Discharge
In the middle of the 1950s a mass reassessment of political cases began. On January 21, 1955 the Fr. Leonty’s case was also reassessed. In the conclusion to his case it said that there had been no ‘organized anti-Soviet activity’, only a few anti-Soviet statements had taken place. That is why it was suggested to reduce the term of the sentence from 10 to 5 years and, since Fr. Leonty had already spent 5 years behind bars, he should be released from prison. On April 30, 1955 Fr. Leonty was released.
Mikhaylovskoye
Upon returning from the camp, Fr. Leonty tried once again to settle in Vorontsovo , but he didn’t succeed. People say that the new Father Superior didn’t welcome him at all and even threatened to arrange a new arrest for him. So the seventy-year old elder had to search for a new place to serve yet again. Fr. Leonty lived in Ivanovo for about a month and on July 20, 1955 he was appointed by Archbishop Venedict to serve as the Father Superior of the church of Archangel Michael in the village of Mikhaylovskoye in Sereda (now Furmanov) region.
The church of the Lord’s Leader of the Angels Michael was built in 1819 and in the Soviet period it serviced the worshipers of Furmanov with its 30 000 inhabitants and those of 24 more villages.
After Fr. Leonty had started his service in Mikhaylovskoye, the local representative of the Soviet on the business of the ROC reported to Moscow: ‘the formerly off-staff priest Lev Fomich Stasevich (archimandrite Leonty) resumed his service, he was appointed to Mikhaylovskoye village, Sereda region. Please take account of him in the clergy index of the Ivanovo district.’
Father came to serve in Mikhailvskoe by appointment of a superior, but the priest who lived there didn’t let him inside his home. Fr. Leonty settled in a cold izba (a log cabin) without a stove and he lived like that all winter long, he used a ‘tushilnik’ (a cauldron with a lid used to make charcoal) as a heater and he used to say ‘I lived in heaven.’
The parishioners came to love Fr. Leonty very much. He restored the relationship between the parish and the members of the church council, he reestablished strictly regulated liturgy, and, as people remember, he served daily. Since the scope of activity in the Mikhaylovskoye parish was very large (the town of Furmanov and 24 villages) Fr. Leonty worked incessantly.
The majority of deeds carried out were for the inhabitants of Furmanov, which is 8 kilometers away from Mikhaylovskoye. Fr. Leonty stayed there in an apartment, where he accepted requests for various needs and carried them out on the same day. Someone reported on this to the local representative of the ROC and to the Board of the Diocese. A critical note from the Bishop followed. Church and Soviet authorities arrived at different solutions to the problem. This state of affairs led to the fact that Fr. Leonty had to go to Furmanov and back several times a day by foot. First, in Furmanov, a request to fulfill a need was accepted, then a record was made in Mikhaylovskoye, and only then and only once again in Furmanov, could it be carried out. It goes without saying that for a seventy-year old elder, who was far from his prime, these ‘hikes’ were a torture. In spite of the high demand from parishioners for Fr. Leonty’s time, he received permission for (and oversaw) a complete reconstruction of the church, its bell tower, its annexes and its fence.
In these years the father had to endure a lot of heartache from evil-wishers, whom he irritated with his exactingness and his unwillingness to compromise. Anonymous notes kept coming to the Board of the Diocese. But father Leonty wrote: ‘There are a lot of needs to carry out. Help! Oh, how they scold me…anonymous letters keep on coming. I praise the Lord for everything! I keep being thankful for everything. And if someone wants to go to a spa, he’s welcome here. Everything’s ready – there’s enough work for everybody. Archimandrite Leonty. March 13, 1960.’
In the end of the 1950s father A. became the second priest in the village of Mikhaylovskoye. One could feel a certain animosity in the way he treated Fr. Leonty.
Perhaps he wanted to become the Father Superior of the Church of Michael the Archangel, because it is from that time on that a flood of slandering letters about Fr. Leonty began. In 1960 there arrived several complaints about Fr. Leonty practically on a monthly basis to the Board of the Diocese. One of the letters arrived complete with names and addresses. When verified, it turned out that no such people lived at the given addresses. Fr. Leonty had to answer each anonymous letter in writing. Thus, in one of the explanatory letters dated January 30, 1960, he wrote: ‘Praise the Lord! I lived and continue to live with my brothers in peace, and I am pleased with everybody and everything. Let the Lord judge them! The complaint doesn’t contain any truth to it. I am not angry at anybody.’
On May 3, 1960, the father was appointed member of the Board of the Diocese by Hilarion, the Archbishop of Ivanovo. On June 1, 1960, by a decree of His Holiness Patriarch Alexy I, Fr. Leonty was awarded the right to serve the Divine Liturgy with the Gates opened during the Cherubic Hymn. On August 13 he was appointed the Diocese confessor, but 1962 was a very hard year for the father. Even earlier, gossip about Fr. Leonty either being suspended from his service as the Father Superior due to his age or being transferred to another parish had started to circulate. Concerned worshipers of the town of Furmanov wrote a letter to Archbishop Hilarion dated October 2, 1960. It said: ‘Before Fr. Leonty our town was much like that of the times of Lot, completely corrupted. And now, thanks to the elder’s holy prayers, God turned many people back to the ways of the righteous. God help him, our dear Father Leonty, as he is a true server and we won’t let him go anywhere. The entire town lives by his prayers. And if he were to be taken from us, we would be orphaned as sheep that are left without their shepherd and that therefore wander off in various directions. We ask you, our dear father, your Eminence, to not leave us orphaned; keep Fr. Leonty with us until his death.’ Another letter said ‘His 7 years of service here have been our only consolation.’ Thanks to such universal affection he wasn’t transferred at this time.
In the summer of 1962 two priests slandered Fr. Leonty for their own selfish ends, accusing him of a careless attitude towards relics. Vladiko, who was a relative of one of those priests, banned Fr. Leonty from service for a whole month. The father was very sad about it: ‘I cry and I sob’, he said, ‘truth will get out, everything will be out in the open, everybody will fly away!’
And that’s exactly what happened. The priest who slandered Fr. Leonty didn’t stay with the parish for long and had to leave it, the reason being that there was no love between him and the parish. When people who didn’t know about what happened asked him about Fr. Leonty’s whereabouts, he used to answer: ‘He’s on vacation!’, although throughout his priesthood the father never took a vacation. And a year after that, Vladiko Hilarion was transferred to a faraway parish. He had to leave Ivanovo by plane. Indeed, ‘everybody flew away’.
After a month of being banned from service, Fr. Leonty wasn’t reinstated in his position, but was transferred to one of the farthest and out-of-the-way parishes at the time – to the village of Elkhovka, Teykovo region. Father Leonty was already 78 years old.
Elkhovka
The Church of the Holy Presentation in the village of Elkhovka was built in 1827. There were no services there from 1938 to 1945. In 1962 the parish was one of the poorest and one of the most remote of all in the Ivanovo Diocese. Father Leonty lived in Elkhovka for just 1 year, but the memory of him is being kept alive by the inhabitants of the village to this day.
We have access to the testimony of a healing performed at the time by Fr. Leonty on a possessed woman, who is now nun E., serving in one of monasteries for women. Here is her letter: ‘ I was spiritually illiterate then I didn’t ask anybody for advice and I listened to an enemy,’ writes nun E.,‘I was on my way to work one day and I deliberately fell down, I pretended that I severely damaged my head and I pretended to become imbecile. I was lifted up and brought to the hospital – first to a general one, and then, since I was deliberately talking nonsense, to a psychiatric facility. There I stayed for a month and a half I was released and registered. The thoughts didn’t leave me: how to begin the feat of becoming a Fool for Christ. A believer lived nearby at the time, her name was Alexandra. She knew Fr. Leonty as a great perspicacious elder. She visited us often and she saw that there was something wrong with me. She asked me to go visit Fr. Leonty in the village of Elkhovka. We came to him, it was spring then, and we entered his wooden house. I took a low bow to him and asked for his blessing. He looked at me and said: ‘Look at the way she bows, just like a nun.’ And his words came true: I am a nun now. Alexandra, who brought me there, said to him: ‘Father Leonty, there’s something wrong with her.’ I was about 28 years old then He said: ‘Come to my church tomorrow. We’ll pray.’ The next morning we woke up very early and went to his church. The church was small and cozy. It was very cold though. During the Liturgy I was standing in front of the Holy Gates and I felt Fr. Leonty’s gaze on myself I’m sure he was asking The Lord to have mercy on me. And when they started to read the Gospel, I suddenly felt so ill that I could no longer stay inside the temple. I took my coat off and ran outside, I felt nauseous. I just managed to open my mouth when a yellow ball came out of me. After that I felt so great that I didn’t feel the ground underneath my feet, it felt like I was standing on air. I calmly reentered the church and stood there till the end of the service, and I took Holy Communion. And the thoughts of becoming a Fool for Christ never came to me since, and I still don’t know what might have happened to me if not for Fr. Leonty.’
The previous parish didn’t forget Fr. Leonty. Starting from the summer of 1962, a real flood of letters started to arrive at the Board of the Diocese, all asking to bring the father back to the village of Mikhaylovskoye. People even wrote to his Holiness Patriarch Alexy I. After reading those letters, one can feel how deeply the father was loved by the parish. Here’s an abstract from one of the letters addressed to Archbishop Hilarion: ‘The Orthodox people of Mikhaylovskoye are writing to you with a humble request. We ask of you, whether the Lord might help you bring back to us our dearly beloved beacon of faith, Fr. Leonty.’ The letter also contained a poem about the elder.
In 1963 Archbishop Hilarion was transferred to a different department and the right reverend Leonid (Lobachev) became the new Vladiko of the Ivanovo Diocese. When he had familiarized himself with the situation in the Diocese, he brought Fr. Leonty back to his former place of service, the village of Mikhaylovskoye.
Mikhaylovskoye, 1964-1972
Father Leonty came back to Mikhaylovskoye an eighty-year old man. His physical feebleness didn’t let him serve daily, and during the last two or three years of his life he couldn’t even move about without someone’s help. But the father came to church every day. When he was en route from his little house to the church, he was leaning on people on both sides of him, and one of the helpers carried a small chair, so that the father could rest after every few dozen steps. And during service, he was supported in the same way when going to the entrance with a Censer or the Gospel. He sat down in front of the Holy Gates, rested for a few seconds, gave his blessing to the entrance and only then entered the altar and approached the Holy Table.
Despite being physically weak, the elder constantly received people, heard their confessions, had conversations with them and prayed for their healing. And that is the way he lived until his very last days.
There were so many people who visited him that half of the passengers on the train got off on the station of Belino, a kilometer away from Mikhaylovskoye. In order to prevent people from seeing the elder, the government forbade the trains to stop on this station.
Father Leonty heard a lot of confessions. ‘His confession sessions were very productive, very spiritual and very humble’, remembers Vladiko Ambrosy, now Archbishop of Ivanovo and Kineshma. ‘He never denounced people for their imperfections, and he tried to speak so that a person would not be offended.’ Fr. Leonty heard confessions in the choir loft, in a quiet corner. ‘He gives you a list of the possible sins, and when you read them out loud, he shows you one specific sin and says: ‘Read this one once again’. And it means that it’s your sin,’ remembers one of the father’s spiritual daughters. And if a person were very nervous during the confession, Fr. Leonty would say ‘It happened to me too, it happened to me too’.
People who confessed to him remember: ‘His admonitions were short, but directed precisely at the penitent. It wasn’t he who spoke, it wasn’t a man’s reasoning, but that of the Holy Spirit.’ A woman, who is a former inhabitant of Mikhaylovskoye, wrote about her confessions to Fr. Leonty: ‘If I quarreled with my husband at home and then came to the father, he would say it just like I did at home – word by word, as if he had been in my house at the time. If you come to confess to him, you won’t be able to hide anything from him, he’ll reveal your sin to you himself’ Fr. Leonty always mentioned the people who came to confess to him during a special supplication of the Liturgy. The father preached simply and said essential things. He used to repeat: ‘You’ll reap what you had sown’, ‘The eye sees not, the ear hears not what the Lord has prepared for those who love him’. Sometimes during a sermon Fr. Leonty would give practical advice on village life. ‘We have to thank God for giving us a lot of mushrooms this year’, said Fr. Leonty during sermons one summer, and summoned people to gather mushrooms. Many people laughed at the elder and even complained to the Diocese, that he speaks of such mundane things in the temple, but it turned out later that he had been right, because that year was an off year, and the mushroom supplies helped people feed themselves during winter months.
One can see from the letters and memoirs of his spiritual children what a kind and gentle person the father was. Once a boy, who was very sad that he was late for a train, where he planned to sell the berries he had gathered, went by his house. Father Leonty asked him: ‘And what did you want to get for the money you would have earned by selling these berries?’ The boy answered: ‘I need a shirt.’ Then father Leonty bought all the berries from him and gave him enough money to buy a shirt.
After one service a small boy approached him in order to get a blessing and get a piece of the Holy Bread, but all the prosphora were gone, and then the father gave him the only thing he had with him – his comb.
One spring Fr. Leonty picked up a rook chick that had fallen from a tree and broke his leg. The father took it home with him, and when the bird grew up, he attached a piece of rope to him and called him Monk. After a service Fr. Leonty would say: ‘Well, I have to go. It’s time to feed Monk.’
Even non-believers loved Fr. Leonty for his kindness. When the river Shatcha flooded in spring, one could get across it only with the help of a ferryman. When ferrymen saw Fr. Leonty coming down a hill, they vied to offer their services to him and waited for his return from town to take him back. The father helped everybody who asked him for help, and he made no distinction between believers and non-believers.
As many gracious elders, Fr. Leonty loved to speak humorously and figuratively, hiding deep and serious thoughts behind a joke. A spiritual daughter once visited him and when he saw her, the father asked ‘What grade are you in?’ She thought in bewilderment: ‘He knows that I have already graduated from college.’ What the father meant was spiritual age, because this woman came to believe only recently and had just started to read spiritual literature.
Later another woman, an acquaintance of the first one, came to visit Fr. Leonty. He asked her: ‘And which college have you graduated from?’, and though she had never attended any college, she had studied the Holy Scriptures very well by then. Once a ‘joke’ of that sort helped the father to get rid of uninvited guests from the Executive Committee of the District Soviet of People’s Deputies (ECDSPD). One summer some people cooked a lot of shchi (traditional cabbage soup) for some guests. They couldn’t eat all of it, so the soup turned sour. Eudokia, who was the housekeeper, wanted to throw it away, but Fr. Leonty didn’t let her do it and the pot with the shchi kept standing in the corridor for a whole week. It was very hot outside, so the shchi went sour and began to ferment, but Fr. Leonty made sure that nobody would throw the soup away. And then some kind of committee from the ECDSPD suddenly arrived in Mikhaylovskoye in order to check up on the temple and to take a look at the priest everybody was talking about. When he saw this committee, Father Leonty put the pot with the shchi on the stove. The odor coming from it was so strong, that those who had arrived had to quickly leave the church territory. And remembering this story, father Leonty always laughed merrily, saying ‘Oh, what fun I made, what fun…’
At the end of his life Fr. Leonty achieved such grace, that he possessed a freedom of spirit one only reads about in biographies of the great elders, such as the elders of Optina Pustyn’ or St Seraphim of Sarov. In memoirs of the father’s spiritual children we can read about cases that give us a chance to see this freedom in God. One of the elder’s spiritual daughters remembers an incident. She and a few other people came to Mikhaylovskoye for confession and communion. The father always ordered to feed his guests first. There were only bread and eggs on the table and nothing suitable for those who had been fasting. The visitors said: ‘Father, we have been fasting, because we wanted to take communion on Sunday, which is tomorrow.’ Father Leonty said to them: ‘Eat regular food, eat what is offered to you and still take communion tomorrow.’ The next day we took communion and received such grace thanks to his prayers that we were literally flying as if on wings when going back from him. This is the way he taught us obedience, which is higher than fasting or prayer.’
Once, in 1965, Vladiko Metropolitan Anthony visited the parish. After the service, during conversation with the parish’s clergy, he asked Lidia, the church warden: ‘What’s your opinion of father Leonty?’ Lidia answered ‘We respect him as our real father!’ ‘You do that, says Vladiko, ‘I have served in many a diocese, but I’ve never met such a priest!’
One believer was invited to an acquaintance’s birthday party. It was a day of fasting, and since she was blessed not to eat meat that day, when she was offered some chicken, she refused and moved the dish aside. Soon after that she went to see father Leonty, but she didn’t tell him anything about the chicken incident. He looked at her and said: ‘When you visit somebody, eat everything you are being offered.’
Nun A. remembers the time she visited Fr. Leonty in Mikhaylovskoye. ‘I was young then, about 26-27, and now I am 55. And now I feel such remorse that I visited such a great elder so rarely. My sister and I entered his house with a feeling of fright, but he greeted us with a happy smile and kissed us right on the lips. We got confused, feeling that we weren’t worthy. He was always sitting on a bunk bed of his, legs down, he made us sit to both his sides, asked us about our life, our activities, and then asked the housekeeper to prepare dinner and shared it with us. He didn’t eat any bread. He would feed us milk, and since we would come for communion, we wouldn’t know what to do, and he would say: ‘You go ahead and eat it, everything will be fine or you won’t have any strength to pray.’ This is the way only people who pray ardently and great elders, who were granted Lord’s great mercy for their humility, would act. The father prayed constantly and he clearly saw and felt the way others prayed. Sometimes when the temple during service was filled to capacity he would become sad and say: ‘There’s just a person and a half in the church.’ But at other times, when a service was attended by just a few singers, he would be elated and say: ‘Our church is full today.’
Due to his humbleness, he wouldn’t tell anything about himself and ‘That’s why’, wrote his spiritual children, ‘we didn’t know anything about him, he would keep back all his feats, all his spiritual deeds and he didn’t like to talk about them. He was great at prayer. He would sometimes lie on his bunk bed and say ‘I wasn’t here, I just returned here.’ He would pray for everybody. Every day the elder would read the entire Psalter by heart. Nobody ever saw him sleep. When you visited him, he would always be dressed and ready to go fulfill the needs of the people.’
The father didn’t like praise, and he even made one woman leave because of it. If a person was commended in front of him, he would criticize him, but if a person were scolded, he would always commend him, so that people would not judge each other.
He knew everything about those who lived with him or worked in his church, he protected their unity and didn’t let just anybody into their ‘family’. Father liked to eat his meals with the people. If he were given food separately, he wouldn’t touch it and he would take his dishes to other people, and they would all eat out of the same dish. He would feed others as well, and add ‘We have a spiritual commune.’
Father Leonty lived in extreme poverty. In his room there was an old iron bunk bed, in which the elder slept, an old table and a few stools. And, behind a partition, there was a minuscule kitchen with a Russian oven. A certain Eudokia took care of all the household matters in Fr. Leonty’s house. She even received a salary from Fr. Leonty. But the father himself was glad to admit: ‘I don’t even touch money (i.e. his salary)’. And if any money ever reached his hands, he would put it in the church cup, happily admitting ‘I’m Fr.ee again.’
Around Easter 1969 Fr. Leonty was awarded a second decorated pectoral cross by His Holiness Patriarch Alexy I, but rumors about letting him off staff already started circulating. Although the father himself was filled with love for everybody, there were some people who would, in a spirit of evil, mock the physical feebleness of the elder. People would trip him during censing of the temple, and a few times people would drop, as though inadvertently, heavy holy banners on him. And approaching the cross during dismissal, some would ask threateningly: ‘When will you leave this place?’ Once some women who had just finished praying in the church went outside and started waiting for Fr. Leonty in order to beat him up. But the father’s helpers, who guessed the women’s plans, managed to escort Fr. Leonty out through the side entrance. And father Leonty said during a sermon: ‘People, why are you turning me out? You sleep every night, but I don’t - I pray for you, so that everybody would go where I’m going to go’. In a private conversation he said to the choir singers and parishioners: ‘Heaven has long been open wide for me, but I live for your sake, so that all of you would attain salvation.’
Believers asked Archbishop Theodosy, who was then in charge of the Ivanovo Diocese, to let Fr. Leonty stay in Mikhaylovskoye. They wrote: ‘Although father Leonty is old and weak, his prayer to God is strong. Our believers went to visit the elder in Lavra, and he said to them: ‘Why visit elders, when you have Athos and Zion, Kiev and Potchaev. You have your own Lavra.’
On seeing how much the parishioners loved their priest, Vladiko Theodosy made the following decision: ‘Archimandrite Leonty is to stay as the Father Superior of the church (…), but he shouldn’t stay beside the Altar table alone, he should serve together with a second priest.’
At that time Fr. Leonty was 87 years old and the day of his blessed passing was approaching.
The Blessed Passing of F. Leonty
There are some miracles related to the blessed repose of the elder, which were told by people close to him. It is most likely that in December 1971 he saw some sort of apparition, because on December 26, after finishing a Water Blessing Prayer Service, father Leonty said that on this day a big miracle happened and ‘if people would find out who he was, the line to see him would stretch from Mikhaylovskoye to Moscow and he would have no rest neither during the day, nor at night.’ He also said to save the water from this Moleben and use it very sparingly. Not long before Fr. Leonty’s passing, one of his spiritual daughters had a dream, where she saw the father entering Heaven, where he was greeted by angels with lit candles in their hands.
According to testimonies from people close to him, the father said numerous times, that he would like to die during a service. The last Liturgy Fr. Leonty served was held on February 7, 1972, on the day of commemoration of Saint Gregory the Theologian. On February 8 he got very weak, but exclaimed happily, raising his hands up to the sky: ‘Going to the Lord, going to the Lord!’ On February 8, on St. John Chrysostom Day, during the reading of the Hours, Fr. Leonty took Holy Communion at his house. After liturgy, all the choir members went to the father to sing the church chants to the dying elder. Nobody dared to leave. At 15:30 his condition worsened, he lost consciousness, and at 16:00 his soul passed away to the Lord.
Not long before passing, Fr. Leonty was visited by the overseer – archimandrite Ambrosy. While they were drinking tea Fr. Leonty said, as if to himself: ‘When I die, I’ll be clothed in a Liturgical vestment, then I’ll be undressed and re-clothed in a monastic vestment, a cross will be put on me, then they’ll take it away and put a different one on me.’ Father Ambrosy didn’t attach any special importance to this, but remembered it. When father Leonty passed away, archbishop Theodosy blessed archimandrite Ambrosy to perform the burial service for the reposed elder. Upon his arrival in Mikhaylovskoye archimandrite Ambrosy saw that Fr. Leonty’s body was clothed in a priest’s vestment, not in a monastic one (riasa, mantle and klobuk). Since it wasn’t long till the start of the burial service, Fr. Leonty started to change the elder’s vestment. When he glanced at the cross, he saw that it was very lavishly and expensively decorated. Fr. Ambrosy asked to change the cross and at that moment he remembered the prophetic words of the late elder. The body of Fr. Leonty remained soft, and it wasn’t hard to change his vestment. When the parishioners were saying their final good-byes to their favorite priest and kissed his hand, they noticed that it was as warm as that of a living person.
People, who had been close to Fr. Leonty during the last years of his life, remember how the father was choosing the place for his burial in preparation for his death. He wanted to be buried near the wall of the small altar (the church in Mikhaylovskoye has a second altar in honor of Tikhon of Amaphuntovo), but he added that this entire space would be paved with asphalt, so he shouldn’t be buried there. Indeed, after Fr. Leonty’s death, this place had to be asphalted due to a technical necessity. He didn’t want to be buried on the small cemetery belonging to the temple, saying that he doesn’t want people to drive upon him. He said of this cemetery that all of it would be ‘ploughed up again and driven upon’. Having foreseen all of this, he asked to be buried on a common village cemetery not far from Mikhaylovskoye. Not long before his passing, Fr. Leonty met the kolkhoz chairman and made a following remark during their conversation: ‘And you’ll give me a horse soon!’
And indeed, on the day of the funeral, the coffin with the elder’s body had to be taken to the cemetery on a horse, because there was too much snow and a car hadn’t been able to get through.
On the 40th day after Fr. Leonty’s passing all the clocks went off at 15:30 and 16:00 in the house were he had lived. A year after the elder’s passing, the electric bell rang in the morning, although nobody came. It happened approximately three times.
On the same day, one of his spiritual daughters had a dream. She dreamt that she was passing through some vegetable garden, where vegetables were ripe for the picking – beets, carrots etc. When she passed it, she entered a wonderful orchard, where father Leonty was sitting, and he was wearing a beaming white liturgical vestment. She made an attempt to approach him. Then, ‘You are not allowed in here!’, not a human voice but Fr. Leonty’s thought, stopped her from it. At this moment her dream ended.
A few years after that nun Elizabeth saw the father in her dream – he was sitting in a golden vestment and everything on him was as if it were shining, beaming: both the cross and the mitre. He blessed her.
Archbishop of Ivanovo and Kineshma Theodosii reported in his message addressed to father superiors of all the churches in the Ivanovo Diocese: ‘On February 9, 1972, at the age of 87, in Boza, the highly respected Father Superior of the Church Of Michael the Archangel in the village of Mikhaylovskoye, Archimandrite Leonty (Stasevich) passed away. He served in the rank of a monk and in the rank of a priest for 60 years. His name must be written into all the parish synodiks of all the churches in the diocese.’
The grief of the parishioners of the Church of Michael the Archangel was deeply felt. The believers of the town of Furmanov wrote a letter to Vladiko Theodosy, which said: ‘We, the inhabitants of Furmanov, in these days of Lent are all deeply saddened by the loss of our spiritual father Leonty, who for many years served and prayed in our temple of St. Michael the Archangel and who urged all us believers to pray and to repent... Now our beacon has gone out… he was our bright guiding star and his way was long and tough.’