Archbishop Joachim of Nizhny Novgorod (born Ivan Ioakimovich Levitsky in Kiev Province on March 30, 1853), was a Russian Orthodox bishop and religious writer martyred by local Bolsheviks in Sevastopol, Ukraine by being crucified upside down on the royal doors of the cathedral's iconostasis.[1] The exact date of his death is unclear, with dates ranging from 1918 to 1920 or even to "not later than April 1921" in various sources, and he is sometimes said merely to have "died at the hands of unknown bandits".[2]
Levitskii was trained at the Kiev Spiritual School (uchilishche), the Kiev Seminary and the Kiev Spiritual Academy, completing a doctorate (kandidatura) in theology before being ordained a priest on March 30, 1879, his twenty-sixth birthday. In 1880 he was sent to teach at the Riga Seminary. After the death of several of his children in the 1880s, and his wife's death in 1886, he entered monastic orders, taking the name monastic Ioakim, and was elevated to the rank of archimandrite in 1893. At that same time, he was named rector of the Riga Seminary. On January 14, 1896, he was consecrated bishop in St. Isaac's Cathedral in St. Petersburg as vicarial bishop of the Baltic dicastery for the Kamenets-Podol eparchy. The following year he was named Bishopof Brest, vicarial bishop of the Lithuanian eparky. In 1900 he was made ordinary Bishop of Grodno and Brest. In 1903 he was transferred to the eparchy of Orenburg and the Urals and in 1910, was named bishop of Nizhny Novgorod and Azama. Three years later, he was elevated to archiepiscopal dignity.[3]
He was briefly imprisoned by the Provisional Government in 1917 for his monarchism, but was a member of the local council of the Russian Orthodox Church in 1917, which reestablished the patriarchate and elected Tikhon as patriarch. He traveled to Moscow and never returned to Nizhny Novgoord. but retired from his archiepiscopate and was named administrator of the New Jerusalem Monastery on March 22, 1918. He was again arrested, this time by the Bolsheviks, in 1918, but later that year, was released and allowed to travel to Crimea where he lived in his son's dacha near Sevastopol. He was killed in the Sevastopl cathedral in April 1920 (or perhaps as late as 1921) by being crucified upside down.[3] The archpriest of the cathedral, Aleksei Nazarevsky, was murdered along with him. Joakim is numbered among the New Martyrs of Russia (those who died for their faith in the Soviet Period).[4]