been sent to Monterey.

Later on that autumn and winter (which will be in 1815), those of port workers from Kadiak, who run away from Tarasov in different places were found and brought to Saint-Barbara, and some of them with kayaks, and those 2 who were in the mission in Saint-Pedro, all together 10 people including Kurbatov. They were assigned to work as well as other Indians, kept for crimes[iv] in handcuffs; the agreement among all of those from Kadiak was to escape from Saint-Barbara and to get to Francis port in their way away from the land, and [to head] to Ross, but it was unclear if it will happen.[v]   

He, Kiglay Ivan, agreed to escape with Kaguiak dwellers Atash’sha Filip, decided to use other means to escape, what they managed to do, they has stolen a kayak and ran away using that, got to the same cape bay Saint Peter, where they were captured, moved to Ekaterina Island, from there to the island Barbara, and from there to the island Ilimena, that happened in a short time because of the good weather. While their arrival to Ilimena, and while they lived there, the local inhabitants were glad to accept them. They trained themselves in catching birds, called Urillas, they used to eat their meat, and their skin they used for clothes for them and for Indians. His friend [Kiglay’s friend] Attash’sha Filip from Kaguiatsk, in one year after arrival to Ilimena, has died. In the autumn of 1818 near Ilimena island appeared 2 Spanish 3-masted [big] ships, stayed 3 days and on easy wind, were coming to the land on small boats, Indians were collecting herbs and berries with good taste for them, while ship was staying, when [other] ship were approaching, or people were coming, they were hiding themselves, helped by Indians. Later a 2-masted ship came, they [Spanish] let Kiglay know that he could join them on the ship, but none of them could speak Russian or Kadiak, so he refused.

While interrogating Kadiak Dweller, Kiglay Ivan, the translator was the dweller of Kadiak region, village Misakovskii, Ivan Samoilov, by his will his son put his hand.[vi]  

While interrogating Kadiak dweller, Kiglay Ivan, the translator was the dweller of Kadiak region, village Chiniatsk, Jacob Shelekhov, who signed by himself.

Fr. Bucko wishes to note that this is an initial translation only. Corrections or insights into this translation are gratefully accepted; please send them to: bucko@creighton.edu. Once again, to download the original deposition document in Russian, click below:

Peter the Aleut story – Initial testimony in Russian

Peter the Aleut: the original martyrdom account is a post from OrthodoxHistory.org. All rights reserved. Your use of this article is subject to our Terms of Use.

St. Raphael Hawaweeny

Prior to Bishop Raphael Hawaweeny’s death in 1915, pretty much all the Syrian (Antiochian) Orthodox in America recognized his authority. This included St. George Syrian Orthodox Church of Grand Rapids, Michigan, which was incorporated in 1910. The parish was under St. Raphael, and all seemed to be well. But in February 1915, St. Raphael died, and his flock split: some recognized the authority of the Patriarch of Antioch, and others the authority of the Russian Holy Synod and its North American Archbishop. This marks the beginning of the “Russy-Antacky” schism, which divided Antiochian Americans for many years.

This split not only divided St. Raphael’s diocese, but individual parishes as well. At St. George in Grand Rapids, the priest came back from St. Raphael’s funeral and told his congregation to sign a declaration of loyalty to the Russian archbishop. Not everyone complied, and pro-Antioch parishioners insisted that their priest commemorate the Patriarch of Antioch in the Divine Liturgy. Meanwhile, the pro-Russian group tried to amend the parish articles of association to place church property under the control of the Russian Holy Synod. The factions went to court, culminating in Hanna v. Malick, a 1923 Michigan Supreme Court case.

The key question in the case is which faction — Russy or Antacky — should have control of the church property. To figure this out, the court had to determine which hierarchy — Russian or Antiochian — was recognized by the parish when it formed in 1910. The Antacky members “claim that they organized under and are subject to the supreme jurisdiction” of Antioch, “whose representative in America was Bishop Raphael of Brooklyn.” The Russy members “claim that this local church was organized under and has always been subject to the supreme jurisdiction” of the Russian Church.

The original parish documents are somewhat ambiguous. Article 2 of the original articles of association describes the purpose of incorporation as follows: “To teach and promulgate the Christian religion in accordance with the tenets and doctrines and creed of the Syrian Greek Orthodox Church of Antioch, Syria, and the Syrian Greek Orthodox Church of America, as expounded by the bishop thereof resident at Brooklyn, New York, U.S.A.”

According to the trial court judge, the articles were prepared by a local Grand Rapids attorney “after he had asked these men under what jurisdiction this contemplated church was claimed by them to be.” Similar language appears in the parish bylaws:

All persons believing in the divinity of Christ, in God the Father and the Holy Ghost, the sacrament of baptism and marriage in accordance with the articles of faith established by the Orthodox Greek Church of Damascus, Syria, shall be entitled to membership. Members are admitted by baptism and by confession of faith under the rules and tenets of the Orthodox Greek Church of Damascus, Syria. They may be suspended or expelled for violation of the teaching and precept of the church as laid down and expounded by the bishop of the Syrian Greek Orthodox Church of America, resident at Brooklyn, New York.

Now, to a casual reader, these documents seem to recognize Antioch. There’s not a word to be found about the Russian Church. But there are references to the Bishop of Brooklyn, and the Russy party used this fact to argue for Russian jurisdiction. According to the Russy group, all the Orthodox in America were under the Russian hierarchy. In fact, they expounded what is, as best I can tell, the earliest coherent example of the “flag-planting theory” for Russian jurisdiction. Here’s how the trial court explained it: “By virtue of having established in the Western Hemisphere a Russian church, and the territory wherein the church was established having been purchased by the United States, the Russian Church now claims the right to rule over and assumes jurisdiction over all Greek Orthodox churches within the United States, regardless of the nationality of the congregation or the membership of the local church.”

But the court wasn’t interested in the jurisdictional claims themselves. It’s not a dispute between Russia and Antioch, but between members of the local parish, for control over a piece of real estate. Because of this, the paramount question is the intention of the original incorporators. “If this were a lawsuit between the Patriarch of Antioch, on the one hand, and the Holy Russian Synod, on the other hand [...] it is possible that a different question might be raised.”

The case, then, boils down to St. Raphael himself. If he was under Antioch, as the Antacky claimed, then their side would win. If he was under Russia, the case for the Russy would be greatly strengthened. So the court looked at St. Raphael’s own writings: what did the man himself say about his jurisdictional position? The following quotations are from St. Raphael’s periodical Al Kalimat, and were translated for the court (brackets in original):

• “That he [Raphael] was consecrated bishop by the order and permission of Melatois, the Patriarch of Antioch.” (vol. 1, page 2)
• “Those who were consecrated bishops through his [Patriarch of Antioch] consent were his grace, Basileus Dibs, the Metropolite of Akkar, Syria, one of the Antiochian dioceses, and the owner of this magazine, the Bishop of Brooklyn, New York, U.S.A.” (vol. 2, page 95)
• “Patriarch Melatois counted the new parish of Brooklyn, New York, as one of the parishes of Antioch.” (vol. 3, pages 95-96)
• “And during his [Melatois'] administration [as patriarch] many unusual things many unusual things took place, such as the demise of several lamented archbishops. For this reason a conclave was had of archbishops, his beatitude presiding, during which conclave there were clected bishops for the seats vacated by such deaths. … Those who received the benediction of ordination into the high priesthood by the sanction of his beatitude are two, to wit, his eminence, Basileus Dibs, archbishop of Akkar, and the editor of this magazine (Bishop Raphael), Bishop of Brooklyn, North America.” (vol. 3, page 95)
• “And the territorial jurisdiction of the See of Antioch became much more extensive during the time of his beatitude, for Syrians who emigrated to many other countries still retained their spiritual relations with and continued to acknowledge and yield allegiance to their mother church, the Holy Church of Antioch, and kept firm in the Orthodox faith. His beatitude manifested the most perfect evidence of his interest in and care for them to the best of his means and ability. In substantiation of this, when the Russian Holy Synod informed him that the lot of presiding in this diocese [the diocese of Brooklyn] had fallen upon our humble self [Raphael], his beatitude hastened to write to the Holy Synod, to His Eminence Tikon, then Archbishop, and to our humble self, sanctioning the choice and declaring that he [his beatitude] had instituted this new diocese as one of the dioceses pertaining to the See of Antioch and thus it is in actuality, notwithstanding its nominal allegiance to the Russian Holy Synod.” (vol. 3, page 95)
• “Whereas, we, the Syrian Orthodox residents of Greater New York and all other parts of North America constituting our new diocese (may God keep it) are considered a vigorous branch of our mother tree, the Church of Antioch; and whereas, this branch has flourished luxuriantly during the days of the administration of our father, may his name be ever blessed, the thrice illustrious Patriarch Melatios; and whereas, his beatitude was the first to sanction and bless the establishment of this new Syrian diocese in this new world.” (vol. 2, page 18)

The trial judge observed that “at first the writings of Bishop Raphael gave to the Patriarch of Antioch jurisdiction over the Syrian branch of the Orthodox Church in the United States, and later gave expression to language indicating that all the branches, including the Syrian branch, of the Greek Orthodox Church in America, were under the jurisdiction of the Holy Synod of Russia.” Without a clear-cut answer from St. Raphael’s own writings, the judge looked at two non-Orthodox sources: Funk & Wagnalls’ Religious Encyclopedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica. The former reported that “the Patriarch of Antioch elevated Raphael to the rank of bishop” (but that Raphael was consecrated by Russian hierarchs), while the latter noted that the Russian archbishop in America “is assisted by two bishops, one for Alaska [...] and one for Orthodox Syrians, residing in Brooklyn.” The secular sources don’t seem to settle things, either.

Texts being insufficient, the judge moved on to consider actions. He observed that “the record shows but one instance where he [Raphael] was directed by any church authority.” That instance was in August 1910, when St. Raphael announced in Al Kalimat an order he had received from the Patriarch of Antioch regarding marriages of Syrian Orthodox in America. In addition, in 1901, St. Raphael wrote that he had received a telegram from the Patriarch informing him of his election as Metropolitan of Salefkias. St. Raphael declined, but the judge saw this as evidence of a relationship between Raphael and Antioch. Furthermore, according to the judge, “It is not shown in this case that during the life of Raphael the authorities of the Russian Church in any manner gave any orders to the Syrian branch of the church, or attempted in any way to direct the actions or utterances of Raphael in his relations with the Syrian Church.”

There are some flaws in this reasoning. Yes, we can establish that there was a close relationship between Raphael and Antioch, but there was also a close relationship between Raphael and the Russian hierarchy in America. It was St. Raphael who, as an archimandrite, welcomed St. Tikhon to America in 1898, and Tikhon and his auxiliary Bishop Innocent were the ones who actually consecrated Raphael in 1904. It was St. Raphael who blessed the land on which St. Tikhon’s Russian Orthodox Monastery was built, and there are countless examples of Raphael working with the Russian Archdiocese in America. The Russians themselves clearly understood Raphael to be one of theirs, and in his 1905 plan for Orthodoxy in America, St. Tikhon includes the Syrian bishop as a crucial part — while at the same time recognizing that Raphael was “almost independent in his own sphere.”

Both parties have a legitimate argument in this case, but as the judge consistently reiterated, this case is ultimately about the intent of the original incorporators of the Grand Rapids church — not about the relative claims of Russia and Antioch in America. Those claims are relevant only insofar as they help us better understand the incorporators’ intent.

In the end, the trial court sides ruled in favor of the Antacky group — that is, as best as the court could determine, the original parish incorporators intended to be under Antiochian jurisdiction. The court based its decision largely on the references to Antioch in the parish documents. Yes, those documents also refer to the bishop of Brooklyn, but the judge saw insufficient evidence to conclude that Raphael was under Russia rather than Antioch. The Michigan Supreme Court upheld the judgment (and, indeed, hardly added a word, mostly quoting directly from the district judge). The Michigan Supreme Court did note that, in light of the chaos that followed the Russian Revolution, “the precautions taken in organizing this Syrian church seem to have justified themselves.”

This is a terribly fascinating case from a historical perspective, and tells us a lot about how the early Antiochians in America thought about themselves. But what are the legal lessons we can learn? The district court judge — affirmed by the state supreme court — could not have employed “deference to higher church authorities” if he had wanted to, since the entire dispute was over which was the correct higher church authority. The judge was forced to employ something along the lines of a neutral principles analysis. Did he get the right answer? Well, it depends on the question. The judge was trying to figure out the intent of the original incorporators, and based on the language of the official documents, it does seem like they intended to be under Antioch. Were they really, in fact, under Antioch? What would the outcome be if the claim was between Antioch and Russia themselves, and actual jurisdiction had to be determined? That is a much, much more complicated question, to which there isn’t a single, clear-cut answer.

This article was written by Matthew Namee.

Hanna v. Malick: the Russy-Antacky schism in the Michigan Supreme Court is a post from OrthodoxHistory.org. All rights reserved. Your use of this article is subject to our Terms of Use.

Petr the Aleut, Saint. (d. 1815?), in June1815 the RAC [Russian-American Company] brig Il’mena took on supplies at San Francisco and then sailed south to poach sea otters along the California coast. In August, 8 baidarkas under the Russian fur hunter Boris Tarasov came ashore at San Pedro, but the Spanish authorities ordered them off. On 17 September, Tarasov landed again, and he and 24 Aleuts were seized. In 1817, Governor Sola delivered 15 prisoners to the Russians, and promised to get others who were being held at the southern missions. Those who had married California women and accepted Catholicism would be allowed to stay.

In March 1819, the Il’mena, under Benzeman, visited “Il’mena Island” (evidently one of the Santa Barbara Channel islands, probably named by the Russians after the vessel), and rescued a Kad’iak Island Aleut, Ivan Keglii (or Kykhliaia or Kychlai) and took him to Fort Ross, where the commandant, I.A. Kuskov, interrogated him. Said to be “not a type who could think up things,” Keglii said that he was among those captured by the Spanish in 1815. The Spanish priests, he claimed, had tried to persuade him and one of his comrades, named Petr (or Chungangnaq), to become converts to Catholicism. Keglii and his friend refused, so the priest returned the following morning accompanied by Indians, had the pair brought out and “then he commanded that Chungangnaq’s fingers should be cut off at the joints, and then his arms at both joints. Finally, not satisfied by this act of tyranny, he commanded that his intestines be opened up. At this last torture, Chungangnaq, thus a martyr, expired.” The same fate awaited Keglii, but was deferred and Keglii, who had watched his friend’s torture and death, later escaped with another Kad’iak man to “Il’mena Island” (perhaps Santa Cruz Island, the closest to Santa Barbara). His companion died, but Keglii lived with the Indians on the island until rescued in 1819.

On hearing of the “barbarous deed,” the Emperor Alexander I at once asked that his charge d’affaires in Madrid be instructed to make inquiries, which was done (Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Paris, 29 August 1821:4254, Nesselrode to Pozzo di Borgo). Nesselrode, I.A. Kuskov, Chief Manager S.N. Ianovskii, the venerable Father German [St. Herman], Father Ioann Veniaminov [St. Innocent], and the company historian P.A. Tikhmenev all believed Keglii’s gruesome tale, and the martyred Chungangnaq became revered as St. Petr the Aleut. However since Keglii’s story is unconfirmed by other sources, features a degree of compulsion uncharacteristic of the mission fathers, and resembles no other case reported among Aleut hunters captured by the Spanish and later delivered to the Russians, it was probably a fabrication. The priests at Santa Barbara and most of the other California missions were Dominicans, but in later versions of the story the culprits are said to have been Jesuits. Since the extermination of Indians on “Il’mena Island” by Aleut hunters led by the Russian Iakov Babin, there with the RAC brig Il’mena, occurred at about the same time as the alleged martyrdom of Petr the Aleut, discovery of additional facts on the one may help explain the other.

Excerpt: Richard Pierce on St. Peter the Aleut is a post from OrthodoxHistory.org. All rights reserved. Your use of this article is subject to our Terms of Use.

• St. Peter the Aleut Did Not Exist
• Fr. Oliver Herbel on St. Peter the Aleut
• Monday Morning Priest: Continuing the Discussion Concerning the “Martyr-Peter”
• Fr. Oliver “reboots” the St. Peter discussion
• Rebooting the St. Peter the Aleut Discussion
• Rebooted: Why I Currently Do Not Accept the Martyrdom Account for Peter the Aleut
• Is the St. Peter the Aleut story true?
• Primary sources on St. Peter the Aleut

When thinking through these issues, I think it’s also worth noting a couple of things about historical inquiry and the canonization process in the Orthodox Church, in no particular order:

• The Orthodox Church should not canonize people she knows or legitimately suspects were either immoral or fictionalized.
• Prelest, ignorance and error must be guarded against through prayerful, sober, deliberative discernment and competent, reasonable due diligence
• Local veneration can be founded on error, the same is true of purported miracles, sweet scents, visions, etc. as many a story in the Paterika tell us.
• Conciliar discernment of sanctity by the Church is required, which includes the bishops in Synod, the clergy, monastics and people.

• ROCOR and the OCA were in canonically “irregular” positions in 1980 when St. Peter was canonized.
• As has been shown in the recent Act of Canonical Communion between the MP and the ROCOR, ROCOR was always only a part of the single local Church of Russia. ROCOR cannot and could not speak for the whole local Church of Russia, definitively. Similarly, it is only the OCA’s Diocese of Alaska that has canonized St. Peter the Aleut, and a single diocese alone cannot speak for the whole OCA, definitively.

• Questioning and assessing local veneration and canonization is part of the ‘reception’ process in Orthodox ecclesiology, cf. the 1848 Encyclical of the Eastern Patriarchs, A Reply to the Epistle of Pope Pius IX, ‘to the Easterns’.
• Questioning the wisdom of local canonizations is a very different thing than questioning the reality of a St. Christopher, for instance, as the Roman Catholics have done; questioning the canonization of St. Peter the Aleut is not like questioning the canonization of a modern, well-attested to saint such as St. Tikhon of Moscow or of an ancient, universally venerated saint such as St. George.

• A lack of historical documentation does not mean a person did not exist or that an event did not take place.
• It is possible that the Church knows, for a fact, that a person is a saint while not knowing anything for sure about his/her life.
• It is possible there are less than historically factual stories circulating about a saint. Whether the person is a saint or not is a different issue than whether stories about him are literally factual.
• Lack of documentary evidence from centuries ago, from illiterate peoples, from frontiers, from climates that poorly preserve documents, etc. are different than a lack of documentary evidence closer to our age, in places and times with a profusion of surviving documentation, from literate peoples, etc.
• While St. Peter’s world may have butted up against highly literate, documentary cultures (Russian, Spanish) in 19th century California, it can also be said that the Mission country of Alta California and its Channel Islands up through Russian Alaska should be treated more like a centuries-past, wild frontier when assessing available evidence.
• When assessing the canonization of a 19th-century, frontier saint such as St. Peter the Aleut, we should keep in mind the same criteria we use when assessing ancient hagiographical writings surrounding St. George and the dragon, St. Mary of Egypt, non-Biblical Marian Feasts, etc.

• Poetic license is a facet of Orthodox hymnography. For instance, there are innumerable hymns that tell us (“literally”) that Mary said X and the Gabriel said Y and then, etc. Literally speaking, these conversations did not happen; however, iconically and poetically, they tell us something important – especially from the perspective of the Eternal Now, “Today”. (See pp. vii, x-xii in The Life of the Virgin Mary, The Theotokos [Holy Apostles Convent, 2006].)
• We should not be too quick to dismiss such stories as untrue ‘legends’, ‘fables’ and ‘myths’. We must be careful not to assume that pre-modern ways of viewing the world, speaking of the world, etc. are inherently inferior and unreliable when compared to modern/post-modern, materialistic ways of thinking and speaking. There is a paucity of non-literal, non-scientific language in our day; this was not the case in centuries and millenia past in more aural and oral, less literate cultures.
• Hagiography is not simply myth and legend, neither is historical fact the most true portraiture of sanctity; similarly, icons show us not simply historical characters and events as they were on earth in the flesh, but as they are now, transformed by God’s glory – as they were then, too, spiritually. Spiritual time and space are in the eternal Present, the Now, the “Today” of iconography, hymnography, liturgy and prophecy; and this can truthfully elide historical events with events from intervening centuries (as well as ‘interpolated’ theology, e.g., Nicene, Chalcedonian or Palamite formulae), together with present and future events. We are told something more than bare , historical facts in hagiography, which is why less than literal historical events remain in Orthodox hagiography, hymnography, etc. unlike in the RCC post-Vatican II.

• All the historian can do in the case of a poorly attested to event or person is make a case for the likelihood (or not) of existence and veracity. That is, the historian assigns probability regarding the facts surrounding a person or event.
• Probability is not the proper, primary determiner in deciding whether to canonize or not.
• However, evidence and its lack must be given serious consideration prior to canonization due to the ever present danger in sinful humanity of prelest, ignorance, error and overreach.

• Matthew Namee identifies a number of different areas of research in the St. Peter story: the historical (what really happened?), the historiographical (how has he been viewed by people over time?) and the ecclesiastical (how do/should canonizations work?).
• I would underline the importance of the historical question (what really happened?) to the past-tense ecclesiastical question (how and why did this particular canonization take place when it did? in both OCA Alaska and ROCOR?)

What I appreciate about the historical investigation and assessment of both Archbishop Arseny (Chagovtsov) of Winnipeg and St. Peter the Aleut for universal veneration is the enunciation, enumeration and assessment of reasons we may want to consider not formally canonizing these candidates sainthood. We shouldn’t simply decide someone should be canonized and then develop a case for their canonization – especially if this includes ignoring evidence that contradicts their sanctity (or existence). While I think some have overstated the case to be made against St. Peter’s existence based on the evidence available, I expect historians to grant significant weight to the tools of their academic discipline. As stated above, probability is often the best historical inquiry can do, and academic probability alone must not be given precedent over established Tradition. Since Archbishop Arseny and St. Peter the Aleut have only been canonized or venerated locally, as stated above, it is the Church’s duty to conduct appropriate, competent and reasonable due diligence into whether two new saints should be put forward for universal veneration. The Church is in need of those who will play “devil’s advocate”; She is in need of those who will raise potential concerns that could come back to embarrass the Church. Concerns about St. Peter have been whispered for years, and a modest inquiry into Archbishop Arseny quickly raised questions that should have been addressed far earlier in the canonization process. The informal, almost ad hoc nature of the Orthodox canonization process with its lack of formal criteria and procedure is perhaps too easily prone to misuse and/or prelest – or the perception of such. If a friendly “devil’s advocate” doesn’t raise all of the questions that can be raised, I assure you other, less friendly critics will. “For nothing is secret, that shall not be made manifest; neither [any thing] hid, that shall not be known and come abroad.” (Luke 8:17)

“Sober, deliberative discernment is required” – which includes historical investigation and assessment – so the Orthodox Church does “not canonize people she knows or legitimately suspects were either immoral or fictionalized.” Our saints are canonized because they were and are living canons – literally “rules” – for us to live by. The Church should do all it can to ensure Her “canonized” measures are true.

This article was written by Christopher Orr.

Guest article on St. Peter the Aleut is a post from OrthodoxHistory.org. All rights reserved. Your use of this article is subject to our Terms of Use.

1. The 1819 transcript from the deposition of Keglii Ivan, the only known eyewitness to St. Peter’s martyrdom.
2. The 1820 report of Russian official Simeon Yanovsky to his superiors in St. Petersburg.
3. The 1820 report of the head of the Russian-American Company to the Tsar.
4. The 1865 letter of Yanovsky to the abbot of Valaam Monastery.

We don’t yet have a copy of the 1819 deposition. The 1865 Yanovsky letter has been widely circulated, but is almost certainly the least reliable of the four sources. That leaves the two 1820 accounts, which I will reprint here. I have taken them from a paper by Jesuit priest Raymond A. Bucko.

First, the February 15, 1820 Yanovsky report:

Here is an example of the inhumanity and ignorance of the Spanish clergy: In June 1815, on the coast of California near the Mission San Pedro, they seized 15 baidarkas of Kadiak men under Tarasov, of whom two Kadiaks fled to Il’men Island (possibly a Russian name for San Nicolas Island – Ed.) where one of them died, and the other, Keglii Ivan, lived with the natives of this island until by chance the Russian-American Company brig Il’men came in March, 1819, when he appeared before the commander of the vessel, Mr. Banzeman, and was taken to Fort Ross. I enclose the original testimony of this Aleut taken by Mr. Kuskov. He has now been sent here on the brig Il’men and tells me the same thing. He is not a type who could think up things. The Spanish tortured his unfortunate comrade, who until the very end replied to his torturer that he was a Christian and wanted no other faith, and with these words he died. One must note that this victim though baptized like the others was not taught Christianity, probably did not even know the dogmas of the faith except God the Father, Son and the Holy Ghost. I suggest that the Government intervene so that the Spanish do not do the same with the rest. But we have to keep in mind that the colonies cannot get along without grain from California.

Here is the report from the main administrator of the Russian-American Company, sent to Tsar Alexander I “sometime before December 20, 1820″:

A Company promyshlennick, a native of the island of Kodiak by the name of Kykhklai, who had been taken prisoner by the Spaniards in 1815 and returned to our settlement at Ross and then to the headquarters of the colony on Sitka Island in 1819, gave the following account of inhuman treatment by the Spaniards of one of the Company promyshlenniks.

In 1815 a Company servitor named (Boris) Tarasov was on Ilmen Island, which did not belong to any nation. He was the leader of a group of promyshlenniks who were there to hunt. Since they were unsuccessful there they decided to set out with fifteen dependent islanders from our Kodiak colony to go to the other islands, Santa Rosa and Ekaterina (Catalina?). During the voyage his baidarka began to leak, and he had to proceed to the coast of California. They stopped at the bay on Cabo San Pedro, where bad weather detained them until the next day. While they were there a Spanish soldier came to them from the mission of San Pedro and informed Tarasov that in exchange for some gifts, he would bring to him two of our Kodiak men who had previously run off from another such hunting party and were presently in the mission.

When the soldier left, although the weather was calmer and they could proceed on their projected route, the desire to see and to free their fellow islanders persuaded them to remain there longer. On the fourth day of their stay they were suddenly attacked by some 20 armed horsemen, who tied up all of our people and wounded many of them with their sabers. One of the Kodiak islanders named Chunagnak was wounded in the head. The attackers looted all their possessions and all the Company trade goods. The prisoners were then taken to the mission of San Pedro where they actually did find the two Kodiak islanders who had fled from the island of Clement from another party of partisans. When they reached the mission, a missionary who was head of the mission wanted them to accept the Catholic faith. The prisoners replied that they had already accepted the Greek Christian religion and did not wish to change. Some time later Tarasov and almost all the Kodiak people were taken to Santa Barbara. Only two of them, Kykhklai and the wounded Chunagnak, were thrown into prison with the Indians who were being held. They suffered for several days without food or drink.

One night the head of the mission sent the runaway Kodiak islanders with a second order for them to accept the Catholic faith, but again they remained steadfast in their own faith.

At dawn a cleric went to the prison, accompanied by Indians. When the prisoners were brought out, he ordered the Indians to encircle them. Then he ordered the Indians to cut off the fingers from both hands of the above mentioned Chunagnak, then to cut off both his hands; finally, not satisfied with this tyranny, he gave orders that Chunagnak be disemboweled.

Tortured in this manner, Chunagnak breathed his last after the final procedure. The same punishment would have awaited the other Kodiak, Kykhklai, had it not been for the fact that the cleric received a timely piece of paper. When he read it, he ordered that the man who had been killed be buried, and that Kykhklai be returned to prison; several days later they sent him to Santa Barbara. There was not one of his comrades there who had been taken prisoner with him. All of them had been sent off to Monterey. Kykhklai was assigned to the same work as other Company promyshlenniks who had been taken prisoner by the Spanish.

Wanting to escape from a life of such torture, Kykhklai and another man conceived the idea of breaking away. They stole a baidarka and went in to the bay on Cabo San Pedro, and from there to the island of Catalina, then to [Santa] Barbara [Island] and finally to Ilmen, where one of them died and where Kykhklai was taken aboard the Company brig Ilmen, which had come to the island and then went to the Ross settlement. The others who had been taken prisoner at the same time were freed on the insistence of our captains Hagemeister and Kotzebue.

This incident, just one of many, is a striking example of the inhuman way in which the Spanish treat Russian promyshlenniks. Many who had previously been in their captivity were so exhausted with labor and so abused from beatings that they will carry the results with them to the grave. The suffering inflicted on the poor Indians is impossible to conceive without shuddering. Not only do they not consider the Indians human beings, they consider them below animals. The Spanish take great pleasure in beating innocent Indians then bragging about it to other Spaniards.

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Fr. Oliver “reboots” the St. Peter discussion is a post from OrthodoxHistory.org. All rights reserved. Your use of this article is subject to our Terms of Use.

I have to say, I have never been more indecisive about an American Orthodox historical matter than I have with St. Peter the Aleut. I honestly do not know whether he existed or not, and if he existed, whether his martyrdom story is true. The past few days have really forced me to reevaluate my view of St. Peter. When I first read Fr. Oliver’s article, my reaction was, “Gosh, that’s a little bit bold, but I tend to agree that St. Peter’s martyrdom story is a fiction.” Then I read all the reactions — and boy, were there reactions. A lot of people made a lot of compelling comments, on both sides. Some of those commenters are friends of mine.

And in the end, my mind was changed. No, I haven’t moved from “he probably didn’t exist” to “he definitely existed,” but I’ve come back to the middle. I am now an agnostic, as far as St. Peter the Aleut is concerned: I just do not know.

What to do, then? It might be worthwhile to revisit Fr. Oliver’s original six arguments against St. Peter’s existence, and discuss their weaknesses. I’ll summarize them, but I would highly recommend that you go read his original article if you haven’t already.

1. Unlike so many Alaskan Orthodox stories (e.g. St. Juvenaly), the St. Peter story has no supporting oral tradition.

At first blush, this seems like a big problem, given the centrality of oral tradition in Native Alaskan culture. Then again, St. Peter is a lot different than, say, St. Juvenaly, whose martyrdom was witnessed by a whole village and was considered a momentous event in their history. The communal memory was preserved through oral tradition, but in St. Peter’s case, there is no communal memory — just a single eyewitness. Even assuming word of his martyrdom eventually reached St. Peter’s village, it would have been at least five years (and probably more) after anyone had last seen him. And unless the eyewitness himself was from the same village, or visited it and told his story, it’s possible that the villagers never actually heard it. I don’t think the lack of oral history is damning, in this case.

2. Fr. Michael Oleksa virtually ignores St. Peter’s martyrdom in his published work on Alaskan Orthodox history.

It’s true — as far as I’m aware, Fr. Michael’s only published reference to St. Peter is a passing mention in Alaskan Missionary Spirituality. But it’s just as true that Fr. Michael has spoken at length about St. Peter in public lectures, and he has reportedly theorized that Spanish government officials, rather than Roman Catholic missionaries, were responsible for St. Peter’s death. This really doesn’t score any points against St. Peter’s story.

3. There are no corroborating accounts of Spanish-Russian violence in California around this time, or accounts of Spaniards torturing natives to convert them to Roman Catholicism.

Well… not exactly. One of the best articles on St. Peterwas written by a Jesuit priest, Raymond Bucko, who himself seriously questions the martyrdom story. But in Bucko’s article, he does point out that part of the St. Peter story is true — there was an 1815 Spanish raid on a Russian-American Company ship, and Native Alaskans on board were taken into Spanish captivity. Also, I think it’s premature to say that there are no corroborating accounts. Only a few researchers have paid even the most cursory attention to St. Peter’s story, and it seems to me that we need to do a thorough check of the Spanish records before we can say that no corroborating accounts exist. At this point, we can merely say that no corroborating accounts of the martyrdom are known to exist.

4. Roman Catholic evidence contradicts the martyrdom accounts.

In support of this claim, Fr. Oliver cites an 1816 letter from one Roman Catholic mission priest to another. This source, which also comes from the Bucko article, suggests that the Roman Catholic approach to Native Alaskan captives was one of relative tolerance and indifference, rather than persecution. It seems to contradict the idea that the missionaries would torture an Alaskan Orthodox prisoner in an effort to convert him to Catholicism.

The problem here is, this is but one piece of evidence. Someone needs to dig into the archives of both the Catholic missions and the secular Spanish authorities to determine how they treated Native Alaskan captives. If we can establish a pattern of tolerant behavior, it does undermine the idea that St. Peter was martyred by Catholic missionaries. But that gets to the bigger problem: we need to comb the Spanish archives for evidence. This 1816 letter, while helpful, is hardly definitive.

5. There is no evidence that St. Peter and his alleged persecutors could converse in the same language, undermining the accounts of an exchange between them.

Well, okay, but how much of an exchange was there, really? The two extant 1820 accounts (one by the Russian official Yanovsky and one by the administrator of the Russian-American Company) say nothing about a lengthy exchange between St. Peter and the Spaniards. They merely tell us that Peter was told to accept Roman Catholic baptism, and he refused. This would be easy enough to communicate, even if the two parties couldn’t understand each other’s words. But there’s more: in the most comprehensive of the 1820 accounts, we are told that the Spanish missionaries used runaway Kodiak Islanders as intermediaries when dealing with St. Peter and his companion. So St. Peter may very well have been able to understand his captors, and they him.

6. The accounts of St. Peter’s martyrdom are “highly suspect.”

There are four known accounts of the martyrdom, all stemming from the same eyewitness testimony:

1. The transcript of the deposition of the purported eyewitness, taken by the Russian official Kuskov. I don’t know anyone who has ever seen this account, although I’ve heard that it was published in Russian a few years ago. See the postscript at the bottom of this article for the possible references.
2. Yanovsky’s report dated 2/15/1820, which gave a very brief summary of the martyrdom story. The summary was brief because, according to the letter, Yanovsky also enclosed the deposition transcript. Yanovsky also notes that, after the eyewitness was deposed, he was sent to Yanovsky. Having interviewed the man himself, Yanovsky concluded, “He is not the type who could think up things.” Also — and this will be of interest to those who suspect that Yanovsky may have been trying to stir up anti-Spanish sentiments — Yanovsky wrote, “I suggest that the Government intervene so that the Spanish do not do the same with the rest. But we have to keep in mind that the colonies cannot get along without grain from California.”
3. A report submitted by the main administrator of the Russian-American Company to Tsar Alexander I “sometime before December 20, 1820.” This account is much more detailed than Yanovsky’s earlier version, and it appears to draw on the original deposition transcript.
4. Yanovsky’s 1865 letter to the abbot of Valaam Monastery.

While the 1820 accounts have the tone of official reports, the 1865 version reads like hagiography. Yanovsky didn’t have the old 1820 documents in front of him when he wrote that 1865 letter, either — we know this because Yanovsky can only remember Peter’s baptismal name, but not his Alaskan one. One might argue that Yanovsky’s inconsistencies are evidence that the original story was fabricated. I think it’s more likely that Yanovsky believed that what he was saying was true, but in the intervening 45 years, exaggerations and embellishments had crept into his memory. Is this really so unbelievable? A 32-year-old man hears a remarkable, memorable story, retains no written account of it, and when he’s 77, he tells the same basic story but with added drama and detail? Seems to me that this is the most likely scenario.

The bigger problem, as I see it, is that we are relying on the testimony of one man, about whose character we know nothing besides Yanovsky’s judgment, “He is not the type who could think up things.” Did the Russian officials Yanovsky and/or Kuskov fabricate the story? If so, why? I understand that there may have been tensions between Spain and Russia over fur trading and the like, but this isn’t the sort of story you just make up out of whole cloth. And the purported eyewitness seems to have even less of a motive to lie.

THE STORY

What do we know? Let’s try to break down the story, point-by-point. We’ll use as our main source the 1820 account by the main administrator of the Russian-American Company, which, in my opinion, is the best version (in the absence of the original deposition).

1. In 1815, a party of Native Alaskan hunters, led by Boris Tarasov of the Russian-American Company, was raided and captured by the Spanish. According to Bucko, this essential fact is corroborated by Spanish records.
2. One of the Alaskans, Chunagnak of Kodiak Island, was wounded in the head during the raid. Spanish records agree that some of the Alaskans were injured in the raid.
3. The captives were taken to a Roman Catholic mission. There, they encountered two runaway Kodiak Islanders. The head of the mission wanted the new arrivals to become Catholic, but the Alaskans said that they were already Orthodox and did not want to change.
4. Eventually, most of the prisoners were taken elsewhere, and only Chunagnak (Peter) and Kykhaklai (the eyewitness, called “Keglii Ivan” in the 1820 Yanovsky account) remained. They were imprisoned with other Indians (not Alaskans).
5. The Spanish missionary sent a message to Peter and his companion by way of the runaway Kodiak Islanders (that is, in a language Peter could understand), again ordering them to become Roman Catholic. Peter and Keglii Ivan refused. Up to this point in the narrative, nothing particularly extraordinary has happened, and all this seems perfectly believable.
6. The next morning, a Spanish cleric and a group of Indians came to the prison. The cleric ordered the Indians to encircle the two Alaskans, torture Peter (cutting off fingers and then hands), and then disembowel him. The Indians did all this, and then someone approached the cleric with a paper. After reading it, the Spaniard ordered the Indians to bury Peter and return Keglii Ivan to prison.
7. Keglii Ivan was transferred and then enslaved by the Spanish before escaping. Several years later, he was picked up by a Russian brig and taken to Fort Ross. According to the 1820 Yanovsky account, he gave his testimony to Kuskov, who then sent him to meet with Yanovsky.

That’s it; basically, that is the original story of St. Peter, as best I can tell. What observations can we make about this story? Well, for one, the involvement of the Spanish clergy is not quite as clear-cut as it might initially seem. Communications between the Spanish clergy and the Alaskan prisoners seem to have been through intermediaries (the runaway Kodiak Islanders). The wicked acts done to Peter were actually carried out by Indians from California — they weren’t directly done by Roman Catholic clergymen. Yes, the eyewitness said that a cleric ordered the Indians to do these things, but that just tells us what the witness thought. Was the persecutor really a cleric, or was he perhaps a Spanish official or soldier? Isn’t it possible that Keglii Ivan was mistaken about the man’s office? And even if the man was a member of the clergy, what are we to make of the letter he received after Peter’s death? Someone — we don’t know who, but presumably a superior such as the head of the mission — ordered the persecution to be stopped. Doesn’t this suggest that the cleric — if he was a cleric — was not carrying out any kind of official Roman Catholic (or Spanish) policy, but rather acting of his own accord? And is it so hard to believe that there might have been an overzealous, sadistic Roman Catholic priest operating in California in 1815?

I know that nobody has yet identified any other instance of this sort of torture in Spanish California in the early 1800s. This is really the biggest weakness of the St. Peter story — it’s just so outlandish, so extreme, that it seems incredible. Had the story ended with Peter’s death as a result of, say, a beating, rather than a gruesome and elaborate torture, I don’t think the account would raise nearly so many eyebrows. But dismemberment and disembowelment — that’s singular, really.

But while some see this as a reason to disbelieve, you could argue that it paradoxically lends credibility to the story. I realize this may sound absurd to some, and maybe it is, but hear me out. Yanovsky — he had no motive to lie, and he was definitely not interested in causing problems that would upset the grain supply from California. If the other Russian official, Kuskov, was a liar, why would he have sent Keglii Ivan to Yanovsky to be interviewed? Why not just take down Keglii Ivan’s “testimony” at Fort Ross, send the witness on his way, and then forward the deposition transcript on to Yanovsky in Alaska? That Kuskov sent Keglii Ivan to Yanvosky suggests that Kuskov had nothing to hide, and even that he wanted Yanovsky’s opinion as to the veracity of Keglii Ivan’s testimony. Yanovsky felt the need to explicitly tell his superiors in Russia that Keglii Ivan was a credible witness — that is, Yanovsky realized how crazy this story was, but he believed Keglii Ivan and was willing to put his own judgment and reputation behind the testimony. As for Keglii Ivan himself, why on earth would he make up something like this? What could he possibly have to gain by fabricating something this bizarre? In the end, to those who think that the St. Peter martyrdom is a fiction, I would like to ask, how do you explain the lie? Who lied, and why did they do it? That is as much of a mystery as the question of who might have been behind St. Peter’s gruesome murder.

None of this is to say that St. Peter was definitely martyred. Also, I have said nothing thus far on the merits of his canonization (by both ROCOR and the OCA’s Diocese of Alaska in 1980). Personally, I think that his canonization, at that time, was ill-advised, simply because those who canonized him lacked sufficient historical evidence for his story. But saying that he was prematurely canonized is NOT to say that he didn’t exist, or that the substance of his story is not true. I remain undecided on those questions, but it seems to me that those who would confidently declare St. Peter’s story false may themselves be acting prematurely. Now that this debate has been opened, let us work together to learn as much as we possibly can in an effort to determine what, if anything, can be verified and/or disproven by the primary sources which might survive.

This article was written by Matthew Namee.

Postscript: I understand that Yanovsky’s original 1820 report is published in The Russian Orthodox Religious Mission in America, 1794–1837, with Materials Concerning the Life and Works of the Monk German, and Ethnographic Notes by the Hieromonk Gedeon. This book was originally published in Russian in 1894, and was translated into English by Colin Bearne. The resulting text was edited by Richard A. Pierce and published by Limestone Press (Kingston, Ontario, Canada, 1978). The report in question appears on pages 80-89.

Also, I’m told that Yanovsky’s 1820 report (and possibly the much-desired deposition transcript) appears in the Russian-language collection Russia in California: Russian Documents on Fort Ross and Russian-Californian Relations in 1803-1850, volume 1, published in 2005. I’ve just ordered a copy of this book to be sent to my own law school library (actually, one of the other libraries at my university has it, so it won’t take long). We’ll need to get it translated, but as soon as possible, we’ll publish it.

Oh, and two final notes:

1. St. Peter was not an Aleut — according to the 1820 sources, he was a Kodiak Islander. Both the name “Peter” and the description of “Aleut” come from the more questionable 1865 Yanovsky letter.
2. While St. Peter is often depicted and referred to as a child in icons and hymnography, the original accounts give no indication as to his age. I believe the Russian-American Company employed Native Alaskans beginning at age 18, so calling Peter a “child” is rather misleading.

UPDATE: Fr. Oliver has offered a response to my article. Click here to read it. [The original link was broken; this link should work.]

Is the St. Peter the Aleut story true? is a post from OrthodoxHistory.org. All rights reserved. Your use of this article is subject to our Terms of Use.

Fr. Oliver’s argument boils down to six main points:

1. Unlike so many Alaskan Orthodox stories (e.g. St. Juvenaly), the St. Peter story has no supporting oral tradition.
2. Fr. Michael Oleksa, the foremost scholar on Alaskan Orthodox history, has written next to nothing about St. Peter. In Orthodox Alaska, Fr. Michael makes not a single mention of Peter’s story. (I would add that Fr. Michael mentions St. Peter only in passing in Alaskan Missionary Spirituality.)
3. No corroborating evidence exists — that is, there is no other evidence of Spanish-Russian violence in California in that era. The St. Peter incident sticks out as an anomaly.
4. On the contrary, there is an internal Roman Catholic document from the period that actually contradicts the idea that the Spanish would torture Native Alaskans.
5. There is no evidence that St. Peter and his alleged persecutors would have been able to converse in the same language, which makes the exchange between them unlikely.
6. There is only one primary account of St. Peter’s martyrdom, and it is suspect for various reasons.

I’d encourage you to read the whole article, as I’ve just barely summarized Fr. Oliver’s observations. And, for the time being, I’m going to stay out of the public debate over whether St. Peter was real (and, if he was real, whether he was really martyred). I do think it is of paramount importance that the original account of St. Peter’s martyrdom be made public and translated into English. We don’t have that account, and I don’t know of anyone who has ever seen it, although in the comments to Fr. Oliver’s post, someone says that it was due to be published in a book.

At some future point, I’ll examine the pro-Peter arguments, and generally discuss the merits of his case.

This article was written by Matthew Namee.

Fr. Oliver Herbel on St. Peter the Aleut is a post from OrthodoxHistory.org. All rights reserved. Your use of this article is subject to our Terms of Use.