Company is coming to Kwethluk.
In June, the community of about 800 on the Kuskokwim River is anticipated to nearly double in size, welcoming hundreds of visitors for the glorification of St. Olga, also known as Matuska Olga. It’s the final step to officially canonize the first Yup’ik saint, following the exhumation of her body in November 2024.
Archbishop Alexei Trader is the head of the Russian Orthodox Diocese of Alaska, based in Sitka. Last month, he traveled to the Yukon-Kuskokwim (Y-K) Delta to attend a meeting with the community of Kwethluk to discuss logistics for the major upcoming event.
“Of course, coming to a small Yup'ik village where there's no hotels, there's no restaurants,” Archbishop Alexei said. “So the infrastructure that's needed for an event, it's going to be something that really the community of Kwethluk, but also all the surrounding communities are really going to have to basically come forward to volunteer to help in the celebration of the first Native woman In Alaska, a Yup'ik woman, a faithful woman who simply lived the Yup'ik life in a way that was fully Orthodox, fully traditional, and quietly became known as a saint.”
Olga — also known as Olinka Arrsamquq Michael — up in Kwethluk. She was a midwife in the community, with miraculous healing and spiritual acts attributed to her throughout her career. Since her death in 1979, accounts of her appearances in dreams as a healer have continued to distinguish her as a holy figure.
June 2025 will mark the official beginning of her sainthood. A church service in her honor will be prayed all night in Kwethluk’s St. Nicolas church. Fr. Thomas Rivas, a Russian Orthodox priest and secretary to Trader, said that they are planning for enough priests to be present to keep repeating the service all night long, into the morning liturgy.
“At that point she will have then officially been declared a saint by every important measure in the church,” Rivas said. “You'll start hearing her name in church. You'll start hearing her name being commemorated. She will be officially on the Orthodox calendar, her feast days.”
Parts of St. Olga’s remains will then travel to Anchorage for a feast and celebration in the hub city before heading to Phoenix, Arizona.
But in Olga’s hometown of Kwethluk, Archbishop Alexei said that the glorification still remains difficult to picture. He said that the church expects 150 pilgrims from out of state and hundreds more from neighboring villages to be in attendance. This scope of the event hasn’t happened before — the influx of visitors will be historic for Kwethluk.
“The kind of the logistical aspects of getting those people from Bethel to Kwethluk, we're gonna have to have a fleet of ships,” Archbishop Alexei said.
Trader isn’t speaking metaphorically. The village of Kwethluk is looking for several volunteers to ferry pilgrims from Bethel to the glorification 15 miles up the Kuskokwim River. And Kwethluk needs more than boats. Trader said that at the meeting, the village discussed its hopes to build a staircase where the boats bearing pilgrims will dock.
“And they were speaking about, well, we need to replace the boardwalk around the church,” Archbishop Alexei recalled. “I would say there's a, there's, there's a lot of excitement, a lot of anticipation, little bit of anxiety. But that's, I think, that's natural as well.”
Getting to Kwethluk will be quite the journey for visitors, but Trader said that when it comes to pilgrimages, that’s part of the point.
“It's not supposed to be easy,” Archbishop Alexei said. “And that goes all the way back, you know, "The Canterbury Tales," or going to Jerusalem on pilgrimage. It's something that's laborious, something that's difficult. It's a journey that's supposed to be arduous for the body, for the soul, that's going to lead to transformation.”
Olga’s remains will stay in her village. Archbishop Alexei said that it will help pilgrims, many of whom are traveling from the lower 48, understand the place that made her.
“St. Olga became the saint that she was, in some respect, because of the place she was at, because of the condition she was in and how she responded to those conditions,” Archbishop Alexei described. “And simple actions, such as the fact that she would get up very early and be making pancakes for everyone in the village. For someone who lives, say, in Anchorage, well, okay, you go to the store and you buy some extra pancake mix. But in Kwethluk, you can understand. It's only in Kwethluk that you can really understand her sacrifice, that you could understand her difficulty, in that you can understand, really, her sanctity by actually coming to the place.”
St. Olga will be the first Yup’ik saint in the Russian Orthodox faith. It’s a big deal, and an event that will prove historic beyond the numbers of glorification weekend. The church has hopes of making Kwethluk a site of ongoing pilgrimage in the years to come, a path for others to follow to the village on the river to understand the place that made St. Olga.
Archbishop Alexei said that the church community is looking for volunteers to make food to help feed the pilgrims. Kwethluk is also still looking for volunteers with boats to help shepherd visitors to and from Bethel, with fuel expenses covered by the church. To get involved with either, anyone interested can contact Fr. Micheal Trefon at St. Sophia parish in Bethel.
