Barnabas Nadezhdin of Belogorye

Holy Venerable Martyr Barnabas Nadezhdin of Belogorye, a monk, is commemorated among the brethren of the Belogorsk Monastery killed in August 1918 together with their abbot, Archimandrite Barlaam. The calendar gives nothing separate about him, but tells the fate of the monastery.

Barlaam, whose name in the world was Vasily Efimovich Konoplev, was born in 1858 in a family of peasant Old Believers without priests at the Yugo-⁠Knaufsky works, Osa district, Perm province. Seeking the truth by reading Scripture and by prayer, he came, as he writes in his autobiography, to join the Orthodox Church by chrismation in the 1890s, together with his father, brothers and their families, nineteen people in all. In November 1893 he was tonsured a rassophore and settled on the White Mountain, where those who wished a monastic life began to gather. On 1 February 1894 he was tonsured a monk with the name Barlaam, the next day he was ordained hierodeacon, and on 22 February hieromonk. He directed the missionary monastery built on the White Mountain, later called the Athos of the Urals, restored the services according to the typikon and valued preaching, given morning and evening; no service went without a homily. A priest of Perm wrote in 1913 that Father Barlaam was the guide of conscience for laity and monks, a man of ascetic rigour, spiritual strength and childlike guilelessness, and crowds came to him from the whole province.

At the beginning of June 1917 the last great celebration took place in the monastery, the consecration of the cathedral, to which Bishop Andronik of Perm also came. A year later, in August 1918, the Bolsheviks took possession of the monastery: they tore up and defiled the altar of the cathedral, made the archimandrite's cell into a latrine and turned the icon workshop into a theatre. Many monks were killed after cruel tortures. On 12 (25) August Red soldiers arrested the abbot Barlaam and shot him on the road to the town of Osa. Many monks also died as martyrs, among them the hieromonks Sergius, Elias, Vyacheslav, Joasaph, John and Anthony, the hierodeacons Micah, Bessarion, Matthew and Euthymius, the monks Barnabas, Dimitry, Sabbas, Hermogenes, Arcadius, Euthymius and Marcellus, and the novices John, Jacob, Peter, Alexander, Theodore, Sergius and Alexis. Their graves were hidden by the authorities and remain 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 throughout the Church. Saint Barnabas is commemorated on 25 August, on 7 February (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church, and on 14 February (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the Saints of the Perm Metropolia, all in the new style.