On the salmonberry-covered hill of Marine Street, where the Holy Trinity Church used to be, Reverend Herman Belt of St. Michael’s Cathedral and Bob Sam, longtime cemetery caretaker, are hoping to have discovered the gravesite of Saint Yakov Netsvetov, the first Aleutian-Russian priest who served in Sitka during his final year of life.
The site is home to around 40 unmarked graves, Belt said, and since he came to Sitka two years ago he has been trying to discover St. Yakov’s burial plot.
Using ground-penetrating radar technology, Belt has been working with the National Park Service to document the site. Past scans identified the graves in the area and revealed the church’s specific location. The most recent scan, last Saturday, looked for metal since St. Yakov would’ve been buried with a neck cross, and he was the only priest buried in that area.
Belt is still waiting on the final report, but initial indications are that they did “detect metal anomalies,” he said.
St. Yakov was the first Native Alaskan priest in the Orthodox Church. Born on Atka Island to a Russian father and Aleut mother, he became a subdeacon in 1825 and began serving the Holy Trinity-Saint Peter Church in Irkutsk, Russia. He returned to Alaska in 1829 and served all over the territory, valuing cultural exchange and language education in addition to spreading the gospel. He was canonized as a saint in 1994.
“It would be a very big honor to see a priest of that caliber, who had such a large impact yet remained such a humble man. [St. Yakov] is an inspiration, especially to priests who care about missions and missionary activity,” Belt said. “By some stroke of God’s blessing, to be here when this work is happening is a big honor. I’m unworthy of it, but here I am, so I’ve got to do it.”
Bob Sam, who has been taking care of Sitka’s cemeteries since the 1980s, said Belt is the first priest who’s taken an interest in historical preservation work here.
“This is almost forgotten history,” Sam said. “These people have been here for hundreds of years, and their history is almost forgotten. This individual’s grave is important for the history of this place.”
Sam spoke about a book he was given that examines what human beings do when they’re walking along a path and encounter a dead body on the road. In addition to inspiring the band name “The Grateful Dead,” Sam said, it’s also inspired his own work.
“My work is all about the Grateful Dead and the big bands and watching the people march up to the cemeteries to celebrate death and Tlingit funerary customs,” he said. “All that stuff is precious and needs to be passed down to the future, so we could be healthy people.”
Sitka is a place that constantly reckons with death, Sam added.
“We have to be careful of how we grieve. I look to the saints, the priests, the elders, the spiritual people for my healthy outlook,” he said.
Discovering St. Yakov’s grave is also an act of reverence for Belt, who sees religious importance in ground-penetrating radars and metal detectors. The Greek word “hagios” means holy again, he said, and a saint is someone who bears Christ in them so much that they become holy.
“In Orthodox theology, matter matters. Our God became incarnate with a real human body. He sanctified matter by taking on human flesh,” Belt said. “So things like the holy relics of our saints and our church building itself, they’re holy matter. Matter and spirituality are not separate things, and that sanctity is a blessing for us.”
Through Belt and Sam’s collective work, the once-unkempt hill has most of its litter removed and overgrown salmonberry bushes pruned. Belt invites everyone in Sitka to visit the site.
“We’re trying to make it a beautiful, wonderful place for the community to visit,” he said. “We’re trying to make it a peaceful place where people can spend time in a respectful manner.”