History
Semyon Timofeyevich Bondarenko
A biography of Semyon Timofeyevich Bondarenko and his role in preserving the memory of the Appearance of Christ the Savior in Elista.
Brief Biography
Church and regional publications name Semyon Timofeyevich Bondarenko (1878–1959) as one of the eyewitnesses of the Appearance of Christ the Savior.
He was born and lived in the village of Apanasenkovskoye in Stavropol Krai. According to the family account, in 1928, during dekulakization, he had to leave his home village with his family and move to Kalmykia.
Life in Kalmykia
The family first lived on a farmstead east of Troitskoye. They moved to Troitskoye in 1936. Semyon Timofeyevich regularly attended services and, after the local church closed, became a parishioner of the church in Elista.
An adobe house said by the family to have been built by him still stands in Troitskoye. His large family lived there.
Witness to the Appearance
Semyon Bondarenko was among the parishioners in Elista’s Church of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross on 11 September 1946 and is named as one of the witnesses to the Appearance of Christ the Savior.
Read about the event of 11 September 1946
Creating the Icon
According to the recollections of his granddaughter, Ekaterina Terentyevna Nefedova, the parishioners decided to commission an icon to preserve the account of the Appearance. Semyon Timofeyevich found an artist in Stavropol, commissioned the image from eyewitness testimony, and brought the completed icon to Elista in the spring of 1947.
Preserving the Memory
The icon has survived and is kept in Elista’s Church of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. In 2026, commemorative events in Elista and Troitskoye returned attention to Semyon Timofeyevich and his family.