Rehearsals have begun at the Irkutsk Academic Drama Theater named after Nikolai Okhlopkov for a play about Saint Innocent Veniaminov, an outstanding missionary, educator and apostle of Siberia and Alaska. The play was written by Valery Khairyuzov and directed by Gennady Shaposhnikov. Audiences will learn about a man who for nearly half a century spread the Orthodox faith in Kamchatka, the Aleutian Islands and Alaska, built churches and schools, and left a notable ethnographic legacy.
A play about Metropolitan of Moscow and Kolomna Saint Innocent (Veniaminov), also known as the apostle of Siberia and Alaska, will appear in the repertoire of the Irkutsk Academic Drama Theater named after Nikolai Okhlopkov. Rehearsals have begun here for a play written by Valery Khairyuzov.The writer studied at an Irkutsk school, where a theological school once stood, which the saint graduated from. Saint Innocent was born in 1797 in the upper reaches of the Lena, in the village of Anga. Today there is a museum dedicated to him there, and a church has been laid on the site of one that was once destroyed.
The play is being staged by the theater’s artistic director Gennady Shaposhnikov. “It is important for us that the audience sees and feels what an extraordinary personality, outstanding missionary, and enlightener this man was,” the playwright noted.
Saint Innocent (in the world - Ivan Popov-Veniaminov) spent almost half a century spreading the Orthodox faith among the peoples of Kamchatka, the Aleutian Islands, and Alaska. He not only baptized tens of thousands of people, built churches where he founded schools and personally taught the basics of Christian life in them, but also left a rich ethnographic legacy about the way of life and customs of the population of Russian America. In 1868, Innocent became Metropolitan of Moscow and Kolomna. He died in 1879.