Hieromartyr Hieromartyr Platon (Kulbush), Bishop of Reval

CRITICAL: date corrected from "December 31" (his episcopal consecration date, 1917, mistakenly taken for his feast) to the true date of his martyrdom, January 1/14; a second commemoration added — November 18, Synaxis of the Saints of the Estonian Land.

Hieromartyr Platon (secular name Pavel Petrovich Kulbush) was born July 13, 1869, in the village of Pootsi-Küla, Pärnu district, Livonia, to a psalmist's family. He graduated from Riga Theological Seminary (1890) and St. Petersburg Theological Academy (1894). That same year he founded the first Estonian-language Orthodox parish in St. Petersburg — a major pastoral undertaking for the capital's Estonian diaspora — and in 1898 an Estonian parish school and the Brotherhood of St. Isidore of Yuriev.

Widowed, he took monastic tonsure as Platon and on December 31, 1917, was consecrated Bishop of Reval by Metropolitan Veniamin (Kazansky) of Petrograd — becoming the first ethnically Estonian Orthodox bishop. Despite German occupation, he actively toured Estonian parishes in 1918.

During the Bolshevik occupation of Tartu (Yuriev), he was arrested January 2, 1919, together with his clergy, and tortured. On the night of January 15, 1919, as the Red Army retreated before advancing Estonian and White forces, he was shot in a cellar along with about 19 hostages, including two archpriests. His body bore seven bayonet wounds and four gunshot wounds, including an explosive round to the right eye; he was identified by his pectoral cross. He was buried February 9, 1919, in the Transfiguration Cathedral of Tallinn, where his relics rest. He was glorified by the Jubilee Bishops' Council of the Russian Orthodox Church in August 2000 (having earlier been glorified by ROCOR in 1982).