Ioasaph of Belgorod

Saint Joasaph of Belgorod was born Joachim Andreyevich Gorlenko on 8 September 1705 in Priluki, a regimental town of the Cossack Hetmanate on the Left Bank of the Dnieper. He belonged to a notable Cossack officer family. His father, Andrei Dmitrievich Gorlenko, served as colonel of the Priluki Regiment. His mother, Maria Danilovna, was a daughter of Danylo Apostol, who later became Hetman of Left-bank Ukraine. The household was Orthodox and comparatively well-to-do, and the child was given a churchly upbringing. At a young age he was sent to the Kiev-Mohyla Academy, then the principal Orthodox school of higher learning in the region, where he remained through the 1720s.

In 1725 he received the monastic tonsure and the name Joasaph. He was ordained hierodeacon and then hieromonk in the following years and taught at the Kiev academy, eventually serving in administrative posts there. In 1737 the Holy Synod appointed him igumen of the Mgarsky Monastery of the Transfiguration near Lubny, a significant Cossack-era house. Contemporary accounts describe him as an austere monk who restored discipline and cared for the poor. After further monastic service he was chosen for the episcopate. On 2 June 1748 he was consecrated Bishop of Belgorod and Oboyan, a vast southern diocese of the Russian Church whose territory covered much of what is now Belgorod and Kursk oblasts and adjoining parts of Ukraine.

As bishop, Joasaph spent little more than seven years in office but left a strong local memory. He conducted lengthy visitations, sought to improve the education and morals of parish clergy, opposed the sale of church offices and clerical drunkenness, and founded or supported schools. He was known for personal fasting, night prayer, and generous almsgiving, and stories of healings and of his spiritual discernment circulated already in his lifetime. He died on 10 December 1754 at Grayvoron while returning from a pastoral journey, and his body was brought to Belgorod for burial.

Popular veneration of Joasaph grew in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries after his remains were reported incorrupt. The Russian Orthodox Church formally glorified him as a saint in 1911, in a rite associated with the uncovering of his relics; Emperor Nicholas II took an interest in the cause. After the Revolution the relics were confiscated by the Soviet state. They were identified again and returned to the Church in 1991 and are now enshrined in the Cathedral of the Transfiguration in Belgorod. He is commemorated on 4 September (glorification) and 10 December (repose) and is regarded as a heavenly patron of the Belgorod land.