Saint John Kochurov was born in Russia on July 13, 1871. He excelled at his studies at both the seminary and academy. After graduating in 1895, Fr. John married and then was subsequently ordained a priest on August 27, 1895 at the St. Alexander Nevsky Lavra in St. Petersburg.
In the late 1890s, a large number of émigrés from Carpathian Ruthenia and Galicia were migrating to the United States. Having expressed the desire to be a missionary priest, Father John was assigned as the first permanent priest at St. Vladimir’s Church in Chicago, which later became Holy Trinity Cathedral. As the parish did not yet have their own building, his first major project was the construction of the church building. Under the guidance of Bishop Tikhon (future Patriarch Tikhon of Moscow), Fr. John enlisted the services of the noted architect Louis Sullivan to design the church. In addition to his zealous labor in Chicago, he was also instrumental in establishing parishes in Buffalo, New York, Hartshorne, Oklahoma, and Slovak, Arkansas.
After returning to Russia he was assigned to serve in Estonia, where he applied the teaching skills he had learned in America. In 1916 he received a new assignment to Tsarskoe Selo near St. Petersburg. Only six days after the Bolsheviks seized power, Father John was beaten to death in the street by a gang of Bolshevik sailors in Tsarskoye Selo. Thus he became the first of countless Priest-Martyrs of the Soviet’s atheist yoke.
Commemorated on October 31/November 13
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