Basil Kolmykov

Holy Hieromartyr Basil Kolmykov, a priest, also called Kalmykov, by his full name Basil Dmitrievich Kolmykov, was born in 1866 in a merchant family. On 2 January 1913 he entered the Omsk diocese as psalm-⁠reader at the church in Yuzhno-⁠Podolskoe, Tyukalinsk district, on 20 January he was ordained deacon, and from 1914 he served in Chernoluchinskoe. In 1916 he was ordained priest and appointed rector in the village of Meshchanskoe, Dzharkent district, Semirechye region, in Turkestan, with a parish that included the settlements of Karkara, Vladislavskoe, Novo-⁠Kievskoe and Okhotnichye. In 1916 the Kyrgyz revolt broke out in Semirechye, which cost thousands of lives, and Father Basil showed true courage in saving his parishioners. In a letter to Bishop Innocent of Turkestan he told how on 12 August, at four or five in the morning, he was woken by shouts, saw around ten thousand armed men on horseback, and thanks to the resolve of Captain Mikhail Kravchenko the attack was repulsed; he organized the removal of provisions to the storehouses, asked for a detachment of thirty horsemen to defend the parish and, helped by the people, put out the fire that had caught the house of prayer. The priest's house, with the church books, money and documents, burned down, and he was left with his family in the clothes they wore. After that he was moved to the stanitsa of Podgornaya.

In 1918 a detachment of Red soldiers entered Podgornaya. The commissars arrested the priest, the church warden Zosima and thirteen other Orthodox Christians, led them out to the cemetery by the village and shot them with a machine gun. Before that they beat them, and put sacks over the heads of some. The Red soldiers did not allow the burial, on pain of death: they set a machine gun on a hill opposite the cemetery and let no one approach. Yet the Cossacks buried the bodies. They laid in one grave the priest Basil, the warden Zosima and thirteen murdered villagers, and their grave remained for many years a place of veneration. For more than eighty years the local people looked after it, a small chapel with an unquenchable lamp was built, and believers came to pray, especially on memorial days. During the war the chapel was taken apart for firewood by Uighur peasants who had settled there, but the memory of the martyrs remained. The priest was rehabilitated by the law of the Republic of Kazakhstan of 14 April 1993, and the Council of the Russian Orthodox Church of 13-16 August 2000 numbered him among the New Martyrs and Confessors, for veneration throughout the Church.

He is commemorated on 16 September, on 7 February (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church, on 26 February in the Synaxis of the Saints of the Omsk Metropolia, and on 8 September in the Synaxis of the Saints of the Central Asian Metropolitan District, all in the new style.