Seraphim Bogoslovsky

Holy Venerable Martyr Seraphim Bogoslovsky, a hieromonk, was killed by Red soldiers in 1921, in the mountain skete near Alma-⁠Ata (Verny), together with the hieromonk Theognostus. They have been venerated as local saints since 1993 and as saints of the whole Church since 2000.

The ascetics Seraphim, Theognostus and Anatolius had come from the Glinsk Hermitage, in the Kursk diocese, to the missionary Holy Trinity Monastery near Lake Issyk-⁠Kul, founded in 1882 by Bishop Alexander (Kulchitsky) of Turkestan to spread the Orthodox faith and enlighten the Asian nomads. They were learned monks of high life; Seraphim had a gift for icon painting and a fine voice, Anatolius was a singer and choir director, and Theognostus had good administrative gifts. In the monastery they grew close to the monks Pachomius and Heraclius. By 1909 Seraphim and Anatolius were called to the episcopal city of Verny (today Almaty), where they were ordained and served in the church of the Dormition of the Turkestan bishop's house; in 1912 they received the right to wear the epigonation. They also cared for the Iveron-⁠Seraphim convent.

Seraphim had been born in the town of Glukhov in the 1870s, in the world with the name Alexander, the son of Euthymius, steward of a landowner, and of Maria, a gentle and pious woman who went constantly to church. It was revealed to his mother that her son would die a martyr; when he was a schoolboy she saw him in a dream as a martyr, and once, listening to him sing church hymns, she saw a crown above his head. His mother's words sank deep into his soul: if my death will be a martyr's, what shall I seek in the world? Grown to youth, he withdrew to the Glinsk Hermitage. There he had as confessor the hieromonk Domnus (Ageev). After the abdication of the tsar, a novice, Theoctista, went to Father Seraphim in the gorge; he met her on the threshold and said that he knew why she had come: Domnus had told him, Seraphim, Seraphim, the tsar has been set aside and everything goes with hurried steps toward ruin.

After the Bolsheviks came to power in March 1918 and Bishop Pimen was shot, the monks withdrew to the mountains, eight versts from the city, to the Medeo gorge, where they made a skete and a church dug into the mountainside, and then, giving the skete to nuns, they sought a more secluded place and found it on Mount Kyzyl-⁠Zhar, where they made cells, caves and an altar. Seraphim was the confessor of the skete. In 1921 three Red soldiers came to the skete on horses, with rifles. Father Seraphim gave them tea and laid them down to sleep; he did not sleep, but read the prayer rule. Toward morning the soldiers came up and shot him in the back; he had time to cry out the name of Anatolius. Then they went to Father Theognostus, who used to pray at night in a cave; tired, he had lain down in his cell with his hands crossed on his chest, and they shot him in the heart.

The next day the militia came, examined the place and allowed burial. They dug a grave and put them in it, without coffins, wrapped in their mantles. Later the hieromonk Anatolius served the funeral service for them on Mokhnataya hill. After this, Fathers Pachomius, Heraclius and Anatolius did not stay in the skete. Anatolius served for a time at Verny, then went to Sukhumi, in the mountains, and was shot in the early thirties. Heraclius, a schema-⁠monk, died of illness in 1937, warned beforehand of his death. Pachomius, born in 1880 in Kursk province, was arrested in 1935 and shot in 1936, and the wanderer Victor died a martyr in 1936-1937. The nun Evdokia was killed in September 1918 by a Red detachment, wrongly accused of counter-⁠revolution.

The grave of the martyrs Seraphim and Theognostus in the Aksai gorge has always been venerated by the faithful; in 1991 a cross was set on it and then a roof, and many cases of healing are known. On the site of the Kyzyl-⁠Zhar skete the Aksai Seraphim-⁠Theognostus monastery has opened. They were glorified in 1993 as local saints of the Almaty diocese and numbered among the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia at the Jubilee Council of Bishops in August 2000. St Seraphim is commemorated on 7 February (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church, and on 11 August and 8 September in the Synaxis of the Saints of Central Asia, in the new style.