Zacharias (Lobov)

Zacharias (in the world Zakhar Petrovich Lobov) was a hierarch of the Russian Orthodox Church who suffered in the anti-religious campaigns of the Soviet period and is venerated as a hieromartyr among the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia. He was born on 23 March 1865 in the village of Petrovka, in the Elisavetgrad district of Kherson Governorate in the Russian Empire, the son of a peasant family. He received a church education, attending the Elisavetgrad Theological School and then the Odessa Theological Seminary. After completing seminary he was ordained to the priesthood in 1887 and spent many years in parish ministry in the Kherson diocese, belonging at that stage to the married white clergy.

After the death of his wife he was tonsured a monk with the name Zacharias. In the years of revolution, civil war, and the renovationist schism he remained with the canonical patriarchal Church rather than the state-supported Living Church. In 1923 he was consecrated bishop, initially as Bishop of Nizhne-Chirskaya, a vicar of the Don diocese. He later served as a ruling hierarch, including at Novocherkassk, and was raised to the rank of archbishop. In the mid-1930s he occupied the cathedra of Voronezh and Zadonsk. His ministry unfolded under constant pressure from the Soviet state, which sought to weaken and control the Church through schism, confiscation of property, and the arrest of clergy.

Archbishop Zacharias was arrested on several occasions in the 1920s and 1930s. He was interrogated, imprisoned, and sent into exile, yet he did not join the renovationist movement and continued, when free, to administer his diocese and to support the faithful. In 1935 he was again taken into custody while associated with the Voronezh cathedra. During the Great Purge of 1937 a troika of the NKVD of Voronezh oblast condemned him to death. He was shot on 9 September 1937. The place of his burial was not disclosed to his relatives or to the Church, a common practice in the mass executions of that year.

In August 2000 the Jubilee Bishops’ Council of the Russian Orthodox Church glorified the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia, including Archbishop Zacharias among the hieromartyrs. He is commemorated on 9 September, as well as with the general synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors and with regional synaxes of the saints of Voronezh and of the Don. Surviving documentation of his life is fragmentary, consisting largely of service records, investigation files, and the memory of the Church; no substantial body of his writings is known to have been preserved.