Joseph Nelyubovych-⁠Tukalsky

Holy Hierarch Joseph Nelyubovych-⁠Tukalsky was Metropolitan of Kyiv, Galicia and all Rus' and exarch of the Throne of Constantinople, and died on 26 July 1675. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church numbered him among the saints on 22 November 2021.

Born Athanasius Nelyubovych-⁠Tukalsky, he first appears in 1649, as the elder of the Holy Spirit monastery in Vilnius. From 1658 he was archimandrite of the Leshchyn monastery, and on 3 August 1661 the king confirmed him bishop of Mogilev and Mstislavl, while he remained igumen of the Leshchyn monastery. In 1663 the Orthodox clergy elected him Metropolitan of Kyiv, but the Polish government did not recognize him. In 1664, slandered by Hetman Teteria, he was imprisoned for almost two years in the fortress of Marienburg; freed in 1667, he lived at Chyhyryn. In 1668, at the request of Hetman Doroshenko, the Patriarch of Constantinople confirmed him as Metropolitan of Kyiv and his exarch in Poland and Lithuania.

His election came in the midst of the struggle between Russia and Poland for Ukraine. The metropolitan did not dare to come to Kyiv, because neither the Kyiv clergy nor the Cossacks of the right bank recognized him, and Moscow thought him unreliable and set Archbishop Lazar Baranovych of Chernigov as locum tenens of the see. With Doroshenko he considered a treaty with Turkey, which he later regretted bitterly; in a letter of 9 August 1670 he lamented the "scattered flock". Yet he always defended Orthodoxy, and gave the Kyiv Brotherhood College a village he had received from Doroshenko, writing that he gave it "like the widow's two mites".

He died on 26 July 1675 and was buried at the Mgar monastery in Lubny. His teachings remained in manuscript and his epistles were printed. The Holy Synod of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, on 22 November 2021, on the recommendation of the canonization commission, numbered him among the saints and appointed his commemoration for 8 August (26 July by the old calendar), the day of his death.