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Biography

Short Description

Konstantin Fyodorovich Dyakov was born in 1864 in the village of Staraya Kulatka, Khvalynsky Uyezd, Simbirsk Governorate, in the Russian Empire, the son of an Orthodox parish priest. Raised in a clerical household typical of the pre-revolutionary Russian Church, he pursued a standard ecclesiastical education, completing the course at the Simbirsk Theological Seminary and then studying at the Moscow Theological Academy, where he received the degree of candidate of theology. In keeping with the practice of the married parish clergy, he married and was ordained to the priesthood in the early 1890s, beginning a long ministry in the Kharkov diocese that combined parish service with pedagogical work in theological and diocesan schools.

For more than three decades he served as a priest, eventually rising to the rank of protoiereus and occupying responsible positions in Kharkov, including rector of a major church and dean. The Bolshevik Revolution and the ensuing civil war, famine, and anti-religious campaigns transformed the conditions of church life. After the death of his wife he was tonsured a monk with the name Konstantin and, in the mid-1920s, was consecrated a bishop. He first served as Bishop of Sumy, a vicar of the Kharkov diocese, and was later elevated to archbishop and then metropolitan, becoming Metropolitan of Kharkov. In the complicated church politics of the 1920s he aligned himself with the patriarchal locum tenens Metropolitan Sergius (Stragorodsky) and the policy of seeking legal recognition from the Soviet authorities, a stance that was controversial among other Orthodox groups who regarded it as an unacceptable compromise.

In the mid-1930s Metropolitan Konstantin was transferred to the ancient see of Kiev as Metropolitan of Kiev and Galicia and Exarch of Ukraine, and he was named a permanent member of the patriarchal Holy Synod. This appointment placed him at the head of the Orthodox Church in Ukraine at a moment when the Soviet government was closing churches on a massive scale, arresting bishops and priests, and promoting atheist propaganda. Despite the extreme pressure, he continued to administer the remaining parishes and to represent the Church in dealings with the state. In October 1937, at the height of the Great Purge, he was arrested by the NKVD in Kiev. A troika of the Kiev regional NKVD sentenced him to death on charges of counter-revolutionary activity; he was shot on 10 November 1937. The location of his grave is unknown.

After the collapse of Soviet power, the memory of the new martyrs was restored. Metropolitan Konstantin was glorified as a hieromartyr by the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate in the 1990s and was included in the general canonization of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia by the Jubilee Bishops’ Council of the Russian Orthodox Church in 2000. He is commemorated on 10 November, the day of his execution, and together with the synaxis of the new martyrs. His life illustrates both the pastoral continuity of the Russian Church from the imperial into the Soviet period and the cost paid by those hierarchs who attempted to keep a canonical church structure functioning under a militantly atheist regime.

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