A long time ago, back in 1988, I found myself in Kerch again. That year, I was going to spend two months there. It was already the end of autumn. The seaside parks, embankments, and streets of the old city seemed almost deserted after the summer buzz. The leaves were beginning to fall. The departing October decorated the ancient city of Kerch with its last burst of color. The bushes and grass on the lawns were still green, the dense canopy still crowned the trees, and the life‑giving rays of the daytime sun still overcame the nighttime coolness, covering the yellow, orange, and burgundy foliage with a thin layer of gold.
On the weekends, I wandered around the old town, along streets that used to be named Mithridatsky and Bosphorus, past the former Forerunner Square, past the bronze statue of the commander on a pedestal, and climbed the staircase with griffins to Mithridatova Hill. From its summit, I looked out at the serene blue sea, at the vast shores with distant burial mounds, at the streets, houses, and square far below, and at the monument, which seemed so small from that height. One day, I walked the entire length of what used to be Konstantinovskaya Street; the single‑story houses on it still held the memory of bygone years and people. Now it was known by a name that was mysterious to me—May 23. At the very end of the street, a small church with a green tent‑shaped dome unexpectedly came into view.
I went inside. A service was in progress; in the middle of the church, by an open coffin, the psalmist was finishing reading the Epistle, and people were standing nearby, holding burning candles in their hands. The funeral service was already coming to an end. An elderly priest was reading the Gospel:
Do not be amazed at this; for the time is coming when all who are in the graves will hear the voice of the Son of God; and those who have done good will come forth to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil will come forth to the resurrection of condemnation (John 5:28–29).
“Where’s the cemetery?” I asked, surprised. “It’s right here,” they said, pointing to the vacant lot right in front of me
People came up to the deceased to offer a farewell kiss. His hands, which held an icon, and his face were covered with a white cloth with a cross on it; a red coffin lid was brought into the church. Those seeing the deceased off left the church, and I followed. The hearse and the bus drove away, and the church was left empty. Several women were standing by its open doors; it was they who said that this was the Afanasyevskaya Cemetery Church, the only one still in operation in the city, while another one was far away on the outskirts. “And where is the cemetery?” I asked, surprised. “There it is,” they said, pointing to the vacant lot right in front of me.
I took a different route back, passing by the old Church of St. John the Baptist. It stood on the square, next to the monument to Lenin. I knew that the church had long been abandoned, and the church building was now owned by the State Historical and Cultural Reserve; it seemed that a lapidarium had been set up inside. I walked through the square, across the carpet of falling leaves, and reached the church near the northern chapel. Traces of excavations were visible under the walls. The main entrance door, beneath the bell tower, was half‑open. Inside, behind the counter, sat an exceptionally unattractive woman who said that I needed to buy a ticket. I walked past the stones with carved figures of people and animals from the excavated burial mounds and ancient tombs to the former altars. I don’t know why, but the woman on duty watched me intently and with obvious dislike. Inside the church, the wall frescoes had been completely destroyed, and half‑filled pits were visible on the floor…
It was time to go home; I had promised to come to Kerch next summer. But I returned only four years later.
The Church of St. John the Baptist
Many changes had taken place during this time. The unshakable state [the Soviet Union] had collapsed, the ruling party had disappeared, and the Church of St. John the Baptist had been returned to the faithful. And I met Semyon Alekseyevich.
I still remember our first meeting with joy. Immersed in the past, he himself was a worker at the museum‑reserve—how much he knew about Kerch! My interests were quite different, but perhaps in some ways we were alike. Now I have a companion for walks around Kerch. The next Sunday, I suggested we go to the Church of St. John the Baptist together; after the service, I wanted to ask him about it.
Suddenly, Semyon Alekseevich stopped by the southern wall of the nave. “And here a priest is buried,” he said, and he pointed to the floor
The service in the northern chapel ended, the royal doors closed, and the curtain was drawn. We walked through the church; I kept looking around, examining the new icons and the still modest decoration of the church. Semyon Alekseyevich was talking about the church’s past. Suddenly he stopped by the southern wall of the nave. “And here a priest is buried,” he said, and he pointed to the floor. I started asking questions—nothing distinguished this place. And Semyon Alekseyevich told me about a story that happened not so long ago.
In August of the memorable year 1988, when the millennium of the Baptism of Rus’ was being celebrated, a researcher at the historical and archaeological museum, Vyacheslav Kholodkov, surveyed the area on the northern side of the church, hoping to find the foundations of early medieval buildings. While digging a trench along the side chapel, they discovered a stone slab; the diggers lifted it. Beneath the slab, they found a narrow crypt with a sealed zinc coffin. When they opened it using a crowbar, the remains of a priest came to light.
Place of the opened crypt Halfway through that hot day, a truck of the sort that carries construction materials drove into the courtyard of the museum’s main building on Sverdlova Street, delivering the coffin from the grave. The excavation supervisor, who jumped out of the cab, hurried to the offices of the management and staff, announcing an unprecedented archaeological discovery and inviting everyone to come down to see the find.
Those gathered around the zinc coffin, with the lid already removed, saw a skeleton dressed in a priest’s vestments, with a silver cross on its chest and a carved wooden cross and a Gospel placed in its hands. Several people present began to say that the burial was clearly less than a hundred years old, that this was not an archaeological find at all, and that the coffin should be immediately returned to its original place and covered with earth. The museum director disagreed with this and ordered that the pectoral silver cross with the crucified Christ be placed in the safe of the jewelry storage vault, and that Kholodkov examine and describe everything inside the coffin. The coffin, covered with a piece of tarpaulin, was placed in the museum courtyard among the exhibits.
Here, in the courtyard, Kholodkov laid out the epitrachelion, the phelonion, the pectoral cross, the scapular, and took out the bones. A week later, the museum staff demanded that the management remove the coffin from their sight. Moreover, rumors about the coffin containing the body of a priest, which had been removed from the grave, began to spread throughout the city. The director ordered the coffin to be moved to another, enclosed, location within the museum‑reserve. Such a location was found nearby, in the courtyard of the former customs house. This location met all the requirements: A high stone fence, high solid gates, and three vicious dogs in the courtyard. The courtyard was called the “dog run.” The pack, languishing in the scorching sun, found shelter in the shade of a coffin resting on a platform.
The priest's burial place The inventory of the remains was completed, and the report on the archaeological find was submitted to the museum’s archive, but the zinc coffin, which had been stored under a tarpaulin for some unknown reason, continued to stand in the corner of the dog run.
Six months passed. Talk about the opening of the grave and the removal of the relics of the priest from the St. John the Baptist Church in the year of the celebration of the millennium of the Baptism of Rus’ grew louder and eventually caught the attention of the commissioner for religious affairs of the Crimean region. The city’s party committee ordered that the priest’s body be buried without publicity and without witnesses.
Leaving the zinc coffin as an exhibit, the museum acquired a wooden coffin hastily put together in a carpentry workshop, which was used to transfer the priest’s remains. In the last days of December, three people—two museum workers and Kholodkov—carried an unlined wooden box into the church and closed the door behind them. They silently lowered it into a shallow pit—what was left of an excavation site—and covered it with earth.
Leaving the zinc coffin as an exhibit, the museum acquired a wooden coffin, into which the priest’s remains were interred
In May of the following year, to dispel rumors about the remains of the priest, the organ of the city committee of the Communist Party, the Kerch Worker newspaper, published Vyacheslav Kholodkov's article “Secrets of the Church of St. John the Baptist”:
As a result of the excavations at the Church of St. John the Baptist in August of last year, the Kerch museum collection acquired new finds. Among them, there is one that has aroused particular interest among the townspeople. It concerns the burial of a priest, which was discovered under the northern wall of the church. The burial was carried out in a coffin placed in a crypt. For safety reasons regarding the burial, and also because a burial discovered during planned archaeological work in a city where there is no modern cemetery area is considered an archaeological find and falls under state protection, the coffin was removed from the crypt and transported to the reserve premises. The museum recorded and described the discovery: The coffin contained the remains of a priest, apparently from the clergy of St. John’s Church.
Due to the discovery, rumors began to circulate in the city about a sign marking the thousand-year anniversary of the Baptism of Rus’ and about the appearance of a saint’s relics. The priest of the local St. Athanasius Church was informed by the museum about the discovery, but he showed no interest in it. Indeed, the grave is unnamed, and there is no information about the priest. As for a miraculous finding of the relics of a saint, it is well known that the relics must be incorrupt, and miracles must be performed in their presence. In our case, nothing of the sort is observed.
Guided by the principles of humanity, the reserve’s administration decided to lay the clergyman’s remains to rest, and this winter his remains were reburied inside the Church of St. John the Baptist.
I needed to leave. Other cities, other concerns, and new friends awaited me. Not long after, I returned to my beloved city. It had become much prettier in many ways, but in many respects it remained the same—the same old streets on the slope of Mithridates, with the same incomprehensible names, the same distant burial mounds, the same serene blue sky, the same large bronze monument in the main square, and nearby—the Church of St. John the Baptist.
Together with my old friend Semyon Alekseyevich, I entered the restored church. We walked across the marble slabs of the floor to the southern wall of the nave, where the priest was buried—the spot was distinguished only by a fire extinguisher that stood opposite it.
That’s when we decided that we needed to tell this story, and that I was the one who would have to do it.
First of all, we needed to find the name of the buried priest
First of all, we needed to find the name of the buried priest.
I went to Simferopol, to the Crimean State Archive. In the reading room, I am leafing through the parish registers of the Church of St. John the Baptist. Here, in the 1892 book, there is an entry about the death and burial in September of the church’s rector, Archpriest John Paksimade. Starting in January 1893, a new rector began serving at the church—Priest Elias Ioakimov. The following years: 1894, 1895, 1896, 1897… In 1898, in the “About the Deceased” section of the parish register, there is an entry:
“On April 9, he died; on the 11th, he was buried. The rector of the Church of St. John the Baptist, Priest Elias Panagiotov Joakimov, passed away. He was 40 years old. He died of rapidly progressing pulmonary consumption. He was buried in a solemn ceremony by the clergy of the entire city within the grounds of this church.”
Simferopol again, now the “Tavrika” library. “Tavricheskie Dyeparchialnye Vedomosti” from 1898. The April issues, numbers 9 and 10, covering the first and second halves of the month—I’m expecting to find an obituary. There isn’t one. I’m looking at the May books. In mid‑May, a month and a half after the priest’s death, Vedomosti reprinted an article from the April issue of the “Police List of the Kerch City Administration”:
On Thursday, April 9, at 12 o’clock in the afternoon, the rector of the local St. John the Baptist Greek Church, Priest Elias Panagiotovich Joakimov, passed away after suffering from consumption. The deceased was born on August 6, 1858, in Tiflis [now Tbilisi]. After graduating from the Tiflis Theological Seminary in 1883, Father Elias took up the position of teacher at the Guria Theological School. In 1886, Archbishop Paul, the exarch of Georgia, ordained him as a priest and appointed him rector of the Alexandropol Cathedral and dean of the churches in the district of the same name. At the end of 1892, at the request of the Kerch Greek Society, Fr. Elias was appointed by Archbishop Martinian of Taurida to his last place of service.
Already weakened by illness, Father Elias, due to the cramped conditions in the school premises, gave up part of his apartment to be used as a school
The priest worked hard in his parish. For ordinary parishioners who only understood Greek, Fr. Elias made sure to have a northern altar added to the church for early liturgies in Greek, dedicated to St. Nicholas and the Great Martyr Catherine. Overseeing a parish school and grammar school, Fr. Elias placed them at the top of the list in the Kerch‑Yenikalsky district. Concerned about his students as they entered the world, he established a sewing and patternmaking school, where the girls gained the opportunity to earn their living through honest work in the future. The priest’s care for the students reached the point of self‑sacrifice: already weakened by illness, Fr. Iliya, due to the cramped conditions in the school premises, gave up part of his apartment to serve as a school, depriving himself of peace and a significant portion of the fresh air that his ailing body so desperately needed.
In view of the reposed priest’s diligent service, His Grace Michael, Bishop of Taurida and Simferopol, gave permission for Fr. Elias to be buried on the grounds of the Church of St. John the Baptist near the chapel he built.
The burial was served on April 11 with the participation of all of the local clergy, with a large congregation of worshippers present.
***
“The dead will rise and those who are in the graves will stand up, and those who are alive on earth will exult when they stand with their spiritual bodies, radiantly glorious and incorrupt. Dry bones, hear the word of the Lord: ‘I will bring upon you a spirit of life, and will lay sinews upon you; and I will bring flesh upon you, and cover you with skin.’ Rise out of the ancient past, you who are redeemed by the Blood of the Son of God, restored to life by His death, for the light of the Resurrection has dawned upon you. Open to them now, O Lord, the whole abyss of Thy perfections. Thou hast shone upon them with the light of the sun and moon, that they may see the glory of the radiant choirs of Angels, Thou hast delighted them with the magnificence of the heavenly lights of East and West, that they may also see the never-waning light of Thy Divinity. O Lord of unutterable Love, remember Thy servants who have fallen asleep” (Akathist for the repose of the departed, ikos 11).
