Justina Melanich

Holy Martyr Justina Melanich was a peasant woman of the Chernigov region, sentenced to a camp in the years of the Second World War. She belongs to the new martyrs and confessors of the Russian Church.

She was born in 1887 in the Tupichen district, Chernigov province, and worked her own holding. In 1940 she was arrested and sentenced to two years in a labour camp. In 1942, in the Karlag camp, where she was serving her sentence, Ustinia Matveyevna was arrested again, in the group case of Venerable Martyr Evdokia (Andrianova), and on 20 April 1942 was sentenced to ten years of deprivation of liberty. Her further fate is unknown.

She was numbered among the saints, the new martyrs and confessors of Russia, by the Jubilee Council of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church in August 2000, for veneration by the whole Church. She is commemorated on 7 February (a movable day), in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church, in new style.