Joachim Levitsky

Archbishop Joachim Levitsky was Archbishop of Nizhny Novgorod and Arzamas, a hierarch, spiritual writer and defender of the Orthodox monarchy, who suffered in the years of the revolution. Born in 1853 in a village near Cherkasy in Ukraine, he was killed in early 1921 near Sevastopol, by some accounts under the torments of a martyr. He is numbered among the New Martyrs of Russia, and he is commemorated on 1 April.

Youth and priesthood

He was born on 30 March 1853 (11 April New Style) in the village of Drabovka, Cherkasy district, Kyiv governorate, into the family of a church reader, and was baptized Ivan. He studied at the Saint Sophia school in Kyiv, the Kyiv seminary (1875) and the Kyiv Theological Academy, with the degree of candidate of theology, and was appointed teacher of homiletics and liturgics and member of the board of the Riga seminary (1879). On 24 June 1880 he was ordained priest at the Riga cathedral, remaining in teaching. From 1883 to 1886 he taught religion at the Riga infantry cadet school and the private girls' high school of Tailova, and for a time was inspector of the seminary. In 1886 he was widowed, with three children, and in 1892 a daughter died.

On 28 June 1893 he was tonsured a monk, the next day he was raised to archimandrite and named rector of the Riga seminary. From 1894 he edited the Riga Diocesan Gazette. He also wrote works on the church history of Riga: he described the founding of the diocese and wrote lives of the archbishops Plato Gorodetsky, Philaret Filaretov and Arsenius Bryantsev, among others.

Bishop in six dioceses

On 14 January 1896 he was consecrated, in Saint Isaac's cathedral in Petersburg, Bishop of Balta, vicar of the Kamenets-⁠Podolsk diocese. From 1897 he was Bishop of Brest, first vicar of the Lithuania and Vilna diocese, from 1900 Bishop of Grodno and Brest, from 1903 Bishop of Orenburg and the Urals, then of Orenburg and Turgai, and from 13 August 1910 Bishop of Nizhny Novgorod and Arzamas. At Orenburg he headed the branch of the Imperial Orthodox Palestine Society, revived missionary work and opened more than fifty parishes of the same faith (Edinoverie), with services by the old printed books. He took part in the Union of the Russian People and was honorary member of the Nizhny Novgorod branch of the Monarchist Conference of Russia. On 6 May 1916 he was raised to archbishop. He received several distinctions, among them the orders of Saint Anna (1895, 1904), Saint Vladimir (1899, 1908), Saint Alexander Nevsky (1913) and the Montenegrin Order of Saint Daniel the First (1900).

Revolution and death

In 1917 he was removed from the governing of his diocese; according to some sources he was also briefly imprisoned by the provisional government for his monarchism. He was a member of the Local Council of 1917 to 1918, which restored the patriarchate and elected Tikhon, first by office, then by a separate decision of the council, and took part in all three sessions, as a member of the third and seventh sections. He went to Moscow and never returned to Nizhny Novgorod. On 22 March 1918 he was retired at his own request and named abbot of the Resurrection New Jerusalem monastery, then went to relatives in Crimea. According to some accounts he was arrested by the Bolsheviks in 1918 and released the same year, then lived at his son's summer house near Sevastopol.

The circumstances of his death are not certain. The reports that the Bolsheviks executed him in 1918, hanging him at the royal doors of the Sevastopol cathedral, or that he was crucified upside down there, are judged mistaken by the Orthodox Encyclopedia. According to Bishop Demetrius Abashidze of Taurida, he was killed by robbers in early 1921 in the neighbourhood of Sevastopol; a report from other clergy of the time supports the idea that he was killed during a robbery, perhaps of the cathedral. The year of death is given between 1918 and 1921. The family of his son Nicholas left with the remnants of the imperial fleet, first for Constantinople, then for France and America.

Memory

In preparing the canonization of the New Martyrs and Confessors made by the Russian Church Outside Russia in 1981, his name was entered in the provisional list of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia, and the list of names, among which that of Archbishop Joachim, was published only toward the end of the 1990s. In 2007 the clergy of the Grodno diocese asked the Synod of the Orthodox Church of Belarus to consider the possibility of his canonization. He is commemorated on 1 April.