Hermogenes Boyaryshnev

Holy Venerable Martyr Hermogenes Boyaryshnev, a monk, suffered in 1918 at the Belogorsk monastery on the White Mountain in the land of Perm, together with its abbot, Archimandrite Barlaam, and other brethren of the monastery. The calendar page we rely on says of Hermogenes only that he is numbered among the monks who were killed; the account below is that of the community and its abbot.

Barlaam, in the world Vasily Efimovich Konoplev, was born in 1858 at the Yugo-⁠Knaufsky works in the Osa district of Perm province, into a family of Old Believers without priests. He had learned to read at ten, loved reading the Scriptures and spent his free time reading. For years he thought about the Church and the priesthood, without which he saw that one cannot be saved, and he prayed every night with tears to be shown the way. Until the age of thirty-⁠five he travelled, visited communities of priestless Old Believers and sought to understand the divisions.

An event gave him clarity on the Sunday of All Saints, when he was in an Old Believer monastery in Saratov province. He asked God for a sign: if the Russian Church had not lost grace through the change of rites, may He send abundant rain at the clergy's celebration on the White Mountain. On his way home he heard that indeed, in the middle of the service, a heavy rain had fallen. In the 1890s he entered the Orthodox Church by chrismation. His father Efim, seventy-⁠five years old, his brothers Anton and Pavel with their families and the family of his elder sister did the same, nineteen people in all.

In November 1893 he was tonsured a rassophore and settled on the White Mountain. Gradually those who wished for monastic life gathered there, twelve by 1894. On 1 February 1894 he was tonsured with the name Barlaam, the next day he was ordained hierodeacon, and on 22 February hieromonk. He was appointed superior of the newly built missionary monastery, later called the Athos of the Urals. He restored the services according to the typikon and the preaching morning and evening. A priest of Perm, Jacob Shestakov, wrote in 1913 that Father Barlaam was a guide of conscience, of great experience, asceticism, strength of spirit and childlike innocence, to whom people came from all over the province.

In the first days of June 1917 the monastery's cathedral was consecrated, in the presence of Bishop Andronik of Perm, a hieromartyr. Processions came from the surrounding villages and the crowd of pilgrims worshipped in the open air, and in those days it was still, without wind, and the candles did not go out.

A year later, in August 1918, the Bolsheviks seized the monastery. Red Army soldiers overturned and defiled the holy table in the main altar, turned the archimandrite's cell into a latrine and the icon workshop into a theatre, forcing the boys of the choir to sing worldly songs. Many monks were killed after cruel tortures. On 12 (25) August they arrested the abbot Barlaam and shot him on the road to the town of Osa. Many of the monastery's monks also received a martyr's death: the hieromonks Sergius, Elias, Vyacheslav, Joasaph, John and Anthony, the hierodeacons Micah, Bessarion, Matthew and Euthymius, the monks Barnabas, Demetrius, Savva, Hermogenes, Arcadius, Euthymius and Marcellus, and the novices John, Jacob, Peter, Jacob, Alexander, Theodore, Peter, Sergius and Alexis. Their graves were hidden by the authorities and are unknown.

They were glorified in 1998 as locally venerated saints of the Perm diocese and numbered among the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia at the Jubilee Council of Bishops in August 2000, for veneration in the whole Church. They are commemorated on 25 August, on 7 February, in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church, and on 14 February, in the Synaxis of the Saints of the Perm Metropolis (new style, movable days).