Sergius Samatov of Belogorye

Holy Venerable Martyr Sergius Samatov of Belogorye was a monk of the Belogorsky Monastery in the Perm region, one of the brethren killed by the Bolsheviks in August 1918 together with their abbot, Archimandrite Barlaam.

The sources consulted say nothing particular of the life of Sergius Samatov; his name, Sergius, stands in the list of those killed. The story of the monastery we know from the life of the abbot. Barlaam, in the world Basil Efimovich Konoplev, was born in 1858 into a peasant family of priestless Old Believers in the Osa district. He himself told of his search for the truth: taught to read at about ten, he prayed with the old men, but finding the Gospel and apostolic writings at odds with what he found in the Old Believer writings about the Church and priesthood, he was troubled until the age of thirty-⁠five. By a wondrous event, on a Sunday of All Saints, while he was in an Old Believer monastery in Saratov, he begged God to enlighten him. On the way home he heard that at the White Mountain a rich rain had fallen in the middle of a solemn molieben. In the 1890s he joined the Orthodox Church by chrismation, and after him his father Efim, seventy-⁠five years old, his brothers Anton and Paul with their families, and the family of his elder sister, nineteen people in all. In November 1893 he was tonsured a rassophore and settled at the White Mountain, where those who wished for monastic life gradually gathered, twelve by 1894. On 1 February 1894 he received tonsure, was ordained hierodeacon, and on 22 February hieromonk, and was put in charge of the missionary monastery then being built at the White Mountain, later called the Athos of the Urals. He restored the Orthodox services according to the typikon and valued preaching, so that no service was left without a teaching, and a priest of Perm wrote of him in 1913 that he was a guide of consciences, to whom laity and monks entrusted themselves. For a quarter of a century the Belogorsky monastery comforted the suffering, and in June 1917 its cathedral was consecrated.

In August 1918 the Bolsheviks seized the monastery. In the sanctuary of the cathedral Red Army soldiers wrecked and defiled the holy table, in the archimandrite's cell they made a latrine, and the icon workshop they turned into a theatre where the boy singers of the choir were forced to sing worldly songs. Many monks were killed after cruel torments. On 12 (25) August they arrested Archimandrite Barlaam and shot him on the road to the town of Osa. Many of the monks also received a martyr's death, among them the hieromonks Sergius, Elijah, Vyacheslav, Joasaph, John and Anthony, the hierodeacons Micah, Bessarion, Matthew and Euthymius, the monks Barnabas, Dimitri, Sabbas, Hermogenes, Arcadius, Euthymius and Marcellus, and 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 in August 2000, at the Jubilee Council of Bishops, were numbered among the New Martyrs and Confessors for veneration throughout the Church. Sergius is commemorated on 25 August (12 August in the old style), 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.