Alphaeus Korbansky

Holy Hieromartyr Alphaeus Korbansky, a deacon of Vologda, was born on 18 November 1871 (or 1873) in Vologda, in the family of the priest Anatoly. He died in the prison hospital on 6 August 1937. He was rehabilitated in 1970, and the Holy Synod of the Russian Church numbered him among the New Martyrs and Confessors on 17 July 2001.

His name was Alphaeus Anatolievich Korbansky. He finished the seminary at Vologda, was ordained deacon and served first at the church of the Protection of the Mother of God, and after its closure at the church of the Nativity of the Mother of God. Protopriest Alexis Rezukhin remembered him in his writings on the Vologda of the thirties and forties: a man no longer young, of middle height, with grey hair falling on his shoulders, with a very small white beard, thin, with yellow patches on his face and hands. He had moved to the Bogorodsk cemetery after the closing of the Protection church. He was not an even-⁠tempered man; he spoke the litanies for the dead with much feeling, commemorating the departed sometimes to tears, but could suddenly say something senseless or burst out laughing, bewildering those around him. He treasured the memory of his parents, Protopriest Anatoly and Olga, whose names he spoke aloud at the liturgy. He spoke the litanies holding the orarion in his right hand and covering his left ear with the other hand, as if he were addressing God while shielding himself from outside words. In winter he wore an expensive cassock with a large collar and said that it was his father's, who had been rector of the Pyatnitskaya church in Vologda.

On 2 July 1937 the deacon was arrested and imprisoned at Vologda, on a charge of "counter-⁠revolutionary activity, anti-⁠Soviet agitation, defeatist and terrorist agitation, propaganda for fascism". On 6 August of the same year he died in the prison hospital; as cause of death the medical certificate gave chronic gastric catarrh. He is commemorated on 6 August, on 7 February and in the Synaxis of the Saints of Vologda, on 11 July.