The Rev. Agapius Honcharenko, 1832-1916

Ahapii [Ahapius, Agapius] Honcharenko (real name: Andrii Humnytsky) was born August 31, 1832, in Kryvyn, Skvyra county, Kyiv gubernia. The Rev. Honcharenko was an Orthodox priest, publicist and the first Ukrainian political émigré to the United States. A descendant of a Kozak family, he graduated from the Kyiv Theological Seminary and entered the Kyivan Monastery of the Caves.

Sent to Athens in 1857 to serve as deacon at the embassy's church, he began to contribute articles to Alexander Herzen's Kolokol. He was discovered and arrested in 1860, but escaped and traveled extensively before immigrating to the United States in 1865.

A subsidy from the federal government enabled Father Honcharenko to establish, in San Francisco, a semimonthly (eventually a semiweekly) newspaper - The Alaska Herald, with a Russian- and Ukrainian-language supplement, Svoboda - aimed at the inhabitants of recently purchased Alaska.

He published the paper singlehandedly from 1868 to 1872, glorifying the Ukrainian Kozaks, popularizing Taras Shevchenko's poetry, defending democracy, individual freedom and private initiative, and attacking Russian autocracy and imperialism, the conservativism and corruption of the Russian Church, and capitalist monopolies. He also prepared the "Russo-English Phrase Book" (1868) for American soldiers serving in Alaska.

He retired to a farm in Hayward, Calif., that he named "Ukraina Ranch." There, in the early 1900s, a group of Ukrainian immigrants from Canada and Halychyna organized a short-lived commune called the Ukrainian Brotherhood.

The Rev. Honcharenko died May 5, 1916, in Hayward, Alameda county, Calif.

- From the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Vol. 2 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988).

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, June 20, 1999, No. 25, Vol. LXVII

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