Luke of Simferopol

Painter, then physician

He was born at Kerch in the Crimea on 27 April 1877, into a family of impoverished Polish nobility: his father a Roman Catholic pharmacist, his mother Russian Orthodox, and the household one in which religion was little spoken of. The family moved to Kiev, and there the boy's gift was drawing. He finished the Kiev art school and went to Munich intending to be a painter — and turned back, judging that he had no right to spend his life on what pleased him while the Russian peasantry died of untreated illness. He read the New Testament in these years and was seized in particular by the verse about the harvest and the labourers; the decision to become a "peasants' doctor" was, in his own telling, a religious one.

He accordingly entered the medical faculty of Kiev University, graduating in 1903, and — to the astonishment of his teachers, who saw a scientist — went straight into rural practice. In the Russo-Japanese war of 1904 he served in a Red Cross field hospital at Chita, where at twenty-seven he was already operating on the great cavities of the body, and where he married the nurse Anna Vasilievna Lanskaya, whom the wounded called "the holy sister." Four children were born to them.

The surgeon

There followed years in the zemstvo hospitals of Simbirsk, Kursk, Saratov and Vladimir provinces, in which he did an enormous volume of general surgery under primitive conditions and began the work that made his name. Appalled at the deaths caused by general anaesthesia in inexperienced hands, he devoted himself to regional and local anaesthesia — nerve-block techniques, and in particular the injection of the branches of the trigeminal and sciatic nerves — and in 1916 defended a doctoral dissertation on the subject which was at once recognised as a work of the first rank. He also began collecting the material of his life's book: the surgery of purulent infection, the field in which, before antibiotics, most surgical death occurred.

In 1917 he moved to Tashkent as chief surgeon of the city hospital, and afterwards professor in the new Turkestan university. In 1919 his wife died of tuberculosis; he read the Psalter over her for three nights, and afterwards raised the four children with the help of a devout theatre nurse to whom he entrusted them.

Priest and bishop

The Tashkent years turned him into a churchman. He spoke at diocesan assemblies, and after one such intervention Bishop Innocent of Tashkent said to him simply: "Doctor, you must be a priest." He was ordained deacon and then priest in 1921, and thereafter operated and lectured in a cassock, with a pectoral cross, and with an icon of the Mother of God hung in the operating theatre — refusing to remove it when ordered, and staying away until it was restored. He signed his medical papers with his priestly name.

In 1923, in the crisis of the Renovationist schism, he was secretly tonsured a monk with the name Luke — after the Evangelist who was a physician and a painter, the two vocations of his own life — and secretly consecrated bishop. He was arrested within days. There followed the pattern of the rest of his life:

• 1923–1926, prison and exile to Siberia — Yeniseisk, and then the far north at Turukhansk, where he operated in a village hospital with a penknife and a pair of pliers, and where he was for a time banished to a fishing settlement inside the Arctic Circle;
• 1930–1933, arrest at Tashkent and exile to Arkhangelsk;
• 1937–1943, arrest in the Great Terror, thirteen days of the "conveyor" interrogation without sleep, and exile to Bolshaya Murta in the Krasnoyarsk region.

He was never broken and never renounced either of his offices. In prison he went on writing the Essays on Purulent Surgery, and one of his manuscripts was confiscated and lost.

The war, the Stalin Prize, and Simferopol

When the German invasion came in 1941, the state needed him. Still a convicted exile, he was made consultant-surgeon to all the military hospitals of the Krasnoyarsk region and chief surgeon of the great evacuation hospital there, treating the most desperate infected wounds of the Eastern front; and while doing it he was, from 1942, Archbishop of Krasnoyarsk. He was translated to Tambov in 1944 and to Simferopol and Crimea in 1946.

In that same year the Soviet state gave him the Stalin Prize, First Class, for the Essays on the Surgery of Purulent Infections together with his monograph on the late resection of infected gunshot wounds of the joints. He accepted it, gave the greater part of the money to orphans of the war, and continued to receive the poor of Simferopol in his own house without payment. He was the only Soviet citizen to hold that prize and a bishop's mitre at once.

He governed Crimea for fifteen years, in the hardest conditions of the post-war Church: churches closing, clergy few, surveillance constant. He preached at length and continually — the corpus of his sermons is very large — and wrote the treatise Spirit, Soul and Body, an argument against materialist psychology from the standpoint of a working anatomist. He lost the sight of one eye in 1955 and became wholly blind about 1958, and thereafter served the Liturgy and preached from memory, dictating.

Repose, relics and veneration

He died at Simferopol on 11 June 1961, which in that year was the Sunday of All Saints of Russia; the church date is 29 May. The authorities tried to prevent a public funeral and failed: the crowd carried him to the All Saints cemetery and the procession filled the streets.

His relics were uncovered in March 1996 and translated to the Holy Trinity cathedral of the convent at Simferopol, where they lie. He was glorified as a locally venerated saint of the Crimea in 1995 by the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, and afterwards numbered among the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia in the general glorification of the Russian Church. His cultus spread with remarkable speed beyond the former Soviet Union: in Greece and Cyprus he is among the most popular of all modern saints, with churches, relic-portions and a very large literature of reported healings, and he is invoked as a matter of course by the sick before operations. He is the patron of surgeons and of medical students.