Ignatius Dalanov

Holy Venerable Martyr Ignatius Dalanov (1885-1942), a hieromonk, was born on 12 September 1885 in the village of Kozhemyakino in the Sebezh district of Vitebsk province, in the family of the peasant Mikhail Dalanov, and at baptism was named Ioann. He studied at the village school. On 6 June 1911 he entered the Optina Hermitage, on 11 September he was blessed to wear the cassock, and from 1914 he did his obedience in the John the Baptist skete of Optina. In July 1914 part of the brethren, rassophore monks and novices, were called to the front because of the war with Germany, among them the novice Ioann, sent to the 5th Siberian Reserve Infantry Regiment. On Great Friday of Lent 1917 he was tonsured a rassophore.

After the closing of Optina, with the coming to power of the godless, Ioann was tonsured a monk with the name Ignatius and served as watchman at the church of the Tikhvin icon in the village of Strelnya near Kozelsk. In 1929 he was ordained hieromonk and from 1934 served in the Saviour church in the village of Kurynichi, Peremyshl district, where he served until the mass persecution of 1937. In November 1937 men of the NKVD interrogated the standard witnesses: the secretary of the village council, a collective farm brigadier and a farmer, who gave the testimonies the investigator required: that Hieromonk Ignatius had said that the Communists carry out the census only to find out how many people had died under Soviet power and how many believers remained, in order to decide whether to close or reopen churches, that in preparing for the elections the Communists begin to put people in prison for nothing, and that they claim that the Soviet country is the most democratic in the world, where the people can choose whom they want, but in reality it is the opposite: they nominate the candidates they need, and if you object, they put you in prison and write you down as a counter-⁠revolutionary.

On 23 November 1937 NKVD men arrested Father Ignatius, and on 27 November he was interrogated. The investigator demanded testimony about counter-⁠revolutionary activity; he answered that he had had none. Asked about counter-⁠revolutionary agitation connected with the elections to the Supreme Soviet, about agitation in April 1937 and about slander of Soviet power, he denied it all. Asked where a monk from a Saratov monastery had come to him from and why he lived with him, he answered that the man had served a sentence in Siberia and at Orel for counter-⁠revolutionary activity, had come to Kaluga and the bishop had sent him to them; he did not serve in the church, but worked in the garden. Asked who else lived in the watchman's house, he said a nun, the woman watchman, the church warden's wife and her sister; asked whether he had organised a monastery there, he said no: two monks, a nun and three church women had gathered there because they had nowhere to live. The investigator told him that, denying the charges, he had taken the path of deceiving the investigation, but he repeated: In the charges brought against me I do not admit guilt, and declare once more that on my part no counter-⁠revolutionary activity was ever carried on.

On 27 November the investigation was concluded, the next day the investigator drew up the indictment, and on 2 December 1937 an NKVD troika sentenced Hieromonk Ignatius to ten years in a labour camp. On 25 July 1940, after passing through various prisons, he arrived at the Temnikov camp in Mordovia. On 24 August 1942 Father Ignatius fell gravely ill and was put in the camp infirmary. Hieromonk Ignatius Dalanov reposed on 3 September 1942 and was buried in an unknown grave in the camp cemetery.

He is commemorated on 3 September, on 7 February, in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church, on 31 July, in the Synaxis of the Saints of Kaluga, and on 24 October, in the Synaxis of All Saints Who Shone Forth at Optina Hermitage (new style, the second being a movable day).