Saint Luke the Surgeon, Archbishop of Simferopol and Crimea
Archbishop and surgeon, confessor of the Soviet years
- Feast day
- June 11
- Lived
- 1877–1961
- Patronage
- Surgeons, cancer patients, those facing operations
Valentin Voino-Yasenetsky was a pioneering surgeon, a Stalin Prize laureate for his work on purulent surgery, and a bishop who operated in his cassock with an icon in the theatre — and spent eleven years in Soviet prisons and exile.
Life
Trained as a surgeon and drawn to medicine specifically to serve peasants, he pioneered regional anaesthesia and wrote the standard Russian textbook on the surgery of infections. Widowed with four children, he was ordained in 1921 and consecrated bishop in 1923, continuing to operate throughout.
He was arrested repeatedly, tortured by sleep deprivation, and exiled to the Arctic, where he continued performing operations in village huts with penknives. During the Second World War he was made chief surgeon of a military hospital in Krasnoyarsk while simultaneously serving as ruling bishop.
Veneration
He received the Stalin Prize in 1946 and gave almost all of it to orphanages. Blind in his last years, he continued to serve. Glorified in 1995, he is one of the most invoked saints in Greece and Russia for surgery and cancer, and his relics rest in the Holy Trinity Cathedral in Simferopol.
When Saint Luke the Surgeon is commemorated
The feast falls on June 11 on the Revised Julian (New) calendar used by most Greek, Antiochian and Romanian parishes. Parishes that keep the Julian (Old) calendar — much of the Russian, Serbian and Georgian Churches, and Mount Athos — celebrate it on the civil date June 24, thirteen days later. You can switch between both reckonings anywhere on this site.
See the full liturgical day for June 11, 2027
That page gives the fasting rule in force, the Epistle and Gospel appointed for the day, and every other saint commemorated alongside Saint Luke the Surgeon. To keep the feast, look for a parish in the USA, Canada or Australia directory, and read the Akathist hymns appointed for private prayer.