Q4336993

Hieromartyr Onufriy, in the world Anton Maksimovich Gagalyuk, was born on 2 April 1889 in Posad-Pokrovskoye, Elisavetgrad district, Kherson Governorate of the Russian Empire, in the family of a miller. His father died while Anton was still a child, and his mother raised the family in poverty and piety. Drawn to the Church from youth, he entered the Odessa Theological Seminary and later the Kiev Theological Academy, from which he graduated in 1915 as a candidate of theology. During his academy years, in 1913, he received monastic tonsure with the name Onufriy and was ordained hierodeacon and hieromonk.

Following his studies he taught in theological institutions in southern Russia and Ukraine as the revolutionary upheavals of 1917 transformed the life of the Church. Remaining loyal to the canonical hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church, he opposed the Renovationist movement. In 1923 he was consecrated bishop, receiving the title of Bishop of Elisavetgrad, vicar of the Kherson diocese. His subsequent episcopal career unfolded entirely under conditions of Soviet persecution: he was repeatedly arrested, exiled, and reassigned to different sees as the authorities sought to disrupt church administration.

In 1933 Archbishop Onufriy was appointed to the Diocese of Kursk and Oboyansk. There he attempted to sustain parish life and monastic communities amid closing churches and growing terror. He was known among the faithful for personal austerity, liturgical devotion, and pastoral concern. In 1935 he was arrested in Kursk, accused of anti-Soviet agitation and participation in a counter-revolutionary organization—standard charges of the period. After a term of imprisonment, an NKVD troika condemned him to death in 1938.

Archbishop Onufriy was executed by firing squad on 1 June 1938. The location of his grave is unknown. In 2000 the Jubilee Council of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church glorified him as a hieromartyr in the host of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia. His feast is kept on the anniversary of his death. Little survives of his personal writings, but the record of his steadfastness under interrogation and his refusal to compromise with schism or the state has been preserved in church memory and the acts of canonization.