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Biography

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Valentin Felixovich Voyno-Yasenetsky was born in 1877 in Kerch, in the Taurida Governorate of the Russian Empire. His father belonged to a Polish noble family and worked as a pharmacist; his mother was Orthodox, and the children were brought up in the Russian Orthodox Church. Gifted in drawing, he studied painting in Kiev before turning to medicine from a desire to serve the poor and the sick. He graduated from the medical faculty of Saint Vladimir University in Kiev in 1903 and became a surgeon, working in zemstvo hospitals and with the Red Cross during the Russo-Japanese War. He developed a particular expertise in regional anesthesia and in the surgery of purulent infections, subjects on which he later published major studies, including a doctoral dissertation and the book Essays on Purulent Surgery.

He married Anna Vasilyevna Lanskaya, a nurse, and they had four children. The family eventually settled in Tashkent, where he practiced surgery and taught. Anna died of tuberculosis in 1919. Thereafter he entered the clergy of the Russian Orthodox Church: he was ordained to the priesthood in 1921 while still working as a physician and professor, received monastic tonsure with the name Luke in 1923, and was consecrated Bishop of Tashkent and Turkestan the same year. He took the name Luke in honor of the Apostle Luke, the evangelist and physician.

Under Soviet anti-religious policy he was arrested several times in the 1920s and 1930s and spent many years in prison and in exile in Siberia and the Far North, including the Yenisei and Turukhansk regions and later the Krasnoyarsk territory. He continued to treat patients whenever circumstances allowed. During the Second World War he served as a consulting surgeon to evacuation hospitals in Krasnoyarsk. In 1946 he received the Stalin Prize for his medical writings and was appointed Archbishop of Simferopol and Crimea, remaining in that see until his death.

In Crimea he combined episcopal administration and preaching with medical consultation. In old age he lost his sight but continued to celebrate the liturgy and to dictate sermons. He died in Simferopol in 1961 and was first buried in the city cemetery; his relics were later transferred to the Holy Trinity Cathedral there. He was glorified as a locally venerated saint by the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in the 1990s and received church-wide canonization by the Russian Orthodox Church in 2000 as a hierarch-confessor. He is widely honored as Saint Luke of Crimea, a physician-saint and a witness to Orthodox faith under persecution.

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