John Kevroletin

Holy Confessor John Kevroletin, a hieroschemamonk, was born on 23 May 1875 in the village of Kulakovo, Troitsk district, Tobolsk province, in the family of the peasant Afanasy Kevroletin. He learned at home. In 1894 he entered as a novice the monastery of the Exaltation of the Cross at Kyrtom, in the Irbit district, Perm province. He fell asleep in the Lord on 27 January 1961, and in the summer of 1993 his relics were found and moved to the Saint Nicholas monastery in Verkhoturye.

Monastic life

The monastery of Kyrtom had been founded in 1878, a hundred and ten versts from Irbit, on the bank of the river Kyrtomka, in a place of dense forests and swamps. It was founded by the monk Adrian (in the world Andrei Medvedev), a peasant from Perm who had struggled for a time on Athos, and he was helped by Timothy Shein, a retired soldier. In 1891 the Holy Synod recognized it officially. It had two churches, both dedicated to the Exaltation of the Cross, and at the beginning of the twentieth century about eighty brethren. Life was harsh: until noon nothing was eaten, the food was plain, and the bread was of rye only. Ivan's obedience was the dressing of hides. Six years he struggled under the guidance of the abbot Adrian, and then, after his death, in 1902, he passed to the Saint Nicholas monastery in Verkhoturye, where he worked as a painter and carpenter. Soon the hieromonk Xenophon (Medvedev), later an archimandrite, was appointed abbot, in whose time the cathedral of the Exaltation of the Cross was built, in which were placed the relics of the Holy Righteous Simeon of Verkhoturye.

On 20 December 1907 the novice John was tonsured into the mantle with the name Ignatius, in honour of the Holy Hieromartyr Ignatius the God-⁠bearer, commemorated that day. In 1909 he was ordained hierodeacon, and in 1913, on the day of the consecration of the new cathedral, hieromonk. In 1925 the monastery was closed; some of the monks stayed in the town, others went away to the surrounding villages and served in parishes. Father Ignatius, often sent to serve in churches without a priest, served between 1919 and 1922 in the village of Serbishna, in 1922 for nine months at the Kazan church in Kasli, then at Verkh-⁠Isetsk, between 1923 and 1924 at the church of Saint Sergius at Istok, and in 1924 returned to Verkhoturye and served until 1925 at a church of the monastery.

Persecution

In those years any priest could be arrested without warning, and Father Ignatius, knowing it, avoided as far as he could meeting the OGPU. Once they came to the house of his spiritual daughter, where he was, and the girl hid him in the cellar, and she answered with such boldness and skill that she removed their suspicions and they left without a search. He was first arrested in 1925 and spent about a month in the OGPU prison. Released late at night, he knocked at the door of nuns he knew, but so that the neighbours should not hear, he gave no answer to their questions. Not knowing who was knocking, they did not open. Then he said in a plaintive voice: "My mother-⁠in-⁠law threw me out into the street and here they do not let me in either." They knew him by his voice and by the fact that he had earlier called prison his "mother-⁠in-⁠law", and let him in. Between 1925 and 1927 he served in the village of Dymkovo, in 1927 at Nikolo-⁠Pavdinsk, then at Irbit, in 1928 in the town of Dolmatovo for two months, then in the village of Kislovo, between 1929 and 1931 at Fedorovka, then in Serbishna, where he was arrested.

In 1931 the OGPU set itself the aim of destroying all the monastic communities in the Urals. The arrests took place at the beginning of 1932; of the brethren of the Verkhoturye monastery alone a hundred and forty were arrested, among them Father Ignatius, on 28 March 1932. Asked whether he belonged to a counterrevolutionary organization, he answered: "I was indeed a member of a monastic organization, which went on existing after the closing of the Verkhoturye monastery in 1925 under the guidance of Archimandrite Xenophon. To him I went in the summer of 1930 to ask counsel, as to an abbot. I admit that, as a monk, by my views and convictions I was opposed to the measures of Soviet power, it could not be otherwise. If you share fully the views of Soviet power, you must cease to be a monk; to be a monk means to be an enemy of Soviet power and of the party. For me monasticism was more important than Soviet power, and I was and am its enemy, but I did no counterrevolutionary work." At the end of the investigation the investigator asked whether he wished to repent before Soviet power. The answer was: "I do not wish to and I will not repent."

On 7 September 1932 the Special Council of the OGPU sentenced him to three years of exile in Western Siberia. He was sent with a group of priests and monks to the Narym region, part of the way on foot. In exile he fell ill with scurvy, from which he was cured by a spiritual daughter who came to nurse him, bringing honey from her apiary. Returning, he travelled in a carriage with criminals and, so as not to draw attention, took part in their talk and turned a cigarette in his hand as if about to smoke, thus reaching Yekaterinburg safely. There his strength failed, and he barely reached the dwelling of his spiritual daughter and fell on the threshold. He was not allowed to live in Yekaterinburg, and he settled in a small dilapidated house on the edge of Verkhoturye. The place was deserted and hooligans troubled him, but a man named Mikhail, a dentist tonsured a monk, gave money to buy a new house near the Verkhoturye monastery, from which the cathedral could be seen. He moved there with his helpers, the schemanun Evdokia and the nun Simeonia.

Foolishness for Christ and the end

A new period began in the ascetic's life, when he hid himself from the world under the guise of folly. He dressed in lay clothes, sometimes in women's, so that some did not recognize him, even those who knew him well. For a time he herded goats on the edge of the town and was loved by all the boys of the neighbourhood, who gathered round him to hear his stories. Many spiritual children remained to him; he visited them and performed the Mysteries in their houses, and when illness did not let him go out, he received them in his cell, where with his helpers he read the whole cycle of services. A priest remembered him as a resourceful and unflagging man, who feigned a little folly and sought to be condemned and laughed at. At Pascha he once came into the church of Saint John in the middle of the service and said: "I slept through the service, I have just come." At home he played tricks too: he dressed in a woman's dressing gown, with his skufia crooked, went out to wash, overturned the helpers' pots or put out the fire with water, then hid in his cell, wrapped in a blanket. He called his spiritual children "the frights". Of his bed he said that whoever lay on it would be healed. A spiritual daughter told that she worked in a sewing workshop and things went badly; he said to her: "Do you pray to the Righteous Simeon? He was a tailor. Ask him to help you, in your own words." From that day her work went better. At other times he knocked down the wood she had stacked or scolded her at digging the garden, and when she was hurt and came back to ask forgiveness, he blessed her radiant with joy. He taught people to pray with attention and to hold to the services.

In his last years he was gravely ill, and not long before his death he was tonsured into the schema with the name John. A spiritual daughter told that he joked even when sick: when the women asked whether it was hard to lie there, he answered that otherwise they would make him split wood. On the day of his death, when asked whether to read the canon for the departure of the soul, he said: "It is still early." Then he himself read a page and a half, and others read on. The hieroschemamonk John (Kevroletin) fell asleep on 27 January 1961.

The Church commemorates him on 27 January, the day of his repose, 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.