Innocent of Irkutsk

Saint Innocent of Irkutsk, born Ioann Kulchitsky, was an eighteenth-century Russian Orthodox hierarch who became the first bishop of Irkutsk and was later glorified as a saint. He came from a family of the petty nobility in the Chernigov region of Left-bank Ukraine, then in the orbit of the Tsardom of Russia, and was born about 1680. He studied at the Kiev-Mohyla Academy, then the foremost Orthodox institution of higher education in the East Slavic lands, where he received a grounding in theology, languages, and the liberal arts. After graduation he was tonsured a monk with the name Innocent and ordained. His abilities as a teacher led to his transfer to Moscow, where he joined the faculty of the Slavic-Greek-Latin Academy; by the end of the 1710s he had become prefect of that school, a position of considerable academic and ecclesiastical responsibility.

In 1721 Innocent was consecrated to the episcopate with the title of Bishop of Pereyaslav and was appointed to lead an Orthodox mission to Beijing. The project reflected Peter the Great's interest in a more formal Russian ecclesiastical presence in China, where a small community of Albazinian Cossacks already lived. The Qing court, however, refused to admit a bishop, and prolonged diplomatic deadlock left Innocent unable to cross the frontier. He spent the following years in Transbaikalia and the Irkutsk region, living in monastic houses, including the Trinity Monastery at Selenginsk, and occupying himself with pastoral work among Russian settlers while awaiting a resolution that never came.

The situation changed in 1727, when Empress Catherine I established an independent Diocese of Irkutsk and Nerchinsk and named Innocent its first ruling bishop. The new see covered an enormous territory of eastern Siberia. Innocent made his residence at the Ascension Monastery near Irkutsk and set about organizing church administration, encouraging the foundation of schools, and preaching both to Russian colonists and to the Buryat and other indigenous peoples of the Baikal area. Contemporary accounts describe him as austere in personal life, accessible to the poor, and firm against remnants of shamanist practice. His episcopate lasted only about four years.

Innocent died on 27 November 1731 and was buried beneath the Tikhvin church of the Ascension Monastery. In 1764, during reconstruction of that church, his remains were found incorrupt, which greatly increased local devotion. After official examination, the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church glorified him as a saint in 1804; a silver reliquary was prepared and his relics were solemnly enshrined. The principal feast of Saint Innocent is 26 November (Old Style), with a second feast on 9 February commemorating the uncovering of the relics. The Ascension Monastery was destroyed in the Soviet period and the relics were for a time placed in a museum; they were later restored to the Church and are now kept at the Znamensky Monastery in Irkutsk. He is venerated throughout the Russian Orthodox Church as the heavenly patron of Siberia and of the city and diocese of Irkutsk.