On July 16, the Moscow Patriarchate announced a “leadership change” in the monasteries of occupied Sevastopol.
These changes boil down to the dismissal of Hegumen Matthew (Ilya Samokhin), “the abbot of the St. George Balaklava Monastery on Fiolent,” “due to gross errors he committed in managing the monastery,” as well as the “appointment of Hieromonk Andrei (Egor Korotkov) as acting abbot” at the St. Vladimir Chersonesos Monastery, and Hieromonk Alexy (Nikolai Godlevsky) as acting abbot at the St. Clement Monastery.
Moreover, the nature of Samokhin’s “gross errors” has not been officially declared by the Synod, and Korotkov’s current “appointment,” previously “appointed rector of the Taurida Theological Seminary,” cannot be considered a promotion.
These proceedings are notable primarily because all of these priests were brought to the occupied peninsula “in the baggage” of the current “new Crimean Metropolitan” Tikhon (Georgy Shevkunov).
We also previously described Tikhon’s initiatives to relocate the “Taurida Theological Seminary” from Simferopol to Sevastopol, to the occupiers’ new buildings on the site of the ruins of Tauric Chersonesos.
Moreover, Samokhin, “betrothed” by Tikhon to the St. George Balaklava Monastery, served for many years as Tikhon’s right-hand man in his propaganda activities, managing the “Volny Strannik” (“Free Wanderer”) publishing house, which claims to cover “all the most important and pressing issues of spiritual life for modern people” and was previously transferred from the Pskov region to Sevastopol.
Significant funds were laundered through this publishing house, and their main source, predictably, was the Russian secret services. In recent years, “Volny Strannik” has effectively become Tikhon’s mouthpiece in his long-term quest to achieve the patriarchal throne.
Social media accounts cite Samokhin’s alleged “insufficient cooperation with air defense forces” as a probable reason for his removal, as numerous Russian military structures are located near the monastery, where many interesting events have occurred over the past month.
However, our sources cite a more realistic version of the current simultaneous reshuffles as an acute financial and property conflict within Tikhon’s entourage, against the backdrop of the “intensified self-promotion” of Samokhin and Godlevsky, which the Metropolitan himself was forced to “hastily extinguish.”
