The life of St Maxim Sandovich of Lemkos
The very act of serving his first Liturgy that December, in the village of Hrab, set the empire's suspicion against him: Orthodoxy itself was read by the authorities as a badge of loyalty to Russia, and an order soon came down forbidding any further Orthodox worship in the district. Maxim went on serving anyway, quietly, out of village homes rather than a church building, until the weeks before Pascha in 1912 brought his arrest alongside his own spiritual father, Ignatij Hudyma. Two years passed in a Lviv cell before a trial finally opened in March of 1914.
War arrived that August before any verdict settled the matter, and militia forces took his whole family into custody, marching them bound to the prison at Gorlice. There, on the sixth of August, twenty-six-year-old Maxim was shot by firing squad, reportedly declaring his loyalty to the Rus people and to Orthodoxy in his final moment.
Eight decades later, in September of 1994, the Polish Orthodox Church numbered him among the saints at Gorlice itself, honoring him as the first martyr of the Lemko people.
