Early Life and Formation
Vasily Martysz was born on February 20, 1874, in Tertyn, in the Hrubieszow district of the Chelm region, the borderland where Orthodox and Latin Christianity had long met. His father Alexander was a judge who was later ordained to the priesthood. The account of his life relates that at the age of ten Vasily accompanied his father on a journey to New York, where Bishop Vladimir told the boy that he would one day be a priest — a word remembered in the family long before it came true on the same continent.
He was formed at the Orthodox seminary in Chelm at the turn of the century, when the seminary's rector was Tikhon (Bellavin), the future Patriarch of Moscow, and graduated in July 1899. Immediately after graduation he married Olga Nowik and was ordained deacon; he was ordained to the priesthood on December 10, 1900, and within weeks departed for America, sent to the mission then coming under the oversight of his old rector, now Bishop Tikhon of the Aleutians.
Missionary in Alaska
Father Vasily's first assignment was Afognak, an island parish north of Kodiak, from which he also cared for the communities of Spruce Island and Woody Island — the very landscape hallowed by Saint Herman a century before. At Afognak he oversaw the building of a church dedicated to the Nativity of the Most Holy Theotokos, completed in 1901.
The Alaskan years were also family years. His daughter Vera was born at Afognak in 1902 and a second daughter at Kodiak in 1904, and he kept throughout his life an extensive personal diary that preserved the memory of his missionary service.
Parishes Across America and Canada
Transferred to the continental United States in 1906, he served immigrant parishes in Pennsylvania — his son Vasily was born at Osceola Mills in 1906 and his daughter Helen at Old Forge in 1908 — and afterward in Connecticut and New York. Sent on to western Canada, he served at Edmonton and then at Vostok, and was made dean of the parishes of Alberta and Manitoba, shepherding the scattered Slavic settlements of the prairie.
He marked the tenth anniversary of his priesthood in 1910, and in 1912, after nearly twelve years of missionary labor in North America, he returned to Europe, settling at Sosnowiec in Poland as parish rector and instructor of religion. During the First World War he was evacuated into Russia, lodging at the Saint Andronicus Monastery in Moscow and commuting to serve a parish at Valdai, before returning to Sosnowiec in September 1919.
Chaplain of the Polish Army
After the restoration of the Polish state, Martysz was called in September 1919 to the War Department in Warsaw to organize Orthodox pastoral care within the new national army. By 1921 he was head of the Orthodox military chaplaincy with the rank of colonel, and the Church raised him to the dignity of archpriest. That same year he organized pastoral ministry in the internment camps holding Ukrainian soldiers.
His service reached beyond the army. He was an advisor to Metropolitan George of Warsaw, and was present in the metropolitan's residence at the time of his assassination in February 1923, himself narrowly escaping harm. He took a significant part in the efforts that led to the grant of autocephaly to the Orthodox Church of Poland in 1925, the year Poland decorated him with the Order of Polonia Restituta. He led the Orthodox chaplaincy until his retirement from state service in 1936, after which he settled in Teratyn, near his birthplace, where he built two houses; his wife Olga died there in 1943, and his daughter Helen's family came to live with him.
Martyrdom
On May 4, 1945 — Great and Holy Friday, in the violent disorder that swept the Chelm borderland at the war's end — armed men attacked the household at Teratyn in search of money. Warned of the approaching danger, the old archpriest had refused to flee, saying that he had harmed no one and would run from no one, for Christ did not run away. He was beaten and tortured for some four hours; his pregnant daughter Helen was beaten so severely that she lost her child; and he was finally killed by gunshot.
He was buried in the cemetery at Teratyn by Father John Lewczuk. His death on the day of the Lord's Passion, met without flight or resistance, marked him in the memory of the faithful as a passion-bearer after the oldest pattern.
Relics & Shrines
In October 1963 his remains were transferred to Warsaw and reinterred in the Orthodox cemetery in the Wola district. Early in 2003, in preparation for his glorification, his relics were solemnly enshrined in the Church of Saint John Climacus in Warsaw, where they remain a place of veneration for Orthodox soldiers and faithful of Poland.
Glorification
On March 20, 2003, the Holy Synod of the Autocephalous Orthodox Church of Poland promulgated the Act of his canonization, and the glorification was solemnly celebrated at Chelm on June 7-8, 2003. He is venerated as the heavenly patron of Orthodox Christians serving in the Polish army, and his feast is kept on May 4, the day of his martyrdom.
