Micah Podkorytov of Belogorye

Venerable Martyr Micah Podkorytov of Belogorye, a hierodeacon, lived at the Belogorsky monastery in the Perm diocese and is commemorated among the brethren of the monastery killed together with Archimandrite Barlaam. The Azbyka page gives of him only the name among those who received a martyr's end.

Archimandrite Barlaam (in the world Vasily Efimovich Konoplev) was born in 1858 in the Yugo-⁠Knaufsky works, Osa district of Perm province, in a family of priestless Old Believers. In his autobiography he tells how he sought the truth and came to the Orthodox Church. He was a guide of consciences, to whom people came from all of Perm province, and the Belogorsky monastery comforted the suffering for a quarter of a century. In the first days of June 1917 the last great celebration took place at the monastery, the consecration of the Belogorsky cathedral, to which came the holy hieromartyr Bishop Andronicus (Nikolsky) of Perm, and processions arrived from the surrounding villages with many pilgrims; the services were held in the open air, and nature itself seemed to listen, without wind and with the candles unmoved.

A year passed. In August 1918 the Bolsheviks seized the monastery. In the main altar of the cathedral the Red soldiers smashed and defiled the Holy Table. In the cell of Archimandrite Barlaam they made a latrine, and the icon-⁠painting workshop they turned into a theatre, where the monastery's boy singers were forced to sing shameless worldly songs. Many monks were killed after cruel tortures. On 12 (25) August the Reds arrested the abbot, Archimandrite Barlaam, and shot him on the road to the town of Osa. Many monks of the monastery received a martyr's end. Their names: the hieromonks Sergius, Elijah, Vyacheslav, Joasaph, John, Anthony; the hierodeacons Micah, Bessarion, Matthew, Euthymius; the monks Barnabas, Demetrius, Sabbas, Hermogenes, Arcadius, Euthymius, Marcellus; the novices John, Jacob, Peter, Jacob, Alexander, Theodore, Peter, Sergius, Alexis. The graves of the martyrs were hidden by the authorities and are unknown.

They were glorified in 1998 as locally venerated saints of the Perm diocese and numbered in August 2000, at the Jubilee Council of Bishops, among the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia, for veneration throughout the Church. Micah is commemorated on 25 August, in the new style, with the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church (a movable day) and, on 14 February, with the Synaxis of the Saints of the Perm Metropolis (a movable day).