Holy Hierarch and Confessor Sylvester (Olshevsky), Archbishop of Omsk

Holy Hierarch Sylvester was born on June 1/13, 1860, in the village of Kosovka (other sources: Kotelnya), Skvyra district, Kyiv province, the son of a deacon. He graduated from the Kyiv Theological Academy and engaged in missionary and pedagogical work. He was Bishop of Chelyabinsk (1914-1915), then Bishop of Omsk and Pavlodar (from 1915), and archbishop from 1918.

In late 1919, as White forces retreated from Omsk, he refused to evacuate and remained with his flock.

IMPORTANT CORRECTION OF THE CIRCUMSTANCES OF DEATH: the original account, which formed the basis of the 2000 canonization, described a martyr's death at the hands of the Cheka — hands nailed to the floor, torture with a red-hot ramrod, death on February 26, 1920. However, archival research by M. F. Panina (2014), whose findings were formally adopted by the Church, established from civil death registry records that Archbishop Sylvester was briefly arrested in 1918 but released, after which he fell ill and died of intestinal cancer on March 10, 1920 — the torture account, introduced by historian I. P. Shikhanov in 1997-1998, has no documentary support. By decision (blessing) of Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia dated May 18, 2018, the hierarch's title was officially changed from "hieromartyr" to "hieroconfessor" — in accordance with the clarified circumstances of his death (illness, not execution).

He was glorified locally in 1998 (Omsk diocese); he was canonized church-wide by the Jubilee Bishops' Council of the Russian Orthodox Church in August 2000.