Ηegumen / Abbot
The venerable martyr igumen Maximilian (Marchenko) was a descendant of the Cossacks, the son of a priest. He took monastic vows in the Holy Trinity St. Sergius Lavra. In 1914, he was sent to the active army. Father Maximilian, according to reviews, was a kind and warm-hearted person, beloved by the sick and the medical staff of the military hospital. In 1915, he returned to the Lavra, becoming a watchman and a rule keeper of the Trinity Cathedral, later being elevated to the rank of igumen. In 1928, he was arrested as a 'former monk, not sympathetic to socialist construction' and sent to the Solovetsky camp. After three years of imprisonment, he served in the Kukuyev Church in the city of Zagorsk, where he was arrested in 1935 along with other clergymen on charges of creating a 'counter-revolutionary monarchist group.' Father Maximilian was sentenced to three years of exile in Kazakhstan, where in 1937 he was again arrested and sentenced to ten years in camps. He passed away in a correctional labor camp in the village of Chemolgan in the Almaty region.
