John of Verkhoturye

Saint John of Verkhoturye was a fool for Christ, a saint of the Russian Church, venerated locally. Very little is known of his life. It is said that he died in 1701 in the city of Verkhoturye, in the Tobolsk district, now the administrative centre of the Verkhoturye urban district in the Sverdlovsk region. He was canonized in 1984 as a locally venerated saint, in the Synaxis of the Saints of Siberia. He is also commemorated in the Synaxis of the Saints of Yekaterinburg. The commemoration dates are given inconsistently in the sources, so they cannot be fixed.

Information about the fool for Christ John is very scanty. The hagiologist Sergius (Spassky), in 1876, mentioning the blessed John, referred, besides a manuscript of an Icon Painter's Guide of the eighteenth century from the library of the Saint Sophia cathedral in Kyiv, to its publication (G. D. Filimonov, 1874) and called him a wonderworker of Verkhoturye and Siberia, placing his life in the seventeenth century. For this reason John is considered a contemporary of another fool for Christ of Verkhoturye, Cosmas. In the appendix to the publication mentioned, Filimonov gives an alphabetical list of the names of the saints named in the Icon Painter's Guide, but in neither of the lists does John of Verkhoturye appear.

In a synodikon of 1670 of the Holy Trinity cathedral of Verkhoturye, in the family commemoration books of the people of Verkhoturye, he is mentioned once: The family of Peter Barabanshchikov: Prokopy; John the blessed; the soldier Vasily; Agafia. The surname Barabanshchikov is not found among the native families of Verkhoturye in the seventeenth century. In a bread-⁠salary book of Verkhoturye of 1707 there appears a certain Leonty Barabanshchikov, a church reader and sexton at the church of the Hodegetria Mother of God across the river, but in the money-⁠salary book of the same year the same reader of the Hodegetria church, Leonty, is entered under another surname, Golyshev.

According to another view, under the name of John of Verkhoturye we should understand the monk Jonah, who founded the Saint Nicholas Monastery of Verkhoturye in 1604.