Job Protopopov

Holy Venerable Martyr Job Protopopov was a hieromonk of the Raifa hermitage near Kazan and cell-⁠attendant of the martyred Bishop Ambrose Gudko, and was shot in 1930. He is venerated as a local saint of the Diocese of Kazan.

Ivan Andreyevich Protopopov was born in 1880 in Odessa. In 1907 he entered monastic life, and until 1917 he lived in Kiev. From October 1917 he was cell-⁠attendant to Bishop Ambrose (Gudko), as a hierodeacon, and shared all the hardships with him, remaining unfailingly beside him through the persecutions, arrests and martyric death. After the bishop's martyrdom he stayed in the monastery at Sviyazhsk until its closing.

He was arrested twice, in July and August 1918, with the bishop. At the July arrest at Sviyazhsk, Father Job begged the Chekists to put him in prison with the bishop, so that he could serve him in confinement. After the bishop's release they lived for a time in the Transfiguration monastery in Kazan. Soon, despite entreaties, Bishop Ambrose returned to Sviyazhsk and was arrested on the spot. On 8 August 1918, by order of Trotsky, the bishop was arrested, and with him the hierodeacon Job.

They were taken to the station of Tyurlema on the Moscow-⁠Kazan railway. There, from the staff of the Fifth Army, which was in the cars of Trotsky's train, the bishop was led out into a field and killed, and his cell-⁠attendant was released and forbidden to follow his beloved bishop. After some hours Father Job found in the field the body of the martyred bishop. He buried him at the place of the killing and for twelve years paid the peasant who owned the field not to disturb the spot where the new martyr's body lay at a shallow depth. In 1930 the land passed to the collective farm and it has not been possible to learn the fate of the unmarked grave of Bishop Ambrose.

From August 1918 he was hierodeacon, then hieromonk of the Raifa hermitage. After the monastery was closed in June 1928 he served in the village of Taganash until December 1929, then settled in the village of Belaya Bezvodnaya. On 23 January 1930 he was arrested together with the monks of the former Raifa monastery and tried in the group case "The Case of the Raifa Monks, Kazan, 1930". He did not admit guilt. On 20 February 1930 he was sentenced to death by an OGPU troika of the Tatar Republic and was shot on 7 April 1930, the day of the Annunciation, with the other martyrs of Raifa. In 1996 he was numbered among the locally venerated saints of the Diocese of Kazan.

He is commemorated on 27 January, on 7 February (a movable day), in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church, and on 17 October, in the Synaxis of the Saints of Kazan, in new style.