Vladimir Izmaylov

Holy Hieromartyr Vladimir Izmaylov was a protopresbyter of the Orthodox Church in Belarus who died as a confessor of Christ in 1930, in the Solovki camp. The act of the 2000 Council of Bishops calls him Vladimir (1885-1930), while the Orthodox Encyclopedia and other works call him Vasily Vasilyevich Izmaylov. What follows keeps to those works.

He was born on 4 June 1885 in Vyshny Volochyok, in the province of Tver, into a family of townspeople. He studied at the seminary in Tver and then at the Theological Academy in Saint Petersburg, where he took the degree of candidate of theology in 1910. After his ordination to the priesthood he taught dogmatic and moral theology at the Minsk seminary from February 1914. When the seminary was closed in 1920, he served at the church of the Protection of the Mother of God in Ozeritskaya Sloboda, near Minsk.

At the beginning of 1927 he was appointed rector of the Resurrection Cathedral in Borisov, and he resisted the Renovationists who wanted to seize it. In the summer of that year he was arrested on their denunciations and accused of counter-⁠revolutionary agitation. He did not admit guilt and accused no one. By a decision of the OGPU Special Council of 26 August 1927 he was sent to Solovki, where he died on 22 February 1930; according to some reports he was shot.

The Synod of the Belarusian Exarchate canonized him as a locally venerated saint on 28 October 1999, and the 2000 Council of Bishops of the Russian Church glorified him for veneration throughout the Church. He is commemorated on 9 February by the old calendar (22 February by the new) and, with the other Belarusian new martyrs, on 15 October by the old calendar (28 October by the new), as well as on the third Sunday after Pentecost.