Bishop
Saint Martyr Arkady, Bishop of Lubny, Vicar of Poltava, was born in April 1888 in the village of Yakovitsy, Zhytomyr province, in the family of priest Joseph Ostalsky. After graduating from the Volhynian Theological Seminary, he served as a priest in the city of Staro-Constantinov from September 1911, and later as the rector of the Nikolskaya Old Believer Church in Poltava. During the Civil War, he organized the Orthodox Brotherhood in Zhytomyr, providing assistance to the poor and the sick. Father Arkady himself showed selflessness, giving his belongings to those in need.
In the spring of 1922, he was arrested on charges of resisting the confiscation of church valuables. After the trial, he was sentenced to death, but thanks to the petitions of the faithful, the sentence was commuted to five years of imprisonment. After his release in 1925, he visited the Diveyevo Convent, where he was tonsured into the mantle. Returning to Zhytomyr, he continued to serve and lead an ascetic life.
On September 2, 1926, he was consecrated as Bishop of Lubny, but was soon arrested and exiled to Kharkov, and then to Tuapse. Despite the ban, he secretly traveled to Lubny to serve the Paschal liturgy, but was forced to go into hiding. In 1927, he was arrested again and exiled to Kazan, from where he escaped to Leningrad. In May 1928, he was arrested in Moscow and sentenced to five years in a labor camp.
While in prison, he provided spiritual support to other inmates. In 1937, he was released, but soon arrested again and executed on December 16 (29), 1937, at the NKVD shooting range in Butovo. He was canonized among the ranks of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia in August 2000 for public veneration.
