Iraklii (Motyakh) of Issyk-⁠Kul

Iraklii (Motyakh) of Issyk-⁠Kul was a schemamonk and confessor of the faith in the region of Lake Issyk-⁠Kul (now in Kyrgyzstan), born in 1863 and reposed in the Lord on 10 June 1937. He is counted a venerable confessor, and in 2023 the Synaxis of Saints of the Central Asian Metropolitan District numbered him among its saints.

He was born in 1863 in Chernigov province, into a Cossack family, with the name Joseph Motyakh, and was given to a monastery in childhood. On 14 October 1901 he entered the Holy Trinity Monastery at Issyk-⁠Kul as a novice, and on 25 March 1905 he was tonsured a monk with the name Irenaeus. The abbot of that time, Hegumen Porphyry, had come from the Glinsk Hermitage with a strict rule of the Athonite type. Irenaeus was used to going away sometimes on long pilgrimages.

On 11 August 1916, during the uprising of the native peoples, the monastery was attacked and seven of the brethren were killed; Irenaeus was among those saved, and all his life he prayed for the martyred brethren and repented that he had not gone with them on that Golgotha. After the monastery was closed in 1919, he lived in the mountains and in the skete in the Aksai mountains, where he received the schema with the name Irakly. In 1921 two hieromonks of the skete were killed; he and Pachomius went to Talgar, then to Issyk-⁠Kul, where he lived in a cell in the mountains. In 1928 he was found injured by a villager of Sazonovka (today Ananyevo), Miron Dubinin, who took him into his house. He lived there and then with other pious families of the village, reading the daily services, sleeping little and spending nearly all his time in prayer standing. People came to him for advice. Together with the priests Isaiah Gorborukov and Archimandrite Gennady Lobachev he stood against renovationism. In 1929, when dekulakization began, the families who sheltered him were persecuted.

It had been revealed to him that he would die at the Ascension. He asked for his schema habit to be sewn, embroidered it himself with crosses and arranged how he was to be buried. In June 1937 he fell gravely ill. On the day of the Ascension of the Lord, 10 June 1937, he crossed his hands on his chest and reposed. At the funeral there was no priest, but people from the surrounding villages came and sang the Trisagion in procession to the cemetery. He is commemorated on 10 June (28 May, old style).