Valentin Felixowitsch Woino-Jassenezki

Bishop Luka

Valentin Felixowitsch Woino-Jassenezki ( Russian Валентин Феликсович Войно-Ясенецкий * April 27 ^{. Jul} / 9. May  1877 ^greg. In Kerch ; † 11. June 1961 in Simferopol , also known as St. Luka. , St. Luke. Or Luke the Confessor ) was Archbishop of Simferopol and Crimea and Bishop of Tashkent and is a saint of the Russian Orthodox Church .

Life

He came from a noble family of Polish origin, studied medicine and worked as a country doctor in a hospital on Lake Baikal since 1903 . There he married and had four children. In 1917 he became chief physician of a large hospital in Tashkent, where he also taught as a professor of surgery at the university. His engagement against the persecution of Christians in the Soviet Union soon caused him problems. Nevertheless, he was ordained a monk in 1923 and secretly ordained a bishop in the Samarkand area on May 8 of the same year .

persecution

Icon depicting St. Luke

Ten days after his return to Tashkent, he was arrested by the GPU ; the charges were anti-revolutionary activities and espionage in favor of Great Britain . He spent the two years of his exile in Turukhansk , where he worked as a surgeon in a hospital. After further deportation to various hamlets on the edge of the Arctic Ocean , he was called back to Turukhansk in the spring of 1924 because a surgeon was needed there. In 1926 he was allowed to return to Tashkent.

In 1930 he was arrested again; this time on the grounds that he had assisted in the murder of Professor Mikhailovsky. The request of Michailowski's widow to bury her husband in the church was taken by the authorities, "whereby the motive for his alleged murder complicity was that, out of religious fanaticism , he wanted to prevent the professor from raising a dead person with the help of materialistic science" He spent the following time again in prisons and in exile.

In the early 1930s he was treated for a tumor in Leningrad . A vision he witnessed during a service reminded him of his duty to serve the Church.

Soon afterwards he was again ordered to Moscow , where, after another interrogation, he was offered an offer to continue his scientific work on local anesthesia and the surgical treatment of festering wounds - provided that the priesthood was given up, which he refused. In 1933 he was released and returned to Tashkent, where he worked in a small hospital. In 1934 he published his work on the surgical treatment of festering wounds, for which he later received a Stalin Prize .

Although suffering from a tropical disease that caused the retina to detach , he continued his surgical activity until 1937. In the course of the increasing persecution of the Church, he was arrested along with the Archbishop of Tashkent and other clerics . He was charged with creating an anti-revolutionary organization and subjected to continuous interrogation that lasted 13 days and nights. After further interrogation and torture , he signed a confession and was exiled to Siberia for the third time in early 1940 , this time to the Krasnoyarsk area . He continued his research in Tomsk .

When the war against Germany began , he was appointed chief physician at the Krasnoyarsk hospital, with responsibility for all hospitals in the area. In the following years he was awarded the Patriotic Order and raised to the rank of Archbishop. In 1943 he attended a council in part, that Sergius the Patriarch chose, and was a member of the permanent synod appointed the Patriarchate. In total, he delivered over 1250 sermons , 700 of which were recorded and, collected in 12 volumes, published in Russia.

In 1944 the hospital was moved from Krasnoyarsk to Tambov , where he also took over the management of the local eparchy . In 1946 he was transferred to the Crimean peninsula and appointed Bishop of Simferopol . Due to illness, he had to stop working as a surgeon, but continued to perform advisory roles. In 1956 he went completely blind, but still celebrated the Divine Liturgy and directed the diocese .

He died on June 11, 1961 and was buried with great sympathy from the clergy and a large crowd. His grave soon became a place of pilgrimage ; many miracles are said to have occurred there. In the Soviet Union it was officially said that there was no literature about him.

See also

• Soviet Union
• Persecution of Christians in the Soviet Union

literature

• Alexander Solzhenitsyn : The Gulag Archipelago . Volume II, Chapter 10: Instead of Political , pp. 285f.

Web links

Commons : Walentin Woino-Jassenezki  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

VIDEO documentary about Lukas Woino-Jassenezki (Luka Krimskiy) with German subtitles (subtitles must first be activated in the playback window)

• St. Luka, Archbishop of Simferopol and Crimea and unselfish doctor († 1961)
• June 11, 2007 - 130th anniversary of St. Luka, Archbishop of Simferopol and Crimea, the unselfish doctor
• Biography , info from Crimea and Perekop (Russian)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ St. Luka, Archbishop of Simferopol and Crimea and unselfish doctor († 1961) ( Memento of the original from April 16, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. ; Retrieved October 2, 2012.