Victor Romanowski

Holy Hieromartyr Victor Romanowski was born in 1899 in Temnohajce, in the Kremenets district, and graduated from the Zhytomyr seminary in 1917. After brief studies at Saint Vladimir University in Kyiv he was ordained priest in 1921 by Bishop Dionysius. At the University of Warsaw he took a master's degree in Orthodox theology, with a thesis on the dogmatic teaching of Saint Irenaeus of Lyon.

From 1930 he was a military chaplain, at Vladimir in Volhynia and then as district chaplain in Warsaw; in 1939 he taught fundamental theology at the Orthodox seminary of the university and sat on the synodal commission for translating Holy Scripture into Polish. In the campaign of September 1939 he served in a field hospital. He was taken prisoner by the Soviets on 17 September, held in the Ostashkov camp and shot in 1940 at Tver (Kalinin); he was buried in the mass graves at Mednoye. He held the rank of lieutenant colonel. Although he is counted among the victims of Katyn, he therefore died at another site of the same crime.

The Polish Autocephalous Orthodox Church decided on 18 March 2025, at the session of its Council of Bishops, to canonize the martyrs of the Katyn massacre, among them these three priests, together with other clergy and faithful whose names God alone knows. The solemn proclamation took place on 16 September 2025 in the church of Holy Wisdom (Saint Sophia) in Warsaw, where Metropolitan Sawa read the act of canonization and the icon of the new martyrs was presented.