Seraphim Shakhmut

Saint Seraphim Shakhmut, hieromartyr, was an archimandrite of the Russian Orthodox Church in Belarus and died in a camp around the year 1946. He was canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church among the hieromartyrs. He is commemorated on 24 August (the day of his arrest, by the old calendar), and also in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia and in the Synaxis of the Saints of Belarus.

He was born on 15 (28) July 1901 in the village of Podlesie in the Minsk governorate (now the Lyakhovichi district of the Brest region), into a poor peasant family, with the name Roman Romanovich Shakhmut. From childhood the Church drew him: while the other children played ordinary games, he would often make little crosses from sticks, put an apron on as an epitrachelion and begin to serve. Though living in great need, he finished the two-⁠class people's school at Lyakhovichi.

In 1920 he found himself on the territory of Poland because of the change of borders. In 1922 he entered the monastery of the Dormition at Zhirovichi as a novice. On 1 April 1923 he was tonsured a monk with the name Seraphim. Because he had a good voice he was given the obedience of the choir, and became a good choir director and rubricist. In 1926 Archbishop Panteleimon (Rozhnovsky) ordained him hierodeacon and soon hieromonk. At the end of 1939 he was raised to the rank of hegumen, and later to archimandrite.

After the occupation of Belarus by the German army, he devoted himself zealously to restoring church life in the occupied lands. On 6 September 1944 he was arrested at Grodno on a charge of aiding the German occupiers. For five days he was interrogated at Grodno and then taken to the prison in Minsk. He firmly rejected the charge that he had been an agent of German counterintelligence. On 7 July 1945 the Special Board of the NKVD of the USSR sentenced Father Seraphim to five years in a concentration camp. He died about 1946 in an NKVD prison, by the official version of heart failure. The sources give 5 March 1946 as the date of his death and the Gorky region as the place, that is, the Unzhlag camp.