Elias Popov

Holy Venerable Martyr Elias Popov, a hieromonk, was one of the monks of the monastery of Belaya Gora in the Perm province who were killed in August 1918 together with their abbot, Archimandrite Barlaam. The Azbyka page lists him only among the brethren who were killed and says nothing else about him.

The monastery of Belaya Gora, later called the Athos of the Urals, was founded as a missionary monastery. Its abbot was Barlaam, in the world Vasily Yefimovich Konoplev, born in 1858 in a family of priestless Old Believers in the Osa district. After a long search for the truth he joined the Orthodox Church by chrismation in the 1890s, together with his father, his brothers and his sister, nineteen souls in all. In November 1893 he was tonsured a rassophore and settled at Belaya Gora, where those who wished for the monastic life gathered around him. On 1 February 1894 he received the name Barlaam, the next day he was ordained hierodeacon, and on 22 February hieromonk. He ran the monastery as a missionary house, restored the services according to the typikon and gave preaching an honoured place, morning and evening. People from all over the province came to him for counsel.

In June 1917 the monastery cathedral was consecrated, in the presence of Bishop Andronicus of Perm, a hieromartyr, and crowds of pilgrims came in processions from the surrounding villages. A year later, in August 1918, the Bolsheviks seized the monastery. Red Army soldiers overturned and defiled the altar in the cathedral, made a latrine of the archimandrite's cell and a theatre of the icon workshop. Many monks were killed after cruel torture. On 12 August (25 August in the new style) Archimandrite Barlaam was arrested and shot on the road to the town of Osa.

With him many monks of the monastery received the crown of martyrdom. The page names the hieromonks Sergius, Elias, Vyacheslav, Joasaph, John and Anthony, the hierodeacons Michaeas, Bessarion, Matthew and Euthymius, the monks Barnabas, Demetrius, Sabbas, Hermogenes, Arcadius, Euthymius and Marcellus, and the novices John, Jacob, Peter, Jacob, Alexander, Theodore, Peter, Sergius and Alexis. The graves of the martyrs were hidden by the authorities and are not known. They were glorified in 1998 as locally venerated saints of the Perm diocese, and in August 2000 they were numbered among the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia, for veneration throughout the Church.

The saint is commemorated on 25 August, in the new style, the day of the killing, and also on the movable days of the synaxis of the new martyrs and of the Saints of Perm.