John Shishev

Holy Hieromartyr John Shishev (in some sources: Shishev), a priest, was born in 1867. It is presumed that his father was the psalmist John Filippovich Shishev of the church of Florus and Laurus in the village of Pirogovskoe, Kamyshlov district. He was shot on 26 August 1918, together with the priest Joasaph Panov.

Studies and family

In 1880 he graduated from the theological school at Dolmatovo in the second category and entered the Perm Seminary. He did not study very well: after the first class he had re-⁠examinations in Holy Scripture and mathematics, and after the second in Greek. In 1886 he finished the seminary in the second category and married Olga, daughter of the priest John Nikolaevich Oransky. They had three children: the sons Vladimir and Peter and the daughter Elizabeth. Father John and his wife Olga had many sufferings because of their children. The father wished the firstborn, Vladimir (born in 1890), to become a priest, and sent him to the seminary. But Vladimir, having an exceptional talent for painting, left the seminary and went to Yekaterinburg, where he entered, secretly from his father, a drawing school. Later he attended the art school in Kazan, under the painter N. I. Feshin, and in 1914 was called into the army. Almost at once he fell into Austrian captivity and for several years was in the Wieselburg camp. There he made sketches for Austrian peasants and often received as a "reward" milk, bread and lard, on which he and his comrades kept their strength. He returned to his parents only in 1918, after tormenting years of separation. The daughter Elizabeth died at twelve. After her death, Father John and his wife Olga adopted an orphan girl, Zoya, who later married, had a daughter and died young. Saint Ignatius (Brianchaninov) writes that temptations and sorrows are sent to man for his benefit. The troubles that Father John bore all his life probably prepared him to receive with full faith and humility the cup of martyrdom.

Service

In December 1887 he was ordained priest and assigned to the church of the Ascension in the village of Krestovskoe, Kamyshlov district. After five and a half years he was moved to the church of the Protection of the women's community of Kolchedan. The village of Kolchedanskoe, a former fort of Kolchedan, had been founded in 1673, seventy versts from Kamyshlov, on the bank of the river Iset. In 1865 the women's community of the Protection was set up here, with a church with side chapels of the Righteous Simeon of Verkhoturye and of the Holy Apostle John the Theologian. At the community a parish school for girls was run. Of the hundred and forty-⁠eight sisters at the beginning of the twentieth century, a hundred and fifteen had received their basic schooling here. Father John taught the Law of God and received the best marks from the inspectors of church schools; the report for 1897-1898 said that he fulfilled his duties "with particular care, zeal and success", and the one for 1898-1899 that he worked "with particular diligence, love and knowledge of the work". In 1897 he received the leg-⁠guard and, a year later, the archpastoral blessing "for labours in church schooling and for material help to schools". In 1894-1895 he was also spiritual investigator for the second district of the Kamyshlov district.

In April 1900 Bishop Irenaeus of Yekaterinburg and Irbit moved him to the first priest's vacancy at the church of the Holy Great Martyr George in the village of Mironovskoe, Verkhoturye district, where the rest of his life was spent. The village, founded in the seventeenth century at the mouth of the river Aramashka into the Rezh, had the stone church of Saint George, with a side chapel of the Protection, built between 1801 and 1835; at the beginning of the twentieth century it had over two hundred and twenty households and twelve hundred inhabitants. Father John was head of the parish school in the hamlet of Lipinskaya and a member of the Society of Mutual Aid for those who learn and teach in the church and literacy schools of the Yekaterinburg diocese. For many years he was a member of the brotherhood of the Righteous Simeon of Verkhoturye, set up in 1886 for enlightening and missionary work, above all against schism, and of the Yekaterinburg committee of the Orthodox Missionary Society. In 1906 he gave twelve "Palestine readings", meant to make the holy places of Palestine known to the people; the peasants received them with sympathy, put the images of the holy places beside the icons and read the brochures aloud in the family circle. In September 1902 he was appointed catechizer for the year 1903. For his zeal he received the skufia in 1902, the kamilavka in May 1908 and by 1915 the pectoral cross. This cross was as if the sign of what he was soon to bear: three years later the Lord granted him to bear another cross, of troubles and martyrdom, in the bloody whirlwind of the civil war.

Martyrdom

In the summer of 1918 the Urals were at the heart of the civil war, and the red terror had gained great scope and tragedy here. On 26 August 1918 a band of five armed Red horsemen entered the village of Mironovskoe. Coming to the two priests, Father John Shishev and Father Joasaph Panov, they told them that a denunciation of anti-⁠Soviet agitation had been received against them and ordered them to go to the regimental staff, then at the station of Yegorshino. Father John was accompanied by his son Vladimir, just returned from Austrian captivity, and with Father Joasaph went his son Sergei. The newspaper "Uralskaya Zhizn" later told of the killing: "They left the village. They went about a verst. 'Halt,' command the Reds. The priests stopped. 'Priests, devils, get down. And you, White Guard (Father Panov's son).' The priests and the young man got down. Father Shishev's son stayed on the horse. 'Well, priests, line up, raise your hands, pray to your God, we shall shoot you now,' command the villains. Abuse follows, volleys of rifles and the victims are brought... The witness of the terrible scene, Father Shishev's son, sat as if petrified, having lost his reason." So perished the faithful servant of the Church of Christ, Father John Shishev. "Eternal memory to these martyrs," wrote the "News of the Yekaterinburg Church" a little later.

After the shooting, Vladimir received from the Reds permission to bury his father in the village of Mironovskoe and did so at once. His wife, Olga Ivanovna, outlived him by almost thirty years, falling asleep after the Great Patriotic War, in 1946 or 1947. Vladimir moved to Alapaevsk, where he was a well-⁠known painter; his pictures are in the Tchaikovsky house-⁠museum in Alapaevsk, in the galleries of Yekaterinburg and Perm and in many private collections. He had children, Apollon, Ivan and Antonina. He died in 1942, at fifty-⁠two. Peter, the younger son, served in the civil war in the White army, and so could not later find skilled work in the Soviet state; he lived long at Alapaevsk, in the same house as his brother, as a tinsmith, had one son, Vladimir, lived to deep old age and died in the 1980s. In the surviving photographs, on the father's face are seen meekness and unfeigned humility, inner nobility, and in the grave gaze a quiet sorrow. In 2002 the saint was glorified in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia from the Yekaterinburg diocese.

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.