Arcadius Noskov of Belogorsk

Holy Venerable Martyr Arcadius Noskov of Belogorsk was a monk of the Belogorsk Monastery in the Urals, in the Perm region, and suffered in August 1918, when the community was destroyed by the Bolsheviks. Nothing has been kept of his own life except his name, entered among the brothers who were killed. He is commemorated on 7 February, in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church, on 14 February, in the Synaxis of the Saints of the Perm Metropolis, and on 25 August, together with Archimandrite Varlaam and his brethren.

The abbot Varlaam, in the world Vasily Efimovich Konoplev, was born in 1858 at the Yugo-⁠Knaufsky works in the Osa district of the Perm province, in a family of peasant Old Believers who had no priests. He sought the way of truth with labour, reading the Holy Scriptures and praying with tears. Decisive was a wondrous happening: on a Sunday of All Saints, asking in prayer for a sign, he learned that during a molieben at the White Mountain a heavy rain had fallen on the ground. In the 1890s he entered the Orthodox Church by the Mystery of Chrismation, together with his father Efim, seventy-⁠five years old, his brothers Anton and Pavel with their wives and children, and the family of his elder sister, nineteen souls in all.

In November 1893 he was tonsured a rasophore and settled on the White Mountain, where those who wished for monastic life gradually joined him; by 1894 there were twelve. On 1 February 1894 he was tonsured a monk with the name Varlaam, the next day he was ordained hierodeacon, and on 22 February, at the consecration of the altar of the little church of Saint Nicholas, hieromonk. He was appointed head of the missionary monastery rising on the White Mountain, later called the Athos of the Urals. He established the services according to the typikon and gave preaching a place of honour, morning and evening. In June 1917 the last great feast of the community took place: the consecration of the cathedral at Belogorsk, at which Holy Hieromartyr Andronik, bishop of Perm, was also present.

In August 1918 the Bolsheviks took possession of the monastery. They wrecked and defiled the altar of the cathedral, made a latrine in the cell of Archimandrite Varlaam, and turned the icon-⁠painting workshop into a theatre. Many monks were killed after cruel torments. On 12 (25) August soldiers of the Red Army arrested the abbot Varlaam and shot him on the road to Osa. Many of the monks also received a martyr's death: the hieromonks Sergius, Elijah, Vyacheslav, Joasaph, John and Anthony; the hierodeacons Michea, Vissarion, Matthew and Euthymius; the monks Barnabas, Demetrius, Sava, Hermogenes, Arcadius, Euthymius and Marcellus; and the novices John, Jacob, Peter, Jacob, Alexander, Theodore, Peter, Sergius and Alexis. Their graves were hidden by the authorities and are unknown.

They were glorified in 1998 as locally venerated saints of the Perm diocese, and in August 2000 were numbered among the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia for veneration in the whole Church, at the Jubilee Council of Bishops.