Eustathius Malakhovsky

Holy Hieromartyr Eustathius Malakhovsky (Evstafy Vladimirovich Malakhovsky) was a priest of the Turkestan diocese of the Russian Orthodox Church, born in 1880 in the village of Nevedro, in the Nevel district, Vitebsk province, and killed in 1918, when the Paschal procession collided with a Bolshevik demonstration, in the settlement of Nadezhdinskaya, near Verny (now Almaty). He was numbered among the new martyrs and confessors of Russia in August 2000, for veneration throughout the Church. He is remembered on 5 May.

Family and beginnings

He was born in the family of the priest Vladimir Kosmich Malakhovsky, of the diocese of Polotsk. The Malakhovsky family came from the szlachta of the Mogilev province: the great-⁠grandfather and grandfather had been Uniate priests, and the father, Vladimir, passed from the Union to Orthodoxy during his studies at the Polotsk seminary, in the early 1840s. In 1897 Eustathius finished the theological school at Polotsk, in 1900 three classes of the Vitebsk seminary, and between 1902 and 1904 was a teacher at the people's school of Staikovo. On 15 December 1904 he was appointed psalm-⁠reader at the military church in Tashkent, in March 1905 was moved to the cathedral of Turkestan, and on 13 May 1905 was ordained deacon and the next day priest, at the Ascension cathedral in the city of Verny.

Service in Semirechye

On 27 May 1905 he was appointed priest at the church of the Three Hierarchs in the village of Karabulak. On 1 September 1906 he was moved to the church of Bolshaya Almatinka in Verny. On 5 September 1907 he was appointed rector in the village of Ivanovskoye, in the Lepsinsk district, and in February 1909 was moved to the church of the Intercession in Verny. In July 1910 he was appointed to the church of the settlement of Karalinsky, in the Lepsinsk district, where settlers lived. On 18 January 1913, at his own request, he was appointed itinerant priest of the first deanery of Pishpek. On 22 June 1916 the appointment to the village of Blagoveshchenskoye was cancelled and he was moved, at his request, to the church of the Intercession in the village of Pokrovskoye, in the Przhevalsk district, thirty-⁠five versts from Przhevalsk, on the south shore of Lake Issyk-⁠Kul. In August 1916 the uprising of the Kyrgyz rose in the region. The defenders of the village, with the help of Father Eustathius, managed to take the inhabitants out to Przhevalsk. The village and the church were burned.

In October 1916 he was appointed to the village of Yegoryevskoye, in the Syr-⁠Darya region. On 1 January 1917, at his request, he was moved to a psalm-⁠reader's place at the railway-⁠car church of the Holy Martyr Alexandra, at Merv, with the charge of looking after the local garrison. On 10 April 1917 he was appointed to the church of the Intercession in the stanitsa of Nadezhdinskaya, Verny district. He was killed in 1918, during the Paschal procession, on Easter day, which our calendar places, on the new calendar, on 5 May.

Public work

He was an active member of the Kazan-⁠Bogorodsky enlightenment society of the Turkestan diocese (1907 to 1915), belonged to the temperance society of Verny (1910), took part in the pastoral assemblies and gave for refugees and for priests' widows. He wrote articles on the life of refugees and on the Kazakh uprising in the Turkestan Gazette and the Semirechye Regional Gazette, in 1912 and 1916, and an obituary of Father Peter Zlotnikov in the Turkestan Diocesan Gazette no. 17 of 1914. He received the epigonation on 13 September 1907.