Joasaph Sabantsev

Holy Venerable Martyr Joasaph Sabantsev, hieromonk of the Belaya Gora monastery, is numbered among the monks killed in August 1918, together with Archimandrite Barlaam, the abbot of the monastery. The Azbyka page tells the fate of the monastery, names Joasaph in the list of hieromonks and says nothing particular about him.

The abbot Barlaam, in the world Basil Euthymievich Konoplev, was born in 1858 at the Yugo-⁠Knaufsky works in the Osa district of the Perm province, in a family of priestless Old Believers. After years of seeking the truth, in the 1890s he passed through Chrismation into the Orthodox Church, together with his father, brothers and sister, nineteen people in all. In November 1893 he was tonsured a riassophore and settled on Belaya Gora, where those who desired monastic life began to gather, twelve persons by 1894. On 1 February 1894 he was tonsured a monk with the name Barlaam, the next day ordained hierodeacon, and on 22 February hieromonk. He was named abbot of the missionary monastery of Belaya Gora, later called the Athos of the Urals. He set the services in order according to the typikon and put great value on the morning and evening sermon; no service was left without instruction. A priest from Perm wrote in 1913 that he was a guide of conscience for laity and monks and that people came to him from the whole province.

At the beginning of June 1917 the last great feast was held in the monastery: the consecration of the cathedral of Belaya Gora, with Bishop Andronicus of Perm. A year later, in August 1918, the Bolsheviks seized the monastery: in the altar of the cathedral the Red soldiers wrecked and defiled the holy table, in the cell of Archimandrite Barlaam they made a latrine, and the icon-⁠painting workshop they turned into a theatre, where the boy singers were forced to sing frivolous songs. Many monks were killed after cruel tortures. On 12 (25) August the Red soldiers arrested Archimandrite Barlaam and shot him on the way to the town of Osa. Many monks of the monastery received martyr's death: the hieromonks Sergius, Elijah, Vyacheslav, Joasaph, John and Anthony, the hierodeacons Michaias, Bessarion, Matthew and Euthymius, the monks Barnabas, Demetrius, Sabbas, Hermogenes, Arcadius, Euthymius and Marcellus and the novices John, Jacob, Peter, Jacob, Alexander, Theodore, Peter, Sergius and Alexis. The graves of the martyrs were hidden by the authorities and are not known.

They were glorified in 1998 as locally honoured saints of the Perm diocese, and the Council of Bishops of August 2000 numbered them among the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia, for veneration throughout the Church. The Church commemorates Venerable Martyr Joasaph on 25 August, in the new style, on 14 February, on a movable day, in the Synaxis of the Saints of the Perm Metropolia, and on the movable day of the synaxis of the new martyrs.