Bazyli Martysz

Bazyli Martysz (also known in English as Basil Martysz) was born on 20 February 1874 in the village of Teratyn in the Chełm land, then part of the Russian-ruled Kingdom of Poland. He belonged to a hereditary Orthodox clerical family; his father, Andrzej Martysz, was a parish priest. The Chełm region in the later nineteenth century was marked by a complicated confessional history, including the suppression of the Uniate Church and the incorporation of much of the local East Slavic population into the Orthodox Church. Martysz received his secondary theological training at the Chełm Theological Seminary and then studied at the Kiev Theological Academy. As a married member of the secular (white) clergy of the Russian Orthodox Church, he was ordained to the priesthood around the turn of the twentieth century and was assigned to missionary work rather than remaining in a local Chełm parish.

In the early twentieth century he was sent to the North American mission of the Russian Orthodox Church. He served both in Alaska, among communities that descended from the old Russian colonial church, and in the coal and industrial towns of Pennsylvania, where he ministered to Carpatho-Rusyn and other immigrant faithful. His American years overlapped the episcopate of Bishop Tikhon (Belavin), later Patriarch of Moscow. After more than a decade of parish and missionary service he returned to Europe in the years before the First World War. The American period remained a distinctive part of his biography and is regularly noted in later Orthodox accounts of his life.

After Poland regained independence, Martysz entered the Orthodox chaplaincy of the Polish Army. He became the leading Orthodox military chaplain of the Second Polish Republic, organizing pastoral care for Orthodox soldiers in a predominantly Roman Catholic army and eventually holding the rank of colonel as head of that chaplaincy. He retired from active military service in the 1930s and in time went back to his native Teratyn. He was married to Helena and they had children; unlike monastic clergy, he lived as a married parish and military priest throughout his ministry.

The Chełm countryside was devastated by occupation, displacement, and ethnic violence during the Second World War. On 4 May 1945, immediately after the collapse of German power in Europe and while civil order in the borderlands was still broken, armed men broke into the Martysz home in Teratyn. The elderly priest was tortured and murdered; his wife was assaulted and wounded. He was buried in Teratyn. Contemporary and later accounts describe the killers as bandits operating in the chaotic final phase of the war; church sources commemorate the death as a martyrdom.

On 20 March 2003 the Holy Council of Bishops of the Polish Autocephalous Orthodox Church glorified Bazyli Martysz as a new martyr, in connection with the wider commemoration of Orthodox victims of wartime violence in the Chełm and Podlasie lands. His principal feast is 4 May, the date of his death. He is venerated in the Orthodox Church in Poland as a priest-martyr whose life joined theological education, missionary work in North America, service as a senior military chaplain of the Polish state, and a violent death at the war’s end.