Vasili Martysz

Life and Ministry

Vasili Martysz was born at Teratyn in the Chełm region of partitioned Poland in AD 1874, ordained a Russian Orthodox priest in AD 1900, and served in the Aleutian and North American diocese under the future Patriarch Tikhon, organizing parishes among Carpatho-Russian immigrants in Pennsylvania and New Jersey from AD 1901 to AD 1912. Returning to the Chełm district as a parish priest, he passed through the upheavals of the First World War, the Polish-Soviet War, and the canonical reorganization of the autocephalous Polish Orthodox Church in AD 1925, in which he was made senior army chaplain (Protopresbyter) of the Polish Armed Forces and chief catechist of Orthodox soldiers, a position he held through the German invasion of AD 1939 until his retirement to his native Teratyn after the fall of Warsaw.

Circumstances of Death

On the night of 4 May AD 1945, six days before the German surrender and as the eastern Polish countryside passed under Soviet control, Father Martysz was murdered in his presbytery at Teratyn together with his daughter Vera. The assailants were members of an anti-Orthodox nationalist band — variously identified as Polish or Ukrainian partisans — that had been targeting Orthodox clergy in the Chełm district through the closing months of the war. He was beaten and shot at his front door; his church was looted; his manuscript translation of liturgical texts into Polish was burned. The pattern of killings to which his death belonged claimed the lives of several other Polish Orthodox priests in the spring of AD 1945 and is the subject of his glorification by the Polish Orthodox Church.

Legacy

Father Martysz was glorified as a New Martyr of the Polish Orthodox Church in AD 2003, together with his daughter Vera and six other Chełm-district clergy. His witness is that the cross is taken up in the parish house as well as in the public square — that the Lord whom he had named to American immigrants in Pennsylvania he confessed at the threshold of his own door in the Lublin countryside, in the silence of a rural night. The Polish Orthodox Church now celebrates the Synaxis of the Chełm and Podlasie Martyrs on the Sunday after the Feast of the Protection of the Theotokos.