Joasaph Panov

Holy Hieromartyr Joasaph Panov, a priest, was born in 1860 in the family of the priest Stephen Panov and his wife Agnia Alexandrovna. His mother was the daughter of Protopresbyter Alexander Levitsky, and his father had been brought up from childhood in the house of the priest Stephen Gornykh. Father Stephen had seven children: the sons Joasaph, Michael, Leonid, Africanus and Gregory and the daughters Eugenia and Augusta. Three of the sons, Joasaph, Michael and Leonid, became priests, and later, in the Soviet time, a grandson also became a priest, Gabriel Mikhailovich Panov.

Service

In 1875 Joasaph finished the theological school at Dalmatovo and for some years was psalmist at the Ascension cathedral in Yekaterinburg. In 1889 he was ordained deacon for the church of Saint Nicholas at the Verkhnyaya Tura works, Verkhoturye district, and in April 1891, by decree of Bishop Polycarp of Yekaterinburg and Irbit, he was ordained priest and moved to the village of Nizhnee in the Yekaterinburg district. The village had been founded in 1678 on the bank of the river Chusovaya, and a wooden church of the Archangel Michael had been raised in it between 1855 and 1860. The village had a landing and served as a transshipment point, and in spring it filled with barge-⁠haulers who floated goods down the Chusovaya; the father had to care spiritually for much population come from other places, besides the over 2,000 locals, and to do the services and Mysteries alone. So thirteen years of toil passed. In November 1904 he was moved to the Dormition church in the village of Tygishskoe, Kamyshlov district, then, in July 1911, at his own request, probably because of illness, he was retired; after half a year he was entrusted with the temporary charge of the parish of Mostovskoe, Irbit district. In 1914 he received at Pascha the leg-⁠guard "for zealous and useful service to the Church of God". By then he was priest in the village of Mironovskoe, Verkhoturye district, where for several years he served together with the future hieromartyr John Shishev, a talented teacher and zealous pastor.

The year 1918

After the overthrow of October 1917 the representatives of Soviet power at first regarded the clergy with hostility but quite restrained. From April-⁠May 1918 the situation worsened, and at the plenum of the Central Committee of the RCP(b) on 6/19 May it was decided to conduct against the clergy a resolute written agitation and to introduce the practice of the death penalty for certain acts. In the Urals this tragedy came much earlier than when the government legalized terror (23 August/5 September), in July-⁠August, and there the clergy suffered more than in other regions of Russia, above all from the Red Guard detachments hastily formed from local workers and peasants, whose cruelty made even the Bolsheviks sometimes regard them with distrust.

Martyrdom

On 13/26 August 1918 the priests of Mironovskoe, Father Joasaph Panov and Father John Shishev, were arrested in the village. They were charged with agitation against Soviet power and ordered to go "to the station of Yegorshino, to the staff, for interrogations". The priests obeyed, but did not go alone, but with their sons: Father Joasaph was accompanied by his son Sergei, just returned home after finishing the Seminary, and Father John by his son Vladimir. About a verst from the village, by the forest, the arrested were stopped by a rough shout from the Red soldiers, who ordered the priests and Sergei to get down from their horses. "Well, priests, line up, raise your hands, pray to your God, we shall shoot you now," sounded the Reds' order. "Abuse follows, volleys of rifles and three victims are brought," wrote "Uralskaya Zhizn" later, after the witness Vladimir, the son of Father John. So the priests who had served at the same altar met death together, with courage and without fear. The saint was glorified in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia from the Yekaterinburg diocese in 2002.

The Church commemorates him on 26 August, the day of his death, in the new style, on 11 February in the Synaxis of the Saints of Yekaterinburg, and on the movable day of the synaxis of the new martyrs.