Peter the Aleut

The Holy Martyr Peter the Aleut (in Alutiiq, Cungagnaq or Chukagnak) is venerated as a martyr by the Orthodox Church. He was a native of Kodiak Island, who received the name Peter at baptism into the Orthodox faith by the missionaries of Saint Herman of Alaska. According to the tradition of the Church, he was captured by Spanish soldiers in 1815, in California, and put to death in torments for his faith. His feast is on 24 September.

The place and year of his birth are not known; he is supposed to have been born on the islands of the Kodiak archipelago, which were part of Russian America. From the beginning of the mission at Kodiak, made up of monks from Valaam monastery, the Aleuts willingly received baptism; Cungagnaq, Peter in baptism, is believed to have been one of Saint Herman's spiritual sons. Fort Ross, the southernmost settlement of Russian America, was founded in 1812 by the Russian-⁠American Company, on the northern coast of California, eighty kilometres from San Francisco. In 1815 a group of fourteen Aleut hunters from Kodiak, working for the company, was driven ashore by a storm and seized by Spanish soldiers. According to the letter of Semyon Yanovsky, ruler of Russian America between 1818 and 1820, written nearly fifty years later, the Spaniards handed the Aleuts to Jesuits, who began to torture them and force them to accept the Roman Catholic faith. Scholars say, however, that the Jesuits were not then in California and that, according to the Orthodox Church in America, the Franciscans were to blame; the Dolores mission at San Francisco is mentioned. The Aleuts showed the crosses at their necks and said they had long since received the Christian faith on Kodiak and wanted no other; they were answered that, in the Catholics' view, they were heretics. They were kept two by two in prison, for some days, without food and water. Peter's cellmate, the Aleut Ivan Kyglaya, witnessed his passion: his toes were cut off, joint by joint, then his fingers, then his feet and hands; enduring, he repeated: I am a Christian and will not change my faith, and he died of loss of blood. The next day the torments would have continued, but from Monterey came an order that the Aleuts be taken to the captured Russians, and so they were saved. Of his martyrdom we know only from Kyglaya's testimony and Yanovsky's letters.

Historians doubt the truth of the story; the earliest testimony, a deposition of 1819, does not mention Jesuits. He was canonised by the Orthodox Church in America in 1980, ten years after the canonisation of Saint Herman, and several churches in North America bear his name.