Eleutherius (Epiphany)

Born in the family of a rural psalmist ; his younger brother is Bishop Isidore (Epiphany) . He studied at the Stary Oskol Theological School, at the Kursk Theological Seminary , which he graduated in 1889 . He was appointed a teacher at a parish school in the Yamskaya Sloboda, where he worked for one academic year.

In 1890 he married and was ordained presbyter on November 25 of that year and sent to the Intercession Church of the village of Trostyanitsy, Novooskolsky Uyezd; soon widowed.

In 1900 he entered the St. Petersburg Theological Academy , where then the future Patriarch Sergius (Stragorodsky) was the inspector and then rector. As a student, around 1904, he received monastic tonsure with the name Eleutherius .

At the end of SPbDA, he was identified as a teacher of homiletics at the Kamenetz-Podolsky Theological Seminary ; since 1906 - inspector of the Kholm Theological Seminary; since 1909 , in the rank of archimandrite, rector of the Smolensk Theological Seminary.

On August 21, 1911 he was consecrated bishop of Kovensky, vicar of the Lithuanian diocese (Archbishop Tikhon (Bellavin) ). In 1914 , after the outbreak of World War II , he moved to the Moscow Donskoy Monastery ; at the end of hostilities he returned to his diocese.

In connection with the election in June 1917 of Archbishop Tikhon (Bellavin) to the Moscow Department, by decree of the Holy Synod of June 28, 1917, he was appointed manager of the Lithuanian Diocese. He was a member of the All-Russian Local Council of 1917-1918.

By the Decree of the Holy Synod of July 11, 1921, he was elevated to the rank of Archbishop of Lithuania and Vilnius and appointed Holy Archimandrite of the Holy Spirit Monastery in Vilna.

He found himself in independent Poland (Vilno was occupied and annexed by Poland in March 1922). He opposed the autocephalous tendencies in the Polish Orthodox Church and remained faithful to the jurisdiction of the Moscow Patriarchate. Due to his non-recognition of the autocephaly of the Polish Church, on the night of October 13-14, 1922 he was detained by the Polish authorities in the Holy Spirit Monastery in Vilna and placed in the Catholic Monastery of Silence ( Kamaldulov ) in the town of Bielany, near Krakow, where he was until the beginning of February 1923. . In February 1923 he was released and deported from Poland to Lithuania.

February 6, 1923 arrived in Kovno ( Lithuania ), which served as the provisional capital of the country.

In the fall of 1928, he received an invitation from the Deputy Locum Tenens Metropolitan Sergius (Stragorodsky) to come to Moscow and report on the situation of the Orthodox Church in Lithuania and Poland. While in Moscow ^[1] , November 28, 1928, he was elevated to the rank of Metropolitan of Lithuania and Vilensky.

Protopresbyter Vasily Vinogradov in a book published in 1959 in Munich, “On Some Most Important Moments of the Last Period of the Life and Work of St. Patriarch Tikhon ”wrote about him:“ <...> With the permission of the Soviet government, he stayed at the Patriarchate for a week (more than a week the Soviets resolutely did not allow). M. Elevferii presented his impressions in a small book (in 2 parts) under the title “Week in the Patriarchate”. This book amazes with the naive, almost childish gullibility with which a foreign hierarch, unfamiliar with the conditions of Soviet life and the psychology of sub-Soviet church leaders, and also a man of a clean and open soul, looked at the fictions of a free church life and free church created by him for artificially showing management. It doesn’t even occur to him to think that the members of the Synod, the Russian hierarchs, who were so hospitable in receiving him, could somehow answer his questions about the conditions and circumstances of the church and their personal lives, not those that they would like to give him, but those that They are pleasing to the GPU (whose agents, as they well knew, in one form or another, certainly everywhere and everywhere in the Patriarchate). ” ^{[2] [3]}

By decree of Metropolitan Sergius and the Synod of December 24, 1930, due to the transfer of Metropolitan Eulogius (St. George ) and most of his parishes to the jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the refusal of Bishop Vladimir (Tikhonitsky) to take control, he was appointed temporary administrator of the West European Russian parishes (who wished to remain administered by the Moscow Patriarchate); since April 30, 1931, the manager.

In 1936 he was awarded the right to offer the cross for worship.

After the occupation and transfer to Lithuania of a part of the formerly Polish territory by the USSR , on November 2, 1939 he returned to Vilnius (annexed by the USSR in July 1940 ^[4] ).

He died in the evening of December 31, 1940; buried in the bishop's tomb in the church of the Holy Spirit Monastery in Vilnius.

• "Week in the Patriarchate." Paris, 1933.
  • A week in the Patriarchate: impressions and observations from a trip to Moscow // The history of the Christian church at home and abroad in the XX century. Collection / Materials on the history of the church. Vol. 2. - M .: Krutitsky Patriarchal Compound. - 1995. - S. 174-295
• About Atonement. Letters to Metropolitan Anthony. - Paris. - 1937. - 196 S.
• “The collegiality of the Church. Of God and Caesarean. " Paris, 1938.
• "The papacy in the matter of the union of the Churches." Paris, 1940.

Also the author of a number of letters and articles of a theological and polemical nature; the archives of the Moscow Patriarchate keep his correspondence with Patriarch Tikhon and Metropolitan Sergius (Stragorodsky) from 1922 to 1939.

• Orthodox Encyclopedia . T. 18, pp. 280-282.

• Eleutherius (Epiphany) Website Russian Orthodoxy
• Metropolitan Eleutherius (Epiphany Dmitry Yakovlevich) Yakov Krotov Library