Bartholomew Ratnykh

Holy Venerable Martyr Bartholomew Ratnykh, a hieromonk, was born in 1894 in the village of Matrenki in Kiev province, in a peasant family. He attended the parish school. In 1913 he entered a monastery of the Kiev diocese as a novice. Two years later he was called into the army and sent to the Romanian front, where he fought until the end of the war in 1918. Returning from the army, he entered a monastery again as a novice, and after a time was tonsured into the mantle with the name Bartholomew and ordained a hieromonk.

From 1927 to 1934 he served at a church in the town of Pereyaslav. In 1936 he was arrested and held for a time under investigation, and then released. In the same year he moved to Feodosia in Crimea and settled in the house of a distant relative. He lived in seclusion, speaking with almost no one, keeping up a correspondence only with his spiritual children. In one letter he wrote of the cross that we must bear, made of many metals, and said that they had chosen the iron cross, that is, patience and hope in God, that the Lord will not put to shame those who hope in Him, and that they must not be afraid, wherever they were driven, for everywhere is the Lord and His people.

On 13 July 1937 the NKVD arrested the hieromonk Bartholomew. At the interrogation he was asked about this letter, found in the search, and accused of slandering Soviet power in it. Father Bartholomew rejected the charge, saying that all he had written was the truth and nothing more. On 10 December 1937 an NKVD troika sentenced him to death. He was shot on 10 February 1938 and buried in an unknown common grave.

He is commemorated on 10 February, on 7 February (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church, on 2 December in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Crimean Metropolia, and on 28 December in the Synaxis of the Saints of Crimea, all in the new style.