Vladimir Talyush

Holy Hieromartyr Vladimir Talyush was a priest in the village of Zaluzhye, Bobruisk district, Belarus, and died as a martyr in a camp after his arrest in 1933.

He was born in 1891 in the village of Zaluzhye in the Bobruisk district, Minsk province, in the family of a village parish clerk. After the Minsk seminary he was a teacher in parish schools. In 1914 he was mobilized and fought on the fronts of the First World War. After the war, in 1918, he worked again as a teacher. In 1920 he received the priesthood and was appointed rector of the church of the Holy Great Martyr George in Zaluzhye. The villagers remembered him as a good pastor, attentive to their needs, with particular care for the parish church.

He was arrested in April 1933 because he had tried to collect from the parishioners the money required for timely payment of the church tax. With him eight other people from Zaluzhye and neighboring villages, who had helped him with the collections, were arrested. Someone in the village denounced him as having said: "Do not believe the people who call themselves communists, for they are antichrists." Father Vladimir was sentenced to ten years in a camp. In confinement he received a martyr's end. On 28 October 1999 the Holy Synod of the Belarusian Orthodox Church canonized him as a locally venerated saint, and in August 2000 the Council of Bishops of the Russian Church numbered him among the New Martyrs and Confessors for veneration throughout the Church. He is remembered in an account of the twenty-⁠three martyr priests of Minsk, beside Seraphim, Vladimir Khirasko, Basil Izmailov, Sergius Rodakovsky, Michael Novitsky, Nicholas Matskevich and others.

The saint is commemorated in the new style on 7 February (movable) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church and on 11 July (movable) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Belarus.