Theodore Belkin of Belogorsk

Holy Venerable Martyr Theodore Belkin of Belogorsk, a novice, is commemorated in the company of martyrs around the Venerable Martyr Archimandrite Varlaam, killed together with the brothers of the Belaya Gora (White Mountain) Monastery in 1918. The calendar page we rely on tells their passion together and lists Theodore among the novices, with no further details about him.

Varlaam (in the world Vasily Efimovich Konoplev) was born in 1858 in the Yugo-⁠Knaufsky works in the Osa district of the Perm province, in a peasant family of Old Believers without priests. He sought the truth from his youth and, before the age of thirty-⁠five, thought much about the Church, finding the apostolic writings unlike those of the Old Believers. A marvellous event on the Sunday of All Saints, a rain that fell on Belaya Gora during a service of supplication for which he had prayed, settled his doubts. In the 1890s he was received into the Orthodox Church by chrismation, together with his father and seventeen other family members. In November 1893 he was tonsured a rasophore monk and settled on Belaya Gora, where those desiring monastic life gradually gathered. On 1 February 1894 he received monastic tonsure with the name Varlaam, the next day was ordained hierodeacon, and on 22 February hieromonk. He was appointed head of the new missionary monastery on Belaya Gora, later called the Athos of the Urals, restored the services according to the rule and gave preaching an honoured place.

In June 1917 the last great celebration of the monastery took place: the consecration of the cathedral, to which Bishop Andronicus of Perm came. In August 1918 the Bolsheviks took possession of the monastery. They wrecked the altar of the cathedral, made a latrine in the cell of Archimandrite Varlaam and turned the icon-⁠painting workshop into a theatre. Many monks were killed after cruel tortures. On 12 (25) August they arrested the abbot, Archimandrite Varlaam, and shot him on the road to the town of Osa. Many monks of the monastery also received the martyr's death, among them the hieromonks Sergius, Elijah, Vyacheslav, Joasaph, John, Anthony; the hierodeacons Micah, Bessarion, Matthew, Euthymius; the monks Barnabas, Demetrius, Savva, Hermogenes, Arcadius, Euthymius, Marcellus; the novices John, Jacob, Peter, Jacob, Alexander, Theodore, Peter, Sergius, Alexis. Their graves were hidden by the authorities and remain unknown.

They were glorified in 1998 as locally venerated saints of the Perm diocese and were numbered among the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia by the Jubilee Council of August 2000. Theodore is commemorated on 25 August (new style), that is 12 August by the old calendar, in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church on 7 February, and in the Synaxis of the Saints of the Perm Metropolis on 14 February, the last two being movable.