Jacob Startsev

Holy Venerable Martyr Jacob Startsev, a novice of the Belogorsk monastery on the White Mountain in the Perm region, is numbered among the monks and novices killed in August 1918 by the Bolsheviks, together with their abbot, Archimandrite Barlaam. The calendar we rely on says of Jacob only that he was a novice and mentions his name in the list of the slain; the story is that of the community.

The missionary monastery on the White Mountain, later called the Athos of the Urals, came into being in 1893 and 1894 around Vasily Efimovich Konoplev, an Old Believer peasant who passed to Orthodoxy and was tonsured a monk with the name Barlaam. As abbot he established the services according to the typikon and preaching morning and evening, and people from all over Perm province came to him for counsel. In June 1917 the cathedral of the monastery was consecrated, in the presence of Bishop Andronik of Perm. In August 1918 the Bolsheviks seized the monastery, defiled the holy table, made the archimandrite's cell a latrine and the icon workshop a theatre. On 12 (25) August they arrested Archimandrite Barlaam and shot him on the road to Osa. Many of the brethren 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. The authorities hid their graves.

They were glorified in 1998 as local saints of the Perm diocese and in August 2000 were numbered among the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia, for veneration in the whole Church. 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).