Hieromartyr Eustathius Malakhovsky

Hieromartyr Eustathius Malakhovsky was born on 29 March 1880 into the family of a priest of the Polotsk diocese. After studying at the Polotsk theological school and the Vitebsk seminary he worked as a teacher, and in December 1904 volunteered for the Turkestan diocese, where settlers had few churches or clergy. Ordained deacon and priest in May 1905, he served in Karabulak, in Verny (Almaty), in the Lepsinsk district, as a travelling priest of the Pishpek district and from 1914 as rector of the church in the village of Pokrovskoye on the southern shore of Lake Issyk-Kul. He wrote for the Turkestan diocesan gazette and founded temperance societies, having himself, by his own account, overcome a weakness for drink early in his ministry.

During the 1916 uprising in Semirechye, when insurgents attacked Pokrovskoye in August, he gathered the villagers in church, heard a general confession and gave them Communion; services continued for days while the streets were barricaded with carts. When a detachment arrived from Przhevalsk, he led the villagers by night in a convoy of about seven hundred carts to the town; according to him, none of those who left was lost.

He later served as rector of the Protection church in the stanitsa of Nadezhdinskaya (now Yesik near Almaty), where on Easter Sunday, 22 April (5 May) 1918, he was killed when the Paschal procession clashed with a revolutionary demonstration. He was glorified among the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia in 2000 and is commemorated on 22 April (5 May) and on 8 September in the Synaxis of the Saints of Central Asia.