New Hieromartyr Meletius of Issyk-Kul

Meletius (Golokolosov) was a hieromonk of the Holy Trinity Monastery on Lake Issyk-Kul, in present-day Kyrgyzstan, who perished in 1918 amid the upheavals that followed the Russian Revolution. He is numbered among the Synaxis of New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia and is commemorated on September 3.

By the biographical account of the Metropolitanate of Kazakhstan, he was born in 1870 into a family of the Don Cossack Host. He entered the Glinsk Hermitage as a novice in 1898 and was tonsured to monasticism there on August 27, 1902. In 1905 he was transferred to the Holy Trinity Monastery in the Turkestan Diocese, which lay on the shore of Lake Issyk-Kul, and there he was ordained hierodeacon and then hieromonk in 1906, afterward serving in parish and garrison ministry in the surrounding region.

The Issyk-Kul monastery was devastated during the Central Asian uprising of 1916, when, according to the regional record, a number of its monks were killed and the community was scattered. Meletius survived this attack and continued to serve in the Kopal district of the Semirechensk region. There, according to the same biography, he perished in 1918 during the fratricidal strife of the civil-war years. He was glorified among the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia at the Jubilee Bishops' Council of the Russian Orthodox Church in 2000.