Repose of Saint Innocent, 1st Bishop of Irkutsk

Innocent (Ivan Kulchitsky) was born around 1680 into a noble family of the Chernigov region and studied at the Kyiv Academy. He became a monk in 1710 and taught at the Moscow Slavonic-Greek-Latin Academy. In 1721 he was consecrated bishop of Pereyaslavl and appointed to the Russian mission in Peking. The Chinese authorities refused to let him in, and he waited for about three years on the border.

In 1727 the Holy Synod named him the first bishop of the new diocese of Irkutsk and Nerchinsk in Siberia. There he organized the diocese, which had few clergy, and kept two schools going, one of them for the Mongols. He died in late November 1731, and the Church remembers him on 26 November.