Barsanuphius Yurchenko

Saint Barsanuphius Yurchenko, confessor and archimandrite, was a pastor and missionary in southern Ukraine who spent long years in prisons and camps for defending Orthodoxy. He was born on 15 August 1880 in the village of Lozuvatka, Yelisavetgrad district, Kherson province, into a pious peasant family; his name in the world was Vasily Grigorievich Yurchenko, and his parents, Gregory and Tatiana, raised him in the fear of God. He attended the village school and the church teachers' school at Novgorodka, then taught for two years in Alexandria. In 1905, at the village of Petrovo, he caught a severe chill and was ill for two years; in that time his religious feeling deepened.

In 1907 he entered the Kyiv Caves Lavra, where he lived eight years and taught at the school there. In 1915 he entered the Pastoral-⁠Missionary Seminary at Kherson. On 24 March 1916 (old style) he was tonsured a monk with the name Barsanuphius, after Saint Barsanuphius of Tver, and remained at the seminary and at the monastery of Saint Gregory at Bizyukov. The revolution brought the monastery plunder and, in 1920, closure; Father Barsanuphius was arrested and held in terrible conditions, and afterward was appointed parish priest at Vysoki Bueraky, near Yelisavetgrad.

When the churches were being torn by the Renovationist schism, backed by the atheist state, he resisted firmly. In 1923 Bishop Onufry Gagaliuk appointed him missionary at Alexandria to combat Renovationism. The town had no Orthodox church at the time. Through his preaching most of the local parishes left the schism and returned to the canonical Church, which angered the Soviet authorities. He was first arrested and held for half a year, and through the 1920s and 1930s he went through many arrests, a public show trial and torture in the NKVD cellars. On 1 January 1931 he was arrested again and sentenced to five years in camps; he did forced labour at Temlag, then lived in exile in Kazakhstan.

In the 1940s he returned to Ukraine and served in parishes of the Donetsk region (Kramatorsk) and the Odessa diocese. On 25 June 1954 he received his last appointment, to the cathedral of Saint Catherine in Kherson. His health was broken by years of prison and camp. He reposed on 17 October 1954 and was buried in the city cemetery near the church of All Saints.

On 28 March 2007 his relics were found in the Kherson cemetery and carried the same day to the cathedral of the Holy Spirit in the city, where they remain. In 2008 the Holy Synod counted him among the saints, as a venerable confessor. He is commemorated on 17 October, the day of his repose, and on 28 March, the day of the finding of his relics (new style). In Alexandria there is a church dedicated to him, the only one in Ukraine with this patron.