The Holy Martyr Vasily/Basil Martysz served in Afognak and Kodiak Alaska and then in Pennsylvania, Connecticut, New York and Alberta for more than a decade before returning to Poland, where he became Head of the Orthodox military chaplaincy and Chancellor of the Autocephalous Orthodox Church of Poland. He was martyred in 1945, a time of great inter-religious and inter-ethnic tension in Poland, when
Hundreds of thousands of Orthodox "Rus" were expelled to the USSR, and many of the clergy persecuted by ultra-nationalist Polish groups. Scores of Orthodox villages were abandoned and burned in an Allied-approved policy of "ethnic cleansing" that much reduced the Orthodox population of Poland following the Second World War.
In July 2008, Archpriest Michael Oleksa, acting-chancellor of the Diocese of Alaska, Orthodox Church in America, presented to the St. Mary Magdalena Cathedral in Warsaw, a gift of holy relics of St. Herman of Spruce Island and received, in exchange, with the Blessing of His Beatitude, SAWA, Metropolitan of Warsaw and All Poland, relics of St. Basil Martysz. A fragment of these were presented to St. Hermanís Seminary in Kodiak, Holy Trinity Church at State College, PA, and St. Michael's Church in Old Forge, PA, while the major portion of the relic was taken to St. Sergius Chapel, Syosset, NY, to be enshrined at the National church headquarters of the Orthodox Church in America.
Father Andrew Tregubov, well known Iconographer , and student of the famous master Father Gregory Krug, is preparing a reliquary icon of St. Basil for St. Innocent Cathedral in Anchorage, Alaska as well.
Pictured above is Archpriest Michael Oleksa receiving the relics of St. Basil at the St. John Climacus Church in Warsaw, standing before the reliquary of St. Basil Martysz in July 2009.
