Juvenaly of Alaska

Saint Juvenaly of Alaska, Hieromartyr, a Russian hieromonk of the first group of Orthodox missionaries sent to Alaska, killed in 1796, is regarded as the protomartyr of America. He is remembered on 24 September, with all the saints of Alaska, on 12 December, with the first martyrs of the American land, and on 2 July.

He was born in 1761 at Yekaterinburg, named Yakov Feodorov Govorukhin, son of the smelting master Feodor Govorukhin of the Nerchinsk mines. He too worked at the Voskresensky mines in Kolyvan, with the rank of ensign. In 1791 he left that post of his own will and went to the Valaam Monastery as a novice. In 1793 he was chosen for the American mission and was tonsured a monk and ordained a priest, being given the name Juvenaly in memory of Saint Juvenal, fifth-⁠century Patriarch of Jerusalem. In the same year ten monks and novices from the Valaam and Konevets monasteries were chosen to serve as missionaries in Russian America, under the leadership of Archimandrite Joasaph Bolotov: four hieromonks, among them Juvenaly and Makary, one hierodeacon, a monk named German, and four novices. Their destination was the Russian settlement on Kodiak Island in the Gulf of Alaska, some eight thousand miles away, across Asia through Siberia and then the Bering Sea.

They arrived on Kodiak on 24 September 1794 and found a settlement primitive beyond what they had been told, where violence was commonplace. The promised church was not there, nor the promised supplies for three years. Fathers Juvenaly and Makary went around the island of Kodiak in two months and baptized the Sugpiaq Eskimos, six thousand people in all. In 1795 Juvenaly left for the mainland and baptized the Chugach Eskimos at Nuchek, more than seven hundred, and the Dena'ina Indians at Kenai. The following year he continued west, beyond Lake Iliamna, “to the northern parts of the continent,” where the local people, not yet pacified, killed him, together with three fur traders and some baptized natives of Kenai.

Father Juvenaly died in 1796, in the village of Kuinerrak at the mouth of the Kuskokwim River. False accounts of the circumstances of his death were spread first by the writings of Ioann Veniaminov, then by the so-⁠called diary of Father Juvenaly, fabricated by Ivan Petroff, which was accepted for a century as a major source but is now regarded as a forgery. He was canonized in 1980.