Academic and Monastic Career
Before his episcopate Meletius spent much of his life in the theological schools of the Russian Church. After graduating from the Saint Alexander Nevsky Spiritual Academy he taught Greek there, and in 1817 he moved to Kiev as Inspector and Professor of Church History and Greek at the Kiev religious Seminary. When the Kiev Spiritual Academy opened in 1819 he became its first Inspector.
He was tonsured a monk at the Kiev-Bratsk Monastery in February 1820 and was quickly ordained deacon and hieromonk. Over the following years he held a succession of rectorships — at the Mogilevsk Seminary and Khutynsk Orshansk Monastery, at the Pskov religious Seminary, and finally at the Kiev Spiritual Academy, to which he was appointed rector in 1824.
Missionary Episcopate in Siberia
Consecrated Bishop of Chigirin in 1826, Meletius served briefly as a vicar of the Kiev diocese before being sent to Perm and then, in 1831, to the far eastern see of Irkutsk with the rank of archbishop. The Irkutsk diocese embraced an immense Siberian territory, and there he gave himself to missionary work.
He is recorded as founding churches in Kamchatka, in the northeastern part of the Irkutsk diocese, and along the Aldan River, and as ministering to the indigenous peoples of the region, among them the Tungus, the Buryats, the Kamchadali, and the inhabitants of the Kurile and Aleutian Islands.
Archbishop of Kharkov and Repose
In 1835 Meletius was translated to the see of Kharkov and Akhtyrsk in Ukraine, where he spent the last years of his life. The synaxarion remembers him for unceasing prayer and personal austerity, and for the generosity to the poor that gave him the name of an unmercenary bishop.
He reposed during the night of February 29, 1840, and was buried beneath the Church of the Cross at the Protection Monastery in Kharkov. He was deeply respected and honored by his former flock, and his grave at the Protection Monastery continued to be visited. His relics were transferred to the Annunciation Cathedral in Kharkov in 1948.
Relics & Shrines
Meletius was first buried in a crypt beneath the Church of the Cross at the Protection Monastery in Kharkov, where his grave remained a place of veneration. In 1948 his relics were transferred to the Annunciation Cathedral in the same city.
