Jacob Danilov

Holy Venerable Martyr Jacob Danilov, a novice of the Belogorsk monastery on the White Mountain in the Perm region, is numbered among the novices killed in 1918 with Archimandrite Barlaam and other brethren of the monastery. The calendar we rely on commemorates him only among the novices; the account below is that of the community.

Barlaam, in the world Vasily Efimovich Konoplev, was born in 1858 in the family of priestless Old Believer peasants in the Osa district. Seeking the truth, he came into the Orthodox Church by chrismation in the 1890s, with his father, his brothers and some of his relatives, nineteen souls in all. In November 1893 he was tonsured a rassophore and settled on the White Mountain, where twelve who desired monastic life soon gathered. In 1894 he received tonsure with the name Barlaam and ordination as hierodeacon and hieromonk and was appointed superior of the missionary monastery there, afterwards called the Athos of the Urals. He established the services according to the typikon and preaching morning and evening. In the first days of June 1917 the monastery's cathedral was consecrated, in the presence of Bishop Andronik of Perm, a hieromartyr.

In August 1918 the Bolsheviks seized the monastery. Red Army soldiers overturned and defiled the holy table in the altar of the cathedral, made the archimandrite's cell into a latrine and the icon workshop into a theatre. 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. There died as martyrs 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 it is not known where they are.

They were glorified as local saints of the Perm diocese in 1998 and entered among the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia in August 2000. They are commemorated on 25 August, on 7 February and on 14 February, in the Synaxis of the Saints of the Perm Metropolis (new style, the last two being movable days).