Sabbas Kolmogorov of Belogorye

Holy Venerable Martyr Sabbas Kolmogorov of Belogorye was a novice (or monk) of the Belaya Gora Monastery, in the Perm diocese, and was killed in August 1918, with its abbot, Archimandrite Barlaam, and many other brothers. The page numbers him among those who died as martyrs on that day, but gives no other details.

Archimandrite Barlaam, in the world Basil Efimovich Konoplev, was born in 1858 in the factory village of Yugo-⁠Knaufsky, Osa district, Perm province, in a peasant family of priestless Old Believers. In an autobiography he told of his search for the truth. He learned to read at nine and through reading Scripture began to ask questions about the faith, about the schism, about the Orthodox Church and about the priesthood, without which he understood that one cannot be saved. At night he prayed with tears before the icons, asking the Lord to show him the way. Until the age of thirty-⁠five he sought, travelled and listened to the priestless. The change came on a Sunday of All Saints, in Saratov province, in an Old Believer monastery, where he prayed the Lord to show him, by abundant rain during a service at Belaya Gora, that the grace of the Holy Spirit works through the pastors of the Russian Church. On the way back he heard that in the middle of the service rain had fallen abundantly. In the 1890s he joined the Orthodox Church by Chrismation, together with his father, his brothers Anthony and Paul, their families and the family of his elder sister: nineteen persons.

In November 1893 he was tonsured a rasophore and settled on Belaya Gora. Gradually those who wanted monastic life gathered there; by 1894 there were twelve. On 1 February 1894 he was tonsured a monk with the name Barlaam, the next day ordained hierodeacon, and on 22 February, at the consecration of the altar of the small church of St Nicholas, hieromonk. He headed the missionary monastery under construction, later called the Athos of the Urals, restored the services according to the Typikon and, bearing in mind the missionary character, gave preaching a place of honour, morning and evening. A priest of Perm wrote in 1913 that Father Barlaam was a guide of consciences, of special experience, struggle, strength of spirit and childlike innocence, to whom people came from the whole Perm province and even from distant regions; great mysteries were performed in his narrow cell. In the first days of June 1917 the last great celebration of the monastery took place: the consecration of the cathedral at Belaya Gora, to which Bishop Andronic of Perm came, with processions of pilgrims from the surrounding villages.

A year later, in August 1918, the Bolsheviks took possession of the monastery. They wrecked and defiled the altar of the cathedral, made a latrine of the cell of Archimandrite Barlaam, and turned the icon-⁠painting workshop into a theatre, where the monastery's boy singers were forced to sing worldly songs. Many monks were killed after cruel torments. On 12 (25) August the Red soldiers arrested the abbot Barlaam and shot him on the way to the town of Osa. Many monks also received the martyr's death, among them the hieromonks Sergius, Elias, Vyacheslav, Joasaph, John and Anthony; the hierodeacons Michael, Bessarion, Matthew and Euthymius; the monks Barnabas, Demetrius, Sabbas, Hermogenes, Arcadius, Euthymius and Marcellus; the novices John, Jacob, Peter, Jacob, Alexander, Theodore, Peter, Sergius and Alexis. Their graves were hidden by the authorities and are unknown.

They were glorified in 1998 as locally venerated saints of the Perm diocese and numbered among the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia at the Jubilee Council of Bishops in August 2000. St Sabbas is commemorated on 25 August, on 7 February (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church and on 14 February (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the Saints of the Perm Metropolis, in the new style.